News: Why You Need to Cook on a Himalayan Salt Block
Salt is a miraculous substance. From the Ancient Egyptians to the Christian Bible, many cultures believe it to have mystical powers that can ward off evil, among other things.
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How To: Use the Volume Buttons to Wake Your Nexus 6, Not Just the Power Button
The attention to detail and build quality that Motorola put into the new Nexus 6 is amazing. Its curved backplate fits the hand like a glove, and fingers slide effortlessly across the rounded edge of its glass front, making the swipe gesture for side navigation menus feel more natural than ever—even for its huge, nearly six inch display.
How To: Make the Most of Your Thanksgiving Leftovers
There are those who prefer Thanksgiving leftovers to the actual official meal, much like people who prefer cold pizza over hot. I'm definitely in the latter camp. There's something luxurious about enjoying your perfectly cooked turkey and stuffing while wearing sweatpants and not having to make small talk with your weird uncle who drinks too much.
How To: Get Spotify's Desktop Beta App for Mac & Windows (Now with Touch)
Without much notice, Spotify launched Desktop Open Beta a few weeks ago, a program that allows anyone to download, test out, and provide feedback on the latest beta version of their desktop application for Mac and Windows.
How To: Auto Move for Android Puts Your Files Exactly Where You Want Them
While I consider myself to be a pretty organized guy, there are often times where I just can't find a file I put on my phone. Most of the time, when I download a file it goes automatically into my Download folder, but when I use a third-party to download other files, like torrents, they could end up in a number of places. Filtering abilities on file explorers often fall short, so it was time to find an app that would automatically sort files in real time.
How To: Cook Polenta in 15 Minutes Instead of 40
I became a big fan of polenta while studying Italian cooking. Previously, it never occurred to me that ground corn could create a dish that could rival the best pastas or potatoes. Those rich, golden bowls of cornmeal, cooked until tender and flavored with good olive oil, butter, sea salt, and fresh herbs soon became one of my favorite things to eat.
How To: The Trick to Squeezing Out Every Last Bit of Juice from Lemons, Limes, & Other Citrus Fruit
Cooks both humble and great are constantly trying to figure out how to get the most juice out of lemons and limes. Why? Because they add so much freaking flavor to everything and are endlessly useful in cooking. Sometimes, it's even a matter of squeezing the most out of your money (earlier this year, the price of limes quadrupled, though it only lasted a few months).
How To: Pit Apricots, Plums, Nectarines, & Other Stone Fruits Like a Chef
Summer is the season to enjoy stone fruit: peaches, plums, nectarines, and apricots are all kissed by the sun and bursting with juicy flavor—which is all well and good when you're eating them as is.
How To: Cook Frozen Steak & Fish Without Defrosting Them First
Can you cook a steak or salmon filet that's straight out of the freezer and get good results? Ordinarily, I would say no. Usually your steak ends up a sad grey mass fit only for the family dog and the fish is burned on the outside with an icy, undercooked center.
Ingredients 101: How & Why You Should Always Brown Butter
Butter can be even more delicious than it already is. While that may be a shocking claim, it's most definitely true. Many new cooks and even seasoned chefs don't realize this, but the few minutes it takes to do these things will pay you back exponentially when it comes to that buttery taste.
How To: Add a “Define Word” Option to the Copy/Paste Menu on Your Nexus 5
Even as a writer by trade, I'm not intimately familiar with every word in the English language. When you're typing something out on your Nexus, sometimes you think to yourself, "Is that right? Am I using the correct word here?" Then, you have no choice but to bring up Google Now and do a search for that word to make sure you're using it correctly.
How To: Set Up Weather Alerts for Perfect Beach Temperatures on Your Galaxy Note 3
Summer is here and flocks of people will make their way to beaches, lakes, and rivers across the country. But before heading out to places like these, it's always a good idea to check the local weather forecast first.
Ingredients 101: The Secret Powers of the Humble Radish
The Spanish and Portuguese introduced many things (some desirable, some not, depending on your POV) to Mexico in the sixteenth century: Christianity, language, and lots of flora and fauna.
How To: Make Pizza Dough with Only Two Ingredients & Why It Works
Any pizza lover knows that a quality crust is crucial to the whole experience. Good pizza crust should be delicious on its own, for once you get to the edge, it will be without any toppings, sauce, or cheese to disguise a bad character. It should be redolent of fresh, good wheat and taste full-bodied, rather than flat, flabby, or metallic, the way so many big chain and frozen pizza crusts do. The exterior should be crisp, while the interior contains an airy crumb as well as having a tender, s...
How To: Why You Should Skip Store-Bought Stock & Just Use Water Instead
When I became serious about cooking, nearly every cookbook and guide I picked up emphasized the importance of using fresh stock, whether it was chicken, beef, or vegetable. When I didn't have time to make my own, I bought the highest quality boxed or canned stock I could find at the market.
How To: Why You Need to Heat Up Store-Bought Tortillas (And the Best Ways to Do It)
Even though I often end the workday exhausted and just want to wrap rotisserie chicken parts in a store-bought tortilla and shove it in my eating hole, I generally try and take a couple of minutes to warm up said tortillas before I begin my meal. But if you're starving, do you really need to take the time? Do warm tortillas really make that much of a difference?
How To: Easily Separate Fat from Stock, Soup, or Meat Drippings
I love making stock. It's thrifty because you get extra use out of poultry bones and vegetable peelings, plus having homemade stock on hand makes so many things taste better, from soup to stews to pasta sauces. If you deglaze a pan, homemade turkey stock, booze of some kind, and butter will create an eye-rollingly good sauce in mere moments. One task I do not love? Figuring out how to skim the damn fat off the stock (or soup) after I've made it. It's necessary to skim the fat as you boil down...
How To: The Secret to Neutralizing Nasty Paint Fumes & Odors (Hint: It's in Your Kitchen)
A new coat of paint is an easy, cheap way to make your home look instantly better, but dealing with paint fumes for days afterward isn't so fun, especially if you have kids or pets.
News: This “Weight-Loss” App Lets You Shed 15 Pounds for Selfies
If mainstream media has taught us anything, it's that being beautiful can get you ahead in life. The notion isn't necessarily correct, but it's what the general consensus accepts and it seems to hold quite a bit of weight (no pun intended) in the western world.
How To: Make Crappy Cheap Vodka Taste Like the Good Stuff
Let's be honest, most of us buy the bottom-shelf vodka either because we're broke or because we're going to disguise the gag-inducing taste of it with juice or something fizzy. If you're cooking or baking with vodka (ice-cold vodka works wonders in pie crust), what's the point of buying Belvedere?
How To: Cook Tuna with Toilet Paper
Toilet paper isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you want a hot meal, but when you're camping or out in the field (i.e. military training), a little TP is the difference between cold tuna and luxury.
How To: Clever Chemistry-Based Cures to Common Kitchen Conundrums
You probably already know that cooking involves a ton of chemistry. Bread rises because of the reaction between the flour and leavener, and the delicious crust on your steak is formed by the Maillard reaction. Understanding the chemistry going on behind the scenes is one of the best ways to improve the quality of your food—it's much easier to fix a problem when you know what's causing it.
How To: Cook Without Measuring Tools
What would you say if I told you it was entirely possible—even desirable—to cook anything from a simple dinner to a great loaf of bread without using measuring cups, spoons, or a scale?
How To: Add Endless Scrolling to Home Screen Pages & App Folders on Your iPad or iPhone
When you're scrolling through your iPhone's home screens, you'll inevitably reach the end and have to either swipe backwards or hit the Home button to return to the first page. Why Apple didn't instill an endless scrolling feature, or at the very least an option for it, is anyone's guess, but just because you can't do it out of the box doesn't mean you can't do it.
How To: Everything You Need to Know About Apple's New iOS 7.1 Beta 5 for iPad, iPhone, & iPod Touch
Apple's just released a new beta of iOS 7.1 for developers, Beta 5, which fixes some small bugs and adds some minor feature enhancements. With previous reports stating that the final version of 7.1 was slated for a public release in March, these early leaks are indications that the final will be released in the following weeks, shortly after the Golden Master version hits developers.
How To: 5 Easy Velveeta-Free Cheese Dips for Your Super Bowl Party
Personally, I think Velveeta is pretty gross. Nothing about its texture, flavor, or color resembles real cheese. But your taste in cheese isn't the important part—what matters is having something good to eat while you watch the game.
How To: Text More Accurately by Handwriting Messages on Your Samsung Galaxy S3
I can't say that my handwriting skills are the best, and my cursive is even worse. I mean, I still don't know how to write a capital L in cursive, but who really cares when I do all my everyday writing with a keyboard now. I've gotten pretty fast at typing on my computer, but those tiny buttons on the Samsung Galaxy S3's keyboard is a totally different thing.
News: Metroid Mod, X360 Skyrim Mash-Up, and Snapshot 13W47e
Hey guy's, hope everything's going well! Here's a snippet of a few cool things and the latest news on Minecraft.
How To: Make Ice Cream
There is nothing more refreshing than an ice cream in a hot summer day. And even though, here in Australia, summer is "just" a couple of months away, I still like to have a scoop or two every now and then. However, I like to make the ice cream on my own. In this way, you can make whatever flavour you want, plus you know what type of products you have used and it usually tastes better than a commercial one.
How To: Make a Simple No-Sew Workout Armband for Your Phone or MP3 Player (No Sock Required)
I've never been much of a runner. I've tried running alone, with a partner, on busy sidewalks, and back country roads, but I just never got it. There are a few other forms of exercise I genuinely enjoy, but have yet to experience that "natural high" that avid runners are always talking about.
How To: Keep Recipes Visible, but Clean & Out of the Way While You Cook
With the explosion of food blogs in the last couple of years, there are more recipes available at the tip of your fingers than ever before. Craving chocolate chip cookies or Sriracha-flavored anything? You're guaranteed to have several thousand versions to choose from. So that's how they did it before the Internet...
How To: Organize Cords, Customize Your Keyboard, & Make Your Desk Nonslip with DIY Fabric Tape
There are thousands of uses for tape, and plenty of different types of it, too. Masking tape is perfect for labeling, double-sided tape is great for crafts, and duct tape is good for...well, just about everything.
Today's Tidbit: Why Women Live Longer Than Men
Life has many perils: parasites, predators, and pitfalls. Eventually, any organism will succumb, and if that organism has not first passed on its genes, those genes will face extinction.
How To: Holy String Art, Batman! 6 of the Coolest Thread Art Projects Ever
You may remember string art from your elementary school days. If so, it probably makes you think of the 2D geometrical designs that took every ounce of patience you had as a kid. Or those laborious curve stitch drawings, which string art was actually birthed from. But thanks to some innovative modern artists, string art has gotten a lot more interesting. Here are some of the most creative applications so far.
Supercool Science Trick: How to Turn Water into Ice on Command
This is an awesome little science trick that has to be seen to be believed. Simply by emptying a bottle of "supercooled" water into a glass, you can watch it turn into ice right as your pour! It's no magic trick or chemical craziness—it's normal water and you can try it yourself right in your own home.
How To: Make the Simplest Invisible Door Ever in Minecraft
This design is super simple and is the easiest invisible door that I've ever seen. Unlike designs that use horizontal pistons, the redstone here is completely hidden underground, and the door itself doesn't create an unsightly dip or gap in the wall.
How To: Fuse a Grater and Used Milk Jug into a DIY Shredded Cheese Catcher
Cheese makes everything better. It's just a fact. Sandwiches, burritos, and even plain bread all get a benefited flavor quotient when cheese is involved.
How To: Use a one-plane and two-plane golf swing
PGA member Jay Goldman teaches us the difference between a one plane and a two plane golf swing. He explains how a one plane golf swing is like a Ferris wheel that has been slanted whereas a two plane golf swing is where your upswing and your downswing are in different motions. He shows us the motions of both swings and what they should look like. He describes how some of the greatest golfers have two plane swings and other great golfers have one plane swings. This description is clear and ea...
How To: Stretch and grow taller
Many people are unhappy with their current height and want to get taller. There are some natural ways to increase your height, but remember, it takes time and a lot of patience and you won't grow 2 inches in a week.
How To: Apply rhinestones to your nails
Want a glamorous look for your nails? Rhinestones can add the perfect amount of glamour to your manicure. Learn how to neatly apply rhinestone to an already polished nails. You will need a base coat, any color of nail polish, a clear top coat, small rhinestones and a toothpick. This is a gorgeous look for short or long natural nails and acrylic or artificial nails. With this how to video you will be able to apply rhinestones to your manicure.