Whether you’re pimping out your desktop, preparing party invitations, simply trying to break into the Scandinavian death metal scene, below are 30 graphic resources that should have you digitally pimped out this Halloween season.

Enjoy!

Tutorials

Turning Your House Into A Haunted Mansion

How To Properly Smear And Splatter Blood

It’s Halloween Week, kids! I thought I’d put together a week long series of posts to get you in the spirit. As the week goes on, I’ll give up music, movies, graphic design resources, and maybe even a game, but today, we’re going to focus on DIY resources for creating that perfect Halloween party.

You need three main things for good Halloween party: something to wear, something to eat, and a creepy atmosphere. Below are costume, decoration, and food ideas for people with more time than money, so there won’t be any store bought junk or kiddie crafts in here.

Be sure to stay tuned this week because there are a lot of resources coming out every day that you probably won’t want to miss…

1. Clever Costumes

First, let’s get you a costume. You’re not going out as a hobo again this year, and it’s 20 years past the point where you should’ve retired your Max Headroom costume. Costumes don’t have to be expensive, they just have to be clever, so your first step should be to check out the How To Have The Best Costume At The Party Guide from Mahalo and get your braaain in motion. If after getting through the guide, you still don’t have any ideas, maybe the following do-it-yourself costume instructions will spark some genius.

$50 DIY Optimus Prime Costume

Sesame Street Yip Yip Costume How To

Hello, Chief. Let’s talk. Why not? In Yesterday’s post, Cartoonify Your Life Using Ping Pong Balls, I mentioned that I wished I had created a pair of Mr. Sparkle eyes before running out of ping pong balls. After I published, I found that there were still two ping pong balls that hadn’t yet left for the land of wind and ghosts. To the left is my fire alarm, which is busy banishing dirt. Join him or die. Can you do any less?

Because of the way the Sportcraft logo is laid out, the only version of Mr. Sparkle’s eyes that can be done on a Sportcraft ball is the one from the original commercial. I’m not going to admit to talking a screenshot and doing an SVG drawing of the eyeball just to get it correct as I could, but that secret dies with this week’s recycling.

To Make Your Own, Read On…

You’d think that sticking googly eyes all over the house would only appeal to 7 year olds, but it has a surprisingly wide appeal. I made up a set of these out of ping pong balls, and #1GF! and I have been hiding them around the house to make each other laugh for a week now. To test my sanity, I brought a set to my parents, and they had the exact same reaction as #1GF! and I did. They kept hiding them in plain site to see if anyone noticed that the faucet was looking at them. It’s a bizarre phenomenon.

These things cost a couple of bucks to make, so there’s no huge loss if you happen to leave them somewhere to make someone laugh. And because they’re only attached to things with a twist-tie, you can stash the ones around your own house so that company doesn’t think that you’re out of your mind. My only regret about this project was that by the time I thought of making a Mr. Sparkle version of the eyes, all my ping pong balls had already been sent to the land of wind and ghosts.

If you want to know how to make your own set, read on. I send you premium answer question, hundred percent.

If you’ve ever wanted to convert your old cassettes into MP3’s, then this is your lucky day. The process is simple enough for almost anyone to undertake, but it requires a fair amount of time and tends to produce MP3’s that are slightly noisier than those ripped directly from CD. There are, however, a few cases when it might be worth it:

1. You have more time than money,
2. You can’t possibly justify spending money to re-buy music that you’ll stop feeling nostalgic about next week,
3. You don’t want the judgmental eyes of the record store clerks to realize that you secretly still like Winger, or
4. Sadly, the band on your tape is out of print, never made the jump to CD, or broke up before getting a recording contract.

What You’ll Need

• A walkman that plays tapes.
• A set of headphones or speakers.
• A male to male 3.5mm stereo cable. You can usually pick up a stereo cable for a couple of bucks at an electronics store. You don’t need a fancy, brand name cable for this as long as you make sure that the cable is stereo and not mono. A stereo cable has two black lines on the tip, while a mono cable will only have one.
• Audacity, the free, open-source audio editor.
• A fair amount of time.

We all have certain tasks that, for some reason or another, we just hate doing. For me, it was cleaning the coffee pot every day. I know it’s insignificant, but for some reason, I would avoid it like the plague. The longer I let it hang over my head, the aggravating it would become. If I hadn’t cleaned it by the end of the day, washing that coffee pot would seem as if I had to clean out the garage.

One day, as I was making myself unnecessarily miserable over having to clean the coffee pot again, I had the temporary clarity to time how long the task took to complete. From start to finish, the chore that had made me monumentally miserable took exactly three minutes out of my life.

From that point on, cleaning the coffee pot became a non-issue because I knew exactly how insignificant it was. When I couldn’t overestimate the time it would require, I minded doing it a lot less. Now when I find that I’m avoiding a chore, I dive into it with stopwatch in hand, and most of the time, it ends up putting the chore back into proportion.

Do you have a chore that you hate doing? Timing it just might make it less of a chore.

Considering an architect can cost up to $250 an hour, having professional renovation plans drawn up can get expensive fast. While there is no replacement for a professional when determining your final plans, creating a 3D model of your renovation can save you some cash by presenting the architect a general idea of what you’re looking for.

Google Sketchup is a free 3D modeling program that I’ve been using for a couple of weeks to do just that. It allows me plan the renovations to scale and then walk around the house as if I were in it, giving me a better idea of where what works on paper and what works in the real world coincide. I did this once with a kitchen renovation, and it worked out extremely well.

In my short time working with the product, I’ve compiled a number of tips and resources to help minimize your frustration and get you up to speed faster with your own project.

Because men have been trained not to spend excess amounts of time on their personal appearance, they generally fail to recognize a few simple aspects of personal grooming that should be undertaken to keep them attractive to the moister sex.

But how does a gentleman know that his hair is unsightly? Because this type of revelation is reserved for close friends or people that can take a punch, he generally doesn’t. That’s where the Gentleman’s Guide to Trimming & Grooming comes in. The Gentleman’s Guide is a cumulative set of tips to give men the trimming and grooming info they need whether they are 5 or 45. All you have to do is match your age to the sections below to find out where your personal grooming may need adjustments.

Remember that the guide is cumulative, so you’ll need to read all of the tips up to your current age. When you’re finished, stash it in your library or rumpus room and come back to it when you hit another milestone age. The Gentleman’s Guide is guaranteed to transform even the most disheveled dork into a lifetime ladies man.

The ladies are waiting, so let’s get to it!

It took me a couple of days, but I wrote my first plugin for Wordpress last week to fix the default way Wordpress displays your blogroll.

The default Links Widget in Wordpress works by pulling your entire blogroll into an unconfigurable list. This is fine if your blogroll only contains five or ten very descriptive links, but it doesn’t scale well if your blogroll contains a ton of obscurely named blogs. The longer the list gets, the less your readers will be able to see the individual links in it. The more obscure the link titles are, the less they’ll trust them.

If your readers don’t see a it, or they don’t trust it, they’re not going to click it.

So how do you fix that?

Kubb is a fun Swedish yard game for 2-12 players that is similar to horseshoes or bocce. It always attracts a crowd when we play the game on the beach, and I’ve yet to meet a player that doesn’t want a set of their own after a couple of rounds.

Warnings

The Kubb set that I am presenting here is not exactly standard, but the Kubb Governance Committee rarely travels all the way to a tiny beach town in Massachusetts to harass me about it.

Here’s a question: If a song costs you about $.83 to buy on CD, and $.99 from iTunes, how can you justify buying only a fraction of a song as a ringtone for $3 a pop? If your cell phone is capable of playing MP3 ringtones, it makes sense to replace that boring default ringtone with a snippet from your favorite song, but there’s no way that you should have to pay $3 to do it.

Here’s how you can create a ringtone from one of your MP3s for free.

Somehow it has become STORMTROOPER WEEK here at dyers.org! Not that you mind because you know that Stormtroopers are awesome. They may even be more awesome than ninjas.

And all these Stormtrooper posts have awakened that secret childhood desire to dress up like Stormtroopers, haven’t they? It certainly has for Kerry and Johnny Wadd, and it probably has for you too. No one should have to deny their inner ‘trooper, but with Stormtrooper costumes starting at over $650 on Ebay, getting your trooper on will probably require that you sit down and make the costume yourself.

As a big fan of the Netflix Watch Now service, I’m surprised that Netflix has an RSS feed for their new releases, but not for the movies that have been added to their Watch Now video on demand service. They do have a recent additions page, but if you happen to forget to check it before it randomly overwrites itself, there’s no way to go back and see the previous weeks additions.

Netflixwatchnow.blogspot.com unofficially publishes the full list of Watch Now movies about once a week, but the list is over 2400 movies long, making it very difficult to scan for new items.

In a rare moment of clarity, I cobbled together a little Perl script to compare the Watch Now lists from week to week to keep track of what the new additions are. If you think this is useful, let me know and I’ll continue running the script until Netflix gets on the stick and adds an RSS feed.

Here’s a pic of the completed 10×14 metal shed with the cardboard “Bubbles” sign above it. Maybe it was the heat, but that two second sign made the three days of labor totally worth it…

The reference is to a character on Trailer Park Boys who lives in a shed with all his cats.

1000 Blank White Cards (1KBWC) is a card game for 3-6 people in which the players create all the cards used in the game. It’s so simple and fun to play that I can’t believe I never mentioned it here before.

One of the most common things that people say when I tell them about 1KBWC is that they’ll just make a card that says “infinity points” and win. Because they are thinking linearly in terms of a single winning scenario, they don’t immediately realize that there are a number of ways to creatively trump a seemingly unbeatable number of points in a game with flexible rules. A couple of simple examples are below.

This has been one of those weeks where all I’ve wanted to do when I got home is sit in front of the PS2, mindlessly punching my way through rappers. Unfortunately, the console started freezing up couple of days ago, ending with my trusty PS2 no longer loading discs.

After instantaneously looking up new and used PS2s online, I found that even a used one couldn’t be had for less than $90. It was at that point that I became aware of my inner geek who said,

“Just what the hell are you doing? A real geek wouldn’t be price shopping for a new PS2 right now. A real geek would get a screwdriver and open that fucker up to find out what’s was wrong with it. It’s dead, the warranty was over 5 years ago, and even if it catches fire, you’re no worse off than you are right now. You’ve got a whole bunch of screwdrivers, a fire extinguisher, nothing to lose, and you’re standing here comparison shopping? I’m actually feeling ashamed of you, right now.”

My inner geek was right. I closed out pricegrabber, and did a little googling on PS2 repair. Eventually, I came across an excellent article showing how to take apart the PS2 to clean and readjust the laser. After successfully performing those tasks, I realized that the disc loading issues were due to a grinding noise coming from the screw that drove the laser up and down its guide rails.

If you hear a grinding from inside a PS2, the lube that you are going to need to fix it is not red lithium grease or plain lithium grease, which you can get at Wal-Mart in the auto section. No. The stuff you need is called white lithium grease. The problem is that while a few forums might mention that this is the stuff you need, no forum or article actually tells you where you can get it. Neither does Google.

I’m here to tell you. You can get White Lithium Grease at Sears in the Tool/Automotive section for about $3 a tube.

You smear the head of a Q-tip full of grease and run it along the two laser guide rails and on snake motor screw, and put the rest back in your tool box, never to be used again. You then gently move the laser assembly up and down the rails until it moves smoothly without catching. Once it does, reassemble the console and pop in your favorite game.

By doing this, you can rid yourself of $87 if not $126 worth of shame and get back into the ring.

I’m a music junkie. I built my CD rack with my own two hands because I thought it was insane that someone should charge me $150 for something I could make on a table saw for $32. Call it handy, call it cheap, but this Yankee mentality drove me when I sought to divide my growing collection into sections, so that Slayer wouldn’t inappropriately touch the Christmas music and the Hip Hop wouldn’t be getting their big pants all up in the jazz section’s grill. I needed CD section dividers that would stick out just the right amount, hold together well, and slide easily between the jewel cases in the rack.

Because my sister works at Scrap in Oregon, she always comes home with ultra-creative things made from materials that would normally be thrown away. Using her as inspiration, I thought that I could make the dividers out of something that I had laying around, thus proving to her that I’m cool. Or creative. Or that Mom loves my geeky corporate ass just as much as her bike-riding, hard-core recycling ass.

So, like a good geek, I broke out my trusty Dremel and tried to create the dividers out of everything from old jewel cases to hacked up CDs tied together with baker’s twine. After two hours, all I ended up creating was a big pile of melted plastic that didn’t impress anyone and stunk to high heaven.

Because #1GF! was due home 15 minutes from what I was considering the midpoint of my project, I swept all the smelly bits (that I could find) into the trash and devised these simple CD dividers that stick out just the right amount from between the CDs and are simple to put together using only a sheet of paper and some tape.

And as an added benefit, they can be quickly dismantled in party situations where coasters are in short supply.

Step 1: Gather Materials
(1) sheet of 8 1/2 x 11″ paper (hopefully used)
(2) CDs that you messed up burning or got for free
(1) piece of packing or regular tape

Step 2:
Tear the sheet of paper into 4 even pieces (Don’t sweat it if they’re not exactly even). Put 3 into your “I’ll use these for scrap paper or alternative fuel” pile.

Step 3:
Fold the remaining piece in half 3 times the long way (For some reason, I show each fold in the picture below. Looking back, it seems a little confusing, but might be valuable if you happen to be drunk or confused by the number 3 or the word “fold”.)

Step 4:
Take your 2 old CDs and slip the piece of paper through them as shown. It should just fit through the holes without bending.

Step 5:
Pick your tape. I have a habit of overbuilding, so I chose packing tape, but I’ve tested this with a single piece of regular tape and it holds fine. (This is #1GF!’s favorite step as it merely pictures two tape dispensers positioned as if they were squaring off to battle. It also makes the assumption that you are still drunk or unfamiliar with the word “tape.”)

Step 6:
Pull the ends of the paper so that the CDs are tight together.

Step 7:
Rip off a piece of tape that is a little more than twice the width of the folded piece of paper.

Step 8:
Place it sticky side UP in the middle of the CDs.

Step 9:
Fold down one side of the paper, sticking it to the tape. Pull the paper tight, and fold down the other side on top of it.

Step 10:
Fold the tape over the paper to seal the deal.

Step 11:
Your divider should look like this when done, and should spin if coaxed.

Step 12:
If you have some old driver CDs or some old AOL CDs, you may get some nice colors in there. If you saved all those clear spacer CDs that come with CD packs, those have a very unobtrusive look.

Step 13:
The Dividers are thin, so they’re barely noticeable and don’t block the view of any CD spines from the front (the 5 dividers from Step 12 are also pictured here).

Comment on what a big nerd I am. Go on. It’s free.

Those non-dairy flavored creamers that I love so much are not very good for me. They contain a lot of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which will give you a heart attack faster than joining the steak-a-day club. I found that you can make a healthier substitute that tastes pretty close, although my version is not quite as sweet.

1. Put two teaspoons of sugar into the bottom of your coffee cup, and add just enough hot coffee to melt it.
2. Add around a teaspoon of vanilla extract (little more, little less).
3. Add desired amount of cream.
4. Fill with hot coffee.

If you do this in the right order, you won’t need a spoon. If you find the right amounts, write me up a recipe.

No real blog tonight as I spent the night working on building a projection tv for under $25. It wasn’t hard, will be great for video games, and creates an eight foot picture. Is the picture awesome? For eight grand? No. For $20? Unbelievable. I found some plans online, and built a 1st draft out of posterboard from staples. If you want to try it, you need 2 packages of 20×30 black posterboard, an exacto knife, some packing tape, and a page magnifier (fresnel lens type). Let me know if you try it, as I’m still tweaking mine. It works on a 25″ TV, but seems better on a 19″. The articles that I’ve seen have listed 13-15″ as optimal. Maybe I’ll hit the goodwill tomorrow and see what they have in stock…

Jebadiah Dyer
So, when my parents were on vacation, I had to feed their cats. Out of curiosity, I opened the silverware drawer to remind myself of how absolutely screwed up it is. It has been repaired 400 times over the last 20 years to the point where the face of it was hanging off. As I pulled it open, I found myself standing there with the front of the drawer in hand, while the rest of it remained quietly in the cabinet. Looking at the pure volume of nails and staples that had been used to attach and re-attach the thing, I was doubtful that there was room for a quick fix.

I was going to have to fix it. So, like any good Dyer, I took the drawer out to my car, and threw it in the trunk. After a week, I opened the trunk, and to my dismay, found that the drawer had not magically repaired itself. In the Dyer tradition, I closed the trunk lid, and gave it another week.