Featured Posts in Clutter

Velcro Remote Controls to a Coffee Table for Easy, Uncluttered Access

In Organization, Clutter, Clever Uses, Diy, Household, / 29 May 2012 / 0 comments

The reason most of us lose remote controls is because they don't have a specific place to go. They might end up on a coffee table, an end table, or just slide behind the couch. Redditor actusual was sick of losing remotes, so he stuck them to a coffee table with velcro.

The idea is that when the remotes have a home to return to they're more likely to end up there. The velcro gives them an out of the way spot where they won't get moved around. You'll still have to remember to put the remote back where it belongs, but at least it has a specific spot to go to. What's your best tip for keeping track of wayward remotes?

People always tell me how good of an idea this was, so I thought I'd share. Never lose your remotes again! | Reddit
Make Any Room in Your Home Feel Bigger with a Little Paint, Some Mirrors, and Clear Objects

In Infographics, Apartment, Home, Household, Decoration, Design, Interior Design, Cleaning, Clutter, Housecleaning, / 23 May 2012 / 0 comments

Big spaces can look cramped and small spaces can look enormous. This is often due to simple methods of decoration and arrangement. How-to illustrator Yumi Sakugawa offers up several suggestions to help make the most of your space.

Among them, she suggests keeping walking pathways unblocked and staying organized—which are kind of a given, but also to create the illusion of more space with paint, mirrors, and clear objects. For example, a glass coffee table is mostly transparent, making it feel like it takes up less space than it does. Also, large mirrors can give the illusion of added depth to keep the space from feeling cramped. Finally, adding color to your walls will make them feel less-cramped. White walls are often thought to be the best choice for adding the illusion of greater depth, but light colors seem to do that better.

If you're not just looking to make your home feel bigger but want to make it look better, too, check out our guide to basic home design on the cheap.

11 Ways to Make Your Living Space Look Bigger | Secret Tips from the Yumiverse
Windownaut Beefs Up OS X’s Title Bar Buttons, Adds Tons of Other Window Management Features

In Window Management, Organization, Clutter, Downloads, Mac Downloads, Mac, Os X, Mac Os X, Clutter, Housecleaning, / 17 May 2012 / 0 comments
Mac only: Windownaut overhauls window management on your Mac so you can arrange your windows in a multitude of ways, customize the functions of its title bar buttons, and lots more.

There are a lot of apps that manage your windows in similar ways—like Divvy, Cinch, and ShiftIt to name just a few—but Windownaut takes a new approach, adding tons of other features to your windows and their title bar buttons. With Windownaut, you can:
- Move and resize windows using modifier keys instead of having to click on the title bar or window edges.
- Snap windows to any screen edge or corner, maximize, center, or move to a new space via drag-and-drop.
- Snap windows to any screen edge or corner, maximize, center, or move to a new space via a custom keyboard shortcut for each position.
- See all your possible window layouts for an individual window by right-clicking on the green "traffic light" button.
- Show the current window's document in the Finder by right-clicking on the yellow "traffic light" button.
- Quit the current application by right-clicking on the red "traffic light" button.
The traffic light features are all customizable as well: you can swap them between buttons, add modifiers, and even make them the default actions for those buttons when you left-click on them (who uses the green button anyway?). The whole app is extremely powerful and customizable, so if you feel held back by other window management applications, you might find what you're looking for with Windownaut.

Windownaut is a $4.99 download for Mac OS X with a free 14-day trial available. It works on both Snow Leopard and Lion.

Windownaut | via Cult of Mac
Free Up Hard Drive Space with a Simple Search Filter, No Extra Programs Necessary

In Disk Space, Cleaning, Maintenance, Clutter, Hard Drives, Windows, Mac, Mac Os X, Os X, Housecleaning, / 17 May 2012 / 0 comments

We've shown you lots of ways to free up hard drive space before, but before you go and download disk-visualizing programs, you might want to do a quick search for big files. Here's how to do it on Windows and OS X.

Hard drive visualizers will show you if certain folders or file types are taking up a lot of space, but sometimes you just have a few huge files that you don't even need. In my case, as you can see in the image above, I had a duplicate of a 1GB video file, a 1GB iPad game that I don't even play, and a 1GB video project that I've long since finished. That's at least 3GB of space I've freed up right there, and all it took was a search for files bigger than 500MB.

To do this in Windows, just open up Explorer and type size:>500MB into the search bar. You can tweak this to be anything you want, but I thought 500MB was a good starting size. Press Enter and it'll show you the biggest files first.

If you're on OS X, you have a few choices, but Mac|Life recommends creating a new smart folder—that way you always have it on hand to check when you're running low on space. To do this, open up Finder and go to New > Smart Folder. Click the plus sign on the right side of the toolbar. Click the "Kind" dropdown and go to Other > File Size. Then, enter your file size in the box, choose "Greater Than" from the dropdown menu, and you should see all the big files on your computer. Click Save to save your smart folder in the Finder's sidebar for quick access later.

Got any other tips for quickly finding space hogs on your machine? Share them in the comments, and hit the link to check out more great uses of OS X's smart folders feature.

Organize Your Finder with Smart Folders | Mac|Life

Velcro Remote Controls to a Coffee Table for Easy, Uncluttered Access

Make Any Room in Your Home Feel Bigger with a Little Paint, Some Mirrors, and Clear Objects

Windownaut Beefs Up OS X’s Title Bar Buttons, Adds Tons of Other Window Management Features

Free Up Hard Drive Space with a Simple Search Filter, No Extra Programs Necessary

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