The Best "How To"

By Candace Horgan
Racks for stereo equipment and home theater systems generally start in the $200 range and increase from there. However, if you don't need the latest cutting-edge look and don't want to spend all that money, it is quite easy to build your own.

1. Step 1

   While a rack with a door used to be considered the way to go, an open rack is better. Home theater and audio components give off a lot of heat, and giving the components adequate ventilation is crucial to their performance and longevity.

2. Step 2

   Decide how many shelves you will need. Let's plan for a rack for four components: a receiver, a DVD player, a cable box, and a CD changer. Most components are 17 inches wide; some high-end components can be 19 inches wide. The depth of each component can vary up to 17 inches. Many hardware stores will pre-cut plywood to your dimensions, and unless you have a power saw you'll get a better shelf that way, so have them cut four pieces of plywood that are 20 inches by 18 inches. If you want to put cable management holes in the rack, make each shelf 20x20 to give enough space to drill the holes for cables and power cords.

3. Step 3

   Plan out the height. Most audio components are about 7 inches high; to ensure adequate ventilation, leave 10 inches for each shelf. Including the height of each shelf, cut four 2x2s that are 40 inches high. Use a level to make sure that each 2x2 is level at the top and bottom.
   
   Sand all the wood so that it is smooth, and then apply the finisher of your choice to pieces of wood.

4. Step 4

   Brace the shelves. The simplest way to create braces is to saw triangle pieces of plywood. Given that a home theater receiver can weigh 40 or more pounds, and you want to minimize vibration to improve performance, four braces per shelf that are 3-inch triangles is the best solution.
   
   You can also choose metal L-type braces that you buy from a hardware store. If you want to use those, the best option is to saw out a 1-inch square at each corner of the plywood shelf, so that the corner will fit around a corner 2x2 and provide adequate bite for the L braces.

5. Step 5

   Screw the braces into the 2x2s. If you are using 3-inch triangle braces, make it so the bottom of each triangle is 3 inches from the bottom of the 2x2. That will put the height of the first shelf 6 inches off the ground. Each piece of plywood is 1 inch thick, so measure a total of 8 inches from the top of the first triangle to the start of the next triangle. This will put 10 inches of space between each shelf.
   
   If you are using the metal braces, screw them in, one on each corner, so that the top of the metal brace is 6 inches from the bottom. For each additional shelf, measure so that the top of the brace is 11 inches above the previous brace.

Finish by screwing the plywood shelves into each brace.

As the number of your Facebook friends and apps you (and them) are using increases, your Facebook news feed and wall can turn into one big mess. It’s nice to communicate with your friends, but if you can’t find useful posts amidst all those silly apps or your real friends amongst all the unknown people you’ve befriended, it’s time to clean up your Facebook profile.

Facebook offers extensive options for fine tuning what individual applications and people can see or do on your Facebook profile, but if you haven’t been following all the changes (and Facebook likes to change often), you might feel lost in all the options. We’re offering a rundown of the most efficient ways to make more sense of your Facebook experience.

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Hide Them From the Feed!

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The simplest way to control what shows up in your News Feed is to click “Hide” on an item you don’t want to see. Facebook will ask you whether you want to hide that person or page, once you confirm it, you won’t see anything from them again.

If you want to bring some of the hidden stuff back, don’t worry. Once you hide something, Facebook will warn you with the message “XXX has been hidden from your News Feed. To manage who appears in News Feed, Edit Options.”

Now, click on Edit Options and you’ll see a list of all the people and Pages you’ve hidden. From there, you can restore the visibility of the items you’ve hidden, and set some additional options, such as the maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed.

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Friends & Lists

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Just like MySpace , Facebook is a place for friends. But let’s face it: In most cases, only a small number of your friends on Facebook are good, real-life friends. You’ve also got acquaintances, business partners, coworkers, and if you’re really trigger happy when it comes to friending, a bunch of people you don’t know at all.

Luckily, you can organize them into Friend Lists, which will let you filter your news feed and the chat box. The process can be a little tedious, but trust us, it can make a huge difference.

We’ve got a detailed article explaining how to create and manage friend lists on Facebook, and for the most part, it’s still accurate. However, Facebook changed its layout after the article was written, and some details about how lists are displayed and managed have changed, too.

Lists are now displayed under Friends in the Facebook homepage; click on it to see all the lists you’ve created. Furthermore, to edit lists, click on Account – Edit Friends. From there, you can add or remove friends from your lists, delete lists or create new ones.

To use lists, simply go to your homepage, and click on a list; you’ll only see news items created by the people you’ve added to that list. Perhaps even more importantly, the lists extend to the chat box. Once you’ve created one or more lists, you’ll see that the chat box now displays them separately. Click on Friend Lists; from there you can choose which lists do you want to see in the chat box. Fantastic if you have a lot of friends, but you only chat with a handful.

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Apps

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Dividing your friends into lists should help you organize and clean up your profile tremendously, but it still doesn’t rid you of all the apps your friends are using, some of which keep popping up on your wall. For example, if you’re not interested in Farmville, you probably don’t want to see how your friends’ crops are doing.

Again, it’s possible to fine tune which apps can do what to your profile, and we recommend doing this not only for the sake of clarity, but also for the sake of privacy and security. Click on Account – Application Settings, and choose Show – Authorized from the drop down menu. You’ll probably be amazed at how many apps you’ve authorized; the list can become huge over time.

There’s a couple of ways to deal with these apps. If you see an app you really don’t need, you can simply remove it by clicking the x next to it. This is a bit drastic, however, as you can also change the settings for each individual application. Click on Edit Settings; from there, you can deny the app to “publish recent activity (one line stories)” to your wall (under Additional Permissions). You can also choose whether you want the app to be located in your Bookmarks, and you can limit the visibility of that app’s tab on your profile.

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What Now?

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After you’ve cleaned up your apps, you’ll see a lot less clutter on your Facebook profile; however, bear in mind that this is an ongoing process. After a while, you’ll likely authorize new apps, and your profile will once again become cluttered with stuff you don’t really need to see on a daily basis. The best way to deal with it is to do regular maintenance of your Facebook profile every couple of months.

Still, if you’ve followed the instructions in this article, your Facebook is now a different place — more organized, less cluttered and generally more enjoyable. We hope it helped! If you’ve got any additional tips on how to clean up your Facebook profile, let us know in the comments!

About the Author :

Stan Schroeder

Stan has been writing for Mashable since 2007, and having the benefit (or the curse) of working in a European time zone, he's taken the post of European Editor. He's been a pro IT journalist in Croatia for over 6 years, having written, among numerous other publications, for the biggest local IT paper magazine Bug as well as one of the biggest local web portals, tportal.hr. Interested in writing in English, he started his (now existing only as archive) blog, FranticIndustries, and he also co-founded (and subsequently sold) whoishostingthis.com, a simple tool for determining the hosting provider of any website. He's an undergraduate of the Philosophic Faculty of Zagreb, working towards a B.A. in English Language and Literature as well as Information Science. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia, and spends his free time pursuing one of his many interests, which include CrossFit, collecting band t-shirts, tinkering with gadgets and hardware and generally leading a frantic lifestyle.

Twitter’s very real-time functionality is obviously the main attraction of the service. But it can also be a downside — if you want to send a tweet at a specific time, you usually have to be poised over a keyboard or phone.

But there are some great solutions. The ability to post-date a tweet is useful for event promotion (where you may be busy at said event), to reach an audience in a different time zone, to space out your messages, or to keep your account nice and lively while you are away.

While some popular Twitter clients offer scheduling options built-in, others don’t. For those in need, here are five great, free online services you can use to queue up tweets for future broadcasting.

To narrow down the vast number of services out there, criteria for this list includes: 1) That it’s free; 2) That it offers OAuth “sign in with Twitter” access, or OpenID sign-in; and 3) That it does what it says on the proverbial packaging.

These five hand-picked options are our favorites, but as always, please do let us know your top choices in the comments below.

1. Twuffer: Best For Minimalists

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Twuffer (Twitter buffer, get it?) is a super-simple example of a Twitter post-dating service. Using your Twitter log-in info, you can set your timezone and select how you’d prefer the time and date to appear. Scheduling a tweet is easy — just type what you’re going to say into the box, set the time and date you want it to go live, and hit the “set status!” button.

Queued tweets can be viewed via a tab on the dashboard, but cannot be edited, so if you’ve made a mistake, it’s a matter of deleting to start again. A record of tweets sent via the service is also viewable. Our scheduled tweet made it out the door as timed, so this simple solution gets a big thumbs up.

2. Later Bro: Best for Facebook Fans

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In addition to Twitter, Later Bro also works with Facebook (), and both options are offered right from the sign-in page. Once you’ve logged in with your Twitter account, you can change your timezone via the settings, enter your tweet, set the date and time (the latter of which is a little quirky) when you want it to go live, and hit the schedule button.

Scheduled tweets are listed below the main box, and can be edited, while sent tweets can be viewed. Another simple service that works well, Later Bro’s amusing name and contemporary looks might give it an edge with a hipper crowd.

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3. Twaitter (): Best for International Reach

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Twaitter (soon to be renamed “gremln” — vowels cost more, don’t you know) is actually a business-aimed Twitter client and scheduling platform, but for the purpose of this exercise, we’re just focusing on the tweet-scheduling aspects.

Twaitter offers some advanced options, including a nifty built-in URL shortener. There’s also the ability to translate your tweets, which, along with the drop-down timezone menu (included in the scheduler), makes this a great option for anyone indulging in some international Twitter action. Other highlights include the option to save drafts, copy tweets, and search and edit queued messages.

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4. FutureTweets: Best for Anyone Up To No Good

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Offering OpenID sign in (but no Twitter OAuth, for some reason), you have to validate your Twitter account before you can get going with FutureTweets. Once you’re in, this service offers a few cunning tricks that might make it worthwhile.

There’s an analog clock face to set the time of scheduled tweets (great for the numerically challenged among us), as well as some novelty options, like the ability to add icons to your tweet or flip the text backwards. Why you’d want to do any of those things is, of course, a matter for you to consider.

However, the really big selling point for FutureTweets over rivals is that you can choose for your update to appear as coming “via web,” rather than from the service. If you are trying to make it appear as if you are tweeting live (for whatever dastardly reason), this feature is certainly handy.

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5. tweetsqueue: Best for Chatterboxes

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Currently in closed beta (with the option to ask nicely for an invite), tweetsqueue offers yet another take on scheduling tweets with, as the name might suggest, a queue-based solution.

This system could work really well as a way of jotting down thoughts and sharing links in a timely manner without spamming your followers with a ton of tweets all at once. It could also serve more creative uses, such as the dialogue or dramatic recreations and experiments we’ve seen in the past. After a Twitter sign-in, you simply select your timezone and the frequency at which you’d like your tweets to be issued (e.g, every 30 minutes). Then, start getting them queued up.

Although in beta, tweetsqueue worked perfectly for us, and we think with a bit of refinement in terms of timing options, it could really become a must-use tweet scheduling tool.

About the Author :

Amy-Mae Elliott
Before joining Mashable as a staff writer, Amy-Mae Elliott covered all things gadget, tech and online news for Pocket-lint.com. Previous to that she worked in magazine publishing for lad's gadget mag "Boys Toys" and the more sedate secretarial title "The PA". Amy-Mae studied photography at The Arts University College at Bournemouth, where she gained her love of the sea-side, now residing near the beach in Devon.