Gift Kit: Simple Girls Night Kit

No matter how old you get, there's nothing like a girls night that makes you appreciate the good things.  Like the grownup version of a sleep over where you talk about "boys/girls/romantic interest" (they still have cooties), work (isn't it funny how homework never really leaves you), and how your extracurriculars are going (how much sleep you're getting after rush hour).  However, one startling departure is everyone actually listens to their bedtime.
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Juice and snacks have been partially supplanted by wine and snacks that you get to pick out.  Even if they're the same snacks you had before minus the oatmeal raisin cookies.  No more will they masquerade as the superior oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.  Celebrate friendship and a night out-yet-in by supplying the hardware.  Cheers!

Components
Wine glass
Wine Charm
Cloth Napkin
Coaster

Wine Glass and Charm

You can always get incredibly fancy and paint the wine glass's base and use that as a marker so you don't accidentally (I see your "accidentally") drink out of someone else's glass.  I like to go the wine charm way because a) whenever I try painting it never turns out the way I want it to, b) I have lots of supplies for making wine charms holed up in various places around my crafting materials.  I made this really easy: just add some seed beads to a wire ring in different color patterns.  You can add a charm for personalization.  Or make some using shrinky dinks.

Cloth Napkin

Feeling classy with your wine?  You're already getting fancy with the charm.  Plus you need something with which to wipe up the crumbs of baked brie.  That was a bad example, you should never have crumbs of this god-like party food.  Maybe from... carrots.  Yeah, veggies.... *chews more baked brie*

Yeah I did it first.  My Bad...

Materials
pencil with flat eraser
blank cloth napkins
fabric paint

Using the rubber eraser of a pencil as a stamp, create rows of dots across the napkins.  For bonus points, measure how long each end of the napkin is and place dots evenly down the row.  Combo breaker: draw on a grid in pencil over your napkin and stamp the corners.  I went with option 1; the rows have "personality" even if a few of them are of someone who didn't have a firm grasp on the concept of straight.

I decorated this bag with the same pattern.  And I might have totally repurposed a Brit Kit for this.  Which is more fun: popcorn or wine?  Popcorn with beer is also an accepted answer.  I used the white chocolate for the covering of Irish Car Bomb Cake Balls.  Appropriate.

Coaster

Because putting the glass down on a nice wooden surface is the ultimate faux pas (It leaves a ring!  It's not even your furniture!  Coasters are the coolest!  Respect the bar!), if you're going to provide glassware, you should provide the accompanying coaster.  You can make some bottle cap coasters if you know the gals in question are beer or soda lovers.

Or Cheerwine lovers!

Or you can take ordinary tiles to new heights by using alcohol inks.  These work wonders with rubbing alcohol and non porous surfaces.

Materials
alcohol inks
white or light tile
rubbing alcohol
sealant (like ModPodge)
sugru, small rubber feet, or no-skid pads (4)

Pour a bit of rubbing alcohol on tile & spread around.  Before it dries, apply drops of color across the tile itself.  I went all of one color, then added the next 2.  Sometimes the later color would "eat" the space you thought you had for one of the first colors.  In that way I recommend not going overkill on the darker colors.

It spreads all over the place

After the ink dries, seal with the sealant.  Put feet into each of the corners or use the sugru to make small equal-sized balls for the feet.

Extras

Because nothing is complete without some emergency chocolate, put in your favorite candy bar.  Add some for this kit and it's complete!  You can wrap the wine glass in the napkin for some protection, or fold it nicely and place it in the glass

Bring gifts + good wine to your next event because you know as soon as these are opened, they're going to be put to good use.  & don't forget the brie.  & sampling it to make sure that this batch was good cheese.

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Finding Files in Linux Based on Known Time

I've slowly become a command line convert even to the point of finding it easier to just straight code in vi rather than download each to my box.  There's so much control over everything you do & you're uninhibited by what you can find within your program files.

However one thing I think that keeps people around in the wonderful world of GUIs is the ability to see files in a tree structure.  It's very visual, we all can process the information incredibly quickly.  And this is incredibly useful for utilizing what we do best which is make sense of unstructured data.  & yes I know it's a stretch to call a grouping of pictures with clearly defined labels "unstructured".  However, like creating the super long specialized view for looking at an entry in the database, sometimes it's just easier to take the simple search and then scan for what you need, especially if it's a one time use case.  This was before I discovered that burred within the man pages, "find" is incredibly powerful.

Using find to search a given time range

So I needed to find a file that was last modified between 5am and 5:10am on my system.  I had no idea what the file would be, but I figured that I should get the list of all the files and narrow from there.  The immediate issue you'll notice with find is that everything is based from now.  Which is great if you're searching generally or have the exact minute difference from where you were today and the time your file exists.  Having to constantly update that would defeat the intent of making life easy.

The solution comes with -newerXY an option that allows you to look for newer files matching the parameters that are put in X, Y and as the argument.  Since we have a time and not a particular file we're going to specify Y = t.  X can be used to specify time of creation, modification, or access.

For example to find all files in root that have been modified between 5:00am and 5:10am on 28 March:
find / -newermt '28 March 2013 5:00' -not -newermt '28 March 2013 5:10'

And this data become even more useful when able to sort and utilize the powers of ls.  The magic of xargs allows us in this case to pipe the results of this query as the "file system" to list and sort.

For example to nicely format the above files with timestamps and in descending order:
find / -newermt '28 March 2013 5:00' -not -newermt '28 March 2013 5:10' | xargs ls -t -l
 
Piping even further, you can refine the search for the file names or even more though grep.   But that's up to your own personal application.  You can keep piping forever Mario, but the princess is still in another castle!


Other bars to sample around this problem:
Virtuelvis
Stack Overflow -> this is the place to go for all your programming woes
Super User -> similar to Stack Overflow
Cyber Citi xargs

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