It's amazing how expensive cradles are for mobile devices. Most users realize that there is a big premium being charged for what amounts to a formed piece of plastic, and it makes them less likely to pony up the big bucks for a device that holds their phone. Luckily, this is an area where a little DIY creativity can help.

A Download Squad tipster pointed us to their YouTube video describing how to take a cardboard coffee cup sleeve and with a few careful cuts, turn it into a perfectly serviceable cradle for holding a mobile device in landscape orientation. The video could have been shorter, but it is very well put together. I've embedded the video after the jump at the end of this post.

Alternatively, there is an iPhone dock papercraft project that Lifehacker pointed to that is a little more complicated, but results in a cradle that can hold an iPhone in landscape or portrait orientation, and allows you to plug in your iPhone's sync cable while in portrait orientation.

Is it worth skimping on a cradle and trying to make it yourself, or are you willing to pay the premium that hardware makers charge for their sturdier versions? Do you know of a different set of DIY cradle plans? Let us know in the comments.

Even though Auto-tune - that funky robot effect that ruled the radio for a big chunk of 2008 - has been officially declared dead by no less a rap superstar than Jay-Z himself, people still went nuts for T-Pain's Auto-tune app on the iPhone. You don't have to have an iPhone (or pay hundreds of dollars for official Antares Auto-tune software) to get that T-Pain sound, though. In fact, you can do it with an app that comes preloaded on the average Mac: Garageband. Check out the gallery for a step-by-step guide to bringing the T-Pain.

With all the drama around brand-name URL shorteners, a lot of blogs have advised people to skip the big guys and create their own. Easier said than done, though, right? Well, maybe not: Lessn, a service from brilliant designer Shaun Inman (who also developed the Fever feed reader), makes getting a personal shortURL as simple as possible. All you need is some server space where you can throw up some PHP and MySQL.

All you have to know how to do to set up Lessn is enter some login info in a php config file and upload the whole package to your server. After that, you're good to go. You can put in your full URL, and Lessen will give you a short one for it. Then, whenever you want to use your shortener, you can click the included bookmarklet. It might be a lot more work than just using Bit.ly, but having your own shortlinks on your own server means that you don't have to risk a service shutting down and leaving you with dead links.

[via Lifehacker]

Whenever I see another one of those "collector" card games targeted at kids, I think "Man, what a horrible waste of natural resources."

Then I think, "Maybe I'm just bitter because I haven't come up with some insipid card game that could net me a cool million with very little effort involved."

If only there were some kind of service on the Internet that would allow me to do this. And maybe create a follow-up board game with all kinds of ridiculous rules and weird dice!

The Game Crafter might be just what I've been waiting for. Using the site's templates and array of pre-fab game pieces, you can create and sell your very own board and card games.

There's also a large list of other Game Crafter users' creations available for you to buy, like Hnefatafl and Messiah the Card Game.

At long last, I can start working on my epic game - Web 2.0: The Monetizing!

Watch out for the weak password attack card, it leads to all kinds of bad press and finger pointing.

[via FeedMyApp]

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

1. Download script.aculo.us. Click on any of these links to begin downloading the zip, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 version.
   
   
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, preferably somewhere you will find it again. This is key.
   
   
3. Upload the whole thing to your web server, and put it where ever you like, again, it should be somewhere you can find it. Once again, finding it is key. You will need to link to these files from your web page, so putting the files in a sub folder of your home directory (root for you unix junkies) is a good idea.
   
   
4. In the header section of your web pages, you need to put this code:
   

   <script src="ajax/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <script src="ajax/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   As you might notice, the code has to point to your uploaded script.aculo.us files. You would replace the "ajax/" portion with your own path depending on the name of your subfolder.
   
   
5. Next, put the one line of code into your pages or posts where ever you want the effect to take place. Let's say you have a content div element you want to have all the sudden appear in the page, all you do is wire the "SlideDown" effect (one of many in script.aculo.us, download the cheat sheet here) to a button, link, or other clickable element on your page. The code to trigger the SlideDown effect from a link looks like this:
   
   <a href="#" onclick="Effect.SlideDown('content');">SlideDown Now!</a>
   
   Why use an <a> tag? First, it is super simple to code (everyone knows it), and second, users think it is an ordinary link. They will be quite surprised when they find out it isn't normal at all. I call this "hacking old-skool users into using web 2.0 unknowingly" (or something like that).
   
   
6. Anyway...be sure your div tag has the id="content" because that is the name of the element the SlideDown effect will be applied to once you click the "link" we just made. Make sense? Good. NOTE: Something to remember is that your DIV will be shown on the page automatically by default, unless you first hide it, so the visual magic of an effect such as SlideDown can really be displayed. To "hide" our div by default so your content won't appear until you click the link we just made, you will need to add an inline CSS style (or add one in your CSS file, if you have one) so the content div ends up looking like this:
   

   <div id="content" style="display: none;">This is the content.</div>

   You'll notice (I hope) that the underlined code is the part that hides this div by default. When the SlideDown effect is triggered by clicking on the <a> link, it will automatically change the div's display property, so don't worry about having to do that.
   
7. Try it out, and have fun! It should slide down your content, which can be anything you put in that div tag, video, audio, pictures, more javascript, an iframe, whatever, use your imagination. There are tons of different effects you can use, so you should check them out at script.aculo.us's website, since they have great demos and even combination demos for different sets of effects.
   
   Since the script.aculo.us wiki is large and contains a lot of information to consume all at once, I have compiled a basic script.aculo.us effects cheat sheet of sorts for your quick and dirty coding enjoyment. You can download my PDF cheat sheet here.

Have fun AJAXing your site, and once you're done, come back and give us a link to your site so we can see what you've done with the place. I'd love to check out your site with the framework in action. It can do some wicked cool stuff. You can build entire sites out of script.aculo.us including AJAX drop-downs, AJAX page loading, and custom stuff. Let me know how your site turns out with it.

NOTE (to lightbox and TinyMCE users): There are some special instructions on integrating script.aculo.us with both of these other frameworks, since they all use Prototype to some extent. You can find TinyMCE help here (script.aculo.us wiki) and most lightbox frameworks list this info on their support page or forums section of the site. Have fun!

This holiday "gift" for you and yours comes from PC World. Their new video area offers practical guides on the small screen (PC that is) on how to replace a graphics card, set up a wi-fi network, and others. The gift part is that you can enjoy a nearly "my-new-technology-doesn't-work" phone-call free holiday season. Okay, I am dreaming a little bit here, but you get the idea. The videos are fairly good, and actually do offer some help for the average to beginner PC user. There was adequate detail on the video I watched, but it wasn't too drawn out, for example they showed going to the nVidia and ATI websites to download drivers, but since that was self-explanatory they whizzed by it, which was fine with me. These videos are obviously not for the uber-all-hours geeks and modders that hang out here, but for those you invariably end up supporting, most likely during a holiday family gathering, to do it themselves.

There comes a time in every savvy, blog-reading techie type person's life when you want or need to produce a smallish, but good-quality-ish video that looks decently like it is at least screaming "cool little video" if not "Oscar." For me this time came at work when I was asked what could be done to really spice up our sales pitch to hook a really big and important customer. What better way to inspire confidence and awe in the customer, but to put together a video on the cheap (nearly free) and wow the customer with a timely expose of one of our new state-of-the-art distribution technologies? When my boss didn't answer, I knew I had hit pay dirt. He enthusiastically said "go for it" once I elaborated on the idea of a video a little bit. Honestly, I didn't quite knew HOW I was going to do this, but I knew I could figure it out, I mean we're talking about tipping the scales in our favor on a $10 million/year deal here, so why not give a shot? I typically give myself more work this way, volunteering for tasks like this, but now I can share my experience with you and the best easy and free ways I found to produce such a video in a day and a half on no budget that looks decent and make customers drool. You don't need excellent computer skills either, but a little will to learn and a few hours time depending how involved you want this video to be. Take one, marker, action!

Setting up your rig, Action!, and Pre-production after the jump...

Engadget's Will O'Brien has written a great piece called How-To: Run your own network wiring. I think it's fair to call it a pretty quick-and-dirty guide, as some of the commenters are criticizing its ad-hoc nature, but if quick-and-dirty is what you need, this is the guide for you. O'Brien tells you what supplies and equipment you'll need to put together your own custom-length cables and then gives some tips on where to hide them. Sure, you might say this new age of wireless obviates the need for wired networks, but if that's not possible or cost-effective for you, take a look at Will's guide and also the comments, which point out some safety and legal issues you might want to be aware of.