Hacking Low Flow Shower Heads

Kramer Low Flow Shower HeadAsk anybody about their favorite episodes of Seinfeld, and the “Low Flow Shower Heads” episode is sure to be mentioned. As funny as this episode is, low flow shower heads are a reality, and I found this out first hand this week upon moving into our new house. My first shower was a dreadful, dreadful experience. On second thoughts, it can not actually be classified as a “Shower”. It was more an inadequate “Trickle”.

Now, I know we all need to conserve water, and respect the environment, and Low Flow Shower Heads help us sustain precious resources………but I am quiet sure my discharge of hot air after an inadequate shower does more damage to the ozone, so with that in mind, this is how I hacked my low flow shower heads.

**DISCLAIMER** – As stated, this is how “I” hacked “MY” shower – your system may be VERY different, and I take no responsibility should you fail catastrophically in your attempt to hack YOUR low flow shower head. This is simply an account of MY experience.

It’s not actually the “Shower Head” that is the problem. This is a DECOY phrase those “They” people use to mislead you. It’s the plastic “restricter” installed in the angled mounting piece of the arm that limits the flow of water.

DecoyWhere my shower arm mounts to the wall, I found a Hexagonal shaped coupling that screws to the hot water pipes. When I screwed it off, I found the water flow through the pipe was restricted by a plastic restricter. This restricter reduces the waters ability to flow through the pipe considerably by simply “blocking” it, hence the flow of water is low.

Shower Flow RestricterI learned that I could easily remove the plastic restricter from the waters path by “picking” it out with a small flat blade screw driver.

Restricter Removed

RestricterOnce I picked out the restricter, I remounted the arm back to the wall, and voila! I was now able to wash ALL of the shampoo out of my hair!

Modifying WordPress’s Tag Cloud Widget

Wordpress Tag Cloud WidgetWordPress ships with a Tag Cloud widget built in. Unfortunately, this widget is not customizable from the admin panel. You need to modify one of the systems .php files.

To modify the widget, you need to get into your WordPress installs files using your favorite FTP program , and in the “wp-includes” folder you will see a file called “category-template.php”. This is the file we will be working on, so please make a backup copy of it and store it in a safe place before you start. That way if something goes wrong you can recover quickly and easily by re-uploading the known good file. Once you have a backup tucked away, open up the file in your preferred editor ( I usually just use the Text Editor on Mac, or Notepad on Windows) and look for (or search for) “Display tag cloud”. This is the beginning of the part of the file we need to edit, and you will see by reading the commented out text, that there are a few parameters you can adjust. For this article we will look at the font sizes, and the number of tags that  appear in the cloud.

The default settings are:

'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,

As you can see, the smallest tag size is set to 8 points, the largest is 22 points, and the number of tags in the cloud are the top 45. Feel free to enlarge or shrink your font sizes, and ad or subtract the total number of tags displayed. The font sizes are ok for me, but I did increase the number of tags displayed to 150 for this web site.

Once you have made your changes, replace the category-template.php file on your server with the file you just modified, and when you refresh your browser you will see your changes in place.