USB Charger Lamp

Behold, the multipurpose USB Charger lamp!

I've been slowly gathering the parts for this lamp for a while. I'm really into how it came together. It took a bunch of tries but ultimately I figured it all out. There might have been a bit of a mess in the meantime, but it all worked in the end.

The most important parts for this project are USB receptacle and the 3 wire cord. I found them at my local hardware store and they are available on Amazon as well. It's important to use the right USB receptacle for this lamp, if you are going to charge smart things with it (iphone, ipad, smart phones, etc). Some of them are the wrong amperage and can damage your device or just not work at all. 

If you aren't comfortable with wiring, this might not be a good first-electrical-project, but it's a really fun one if you are familiar with wiring.

Here is the basic diagram for a lamp with a USB changer, plug and light switch. In this lamp, the switch only turns the light off and on, the USB and plug are always powered. Be sure to use a single pole switch.

Putting it all together looks like this awesome beasty.

Excel - Combining text in multiple columns into one and Paste Value

It's a Excel Tech Tip kind of week!

I made this for one of my favorite humans. She uses these quite a bit, but sometimes the memory of them hides on her.

The first one, Concatenate, is delightful. There are a number of ways to do this task, so I listed our personal favorites. It's like mail merge for Excel! It will take the text in multiple cells and display them in a single cell. The two examples will display the same way.

=A1&" "&B1&" "&C1&""
or
=CONCATENATE(A1, B1, C1)

You can even get a little fancy and add punctuation or words in between each cell:

=A1&" & "&"B2 would display as Bob & Steve  (if A1=Bob and B2=Steve)

Similarly, you can use Concatenate:

=CONCATENATE(A1," & ",B2) would also show up at Bob & Steve

For the second part of the poster - Paste Value. There are a lot of "Paste special" options - I personally use Paste Value more often in what I'm working on. It is especially helpful if you want to paste the contents of a cell into another part of a spreadsheet, but want the hard coded number, not a link to the live data that might change tomorrow. Paste Value takes the formula away and just leaves you with the number, no frills, no database connections.

Please enjoy!

My Intentions

Here are the things that I am promising you.

1. A weird obsession with The Cult of Done.
2. Updates about what the projects I am working on, especially when they are done.
3. Vegan recipes.
4. Probably a lot about my garden in the summer and my cat in the winter... ok, probably a lot about my cat all seasons.