Plastic bags may be banned from retail stores in some cities, like Santa Monica, Seattle, and San Fransisco, and will be banned in Los Angeles shortly, but we still use billions of them every year. What else are we going to use for throwing away cat litter or picking up dog poop?
Once when I was a kid, my dad used a glue trap to catch a mouse in our basement. The result was so awful for the mouse that my mom and I made him promise to never use that kind of trap again. Call me a softy, but I'm a firm believer that you don't have to kill pests to get rid of them.
If you're anything like me, you'd like the ability to fully exit your iPhone apps to help free up memory, improve battery life, stop background processes, and fix unresponsive apps. The thing is, you can, with the help of the app switcher. Force-closing apps also helps keep your app switch clean and organized.
When you upgrade to a new Android smartphone like the HTC One, you can have browser bookmarks, Wi-Fi passwords, and other settings quickly transferred over from your old device using your Google Account backup. However, you'll still have to download apps individually from your Google Play list, and not all of your saved progress will be transferred over. Fortunately, there is a third-party app that will allow you to backup and restore your apps—with all their data.
One of the very first Photoshop skills we learned in my tenth grade photojournalism class was cropping the background out of images. I hated it. It was extremely time consuming, and the magnetic lasso tool never seemed to want to cooperate with me.
Any living creature will die if deprived of sleep for long enough. The longest documented occurrence of a person not fully sleeping and surviving is only 11 days. There is a rare disease where deep sleep is never achieved, affecting roughly 100 people worldwide. Patients usually only survive between 6 to 18 months after the onset of chronic insomnia, and only 3 to 9 months in a parasomnia state without any real REM sleep.
Mixing water and electricity is extremely risky and potentially lethal, yet that's exactly what I did with the Scariac. In its simplest form, the Scariac is just a glorified version of two wires in a bucket of water, but it's actually one of the cheapest power controllers you can make.
As we all know, our attention spans are much shorter now that we're accustomed to getting information and news in tiny snippets via text messages, tweets, instagrams, and other constant updates.
Apps sure do run great on Android tablets! If you caught that little whiff of sarcasm, you probably already figured out I was lying. There is a definite lack of good, high-quality apps specifically made for Android tablets. If you've ever tried Facebook or Twitter on a tablet, you know exactly what I mean.
Sometimes, figuring out what to cook for dinner takes longer than actually cooking it. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten excited about a recipe, then realized that it requires marinating for twelve hours. When it's already 6 p.m., that just isn't going to work.
We've all had to write an essay or research paper at some point, and undoubtedly the hardest part about it is always the citation, right? If you ask me, it's a huge pain in the arse. Even more so if you're gathering your facts from a huge variety of sources.
So, you've flashed a bad ROM or ZIP file, and now your Nexus 7 won't boot up. Maybe it just went haywire for no reason. Whatever happened, the bad news only keeps coming—you didn't make a backup of your system, contacts, or apps.
If you've ever listened to your loved ones sing in the shower or watched a few minutes of American Idol, you would think that the majority of the population is tone deaf. In reality, only about 4 percent of the world's population suffers from tone deafness, or the inability to distinguish between different pitches. Che Guerava, Charles Darwin, and Ulysses S. Grant were all tone deaf.
Having trouble getting a strong Wi-Fi signal on your Samsung Galaxy S3? Does the signal drop out on you when changing rooms? Frustrating, isn't it?
If you're the type of person who constantly uses multiple tabs in your browser, you know how annoying it is when one of them starts playing unwanted music or video.
The gold standard of great foods on a stick is reserved for honey battered corn dogs and shish kabob (which is surprisingly spelled just like it sounds). But when I saw this absolutely amazing concoction of breakfast food combined with the queen of meats, I fell in love. Now, if you are looking at this picture and still don't know what it is, you are definitely not a chicken and waffles fan, otherwise you would have figured it out right away. I mean, what else goes well with syrup-drenched wa...
I get advice from my friends on a lot of things in life—cool video games, movie reviews, and feedback on my choices in women. Friends can be very helpful in filtering out some of the excess noise and are more likely to give you suggestions you can relate to.
Smartphones and tablets are great for watching movies and videos while you're out, but at home, the screen is just too tiny. There are quite a few projectors on the market that work with mobile devices, but they can get pricey.
Even though iOS 6.1 was only released a couple of weeks ago, hackers released evasi0n a couple days after. Evasi0n, the only iPhone 5 jailbreak currently on the market, is the most popular jailbreak in history—with nearly 7 million iOS devices already hacked in the mere four days after its release. Well, now it seems that iOS 6.1 is being taken advantage of again, this time with a simple exploit figured out by YouTube user S1riOS6, which lets you bypass the lock screen on an iPhone running iO...
If I could win a trophy for waking up to go to work or for eating a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats without any of the biscuits getting soggy, I think my life would be so much more awesome. The gaming industry has cornered the market when it comes to achievement-based rewards, because they know that we love challenges.
Babies are pretty cool. They do whatever they want, have beautiful women drool all over them, and have more one-on-one boob action than any grown man (or woman) I know.
It wasn't that long ago that we started seeing a variety of beers catering to the Steampunk crowd, so why not some wine?
Needing to use your device in bright or low lighting can require an adjustment in the phone's built-in brightness settings. However, there are times when those default settings just don't do the trick.
Once you have the skills to bring your ideas to life, the hardest part is coming up with ideas. What do you do when you can't think of something to make? What happens when your well of inspiration runs dry?
In evolutionary times, we were far more likely to die from starvation than from diseases related to obesity. In those times, when food was available, it was best to stuff oneself.
The holiday season is here, and most people have already started counting down. Advent calendars are a very traditional way to keep track of how many days are left, but most of the ones you see are either boring, made for little kids, or just plain ugly.
Wall framing. How to frame a wall. Whether you're re-sheeting an old wall or building a new timber frame wall, before you install the plasterboard or drywall, take the opportunity to have a really good think about what services or insulation qualities you might want to have in that space. There are issues to consider like electrical, plumbing, noggins for wall fixtures and insulation.
What's your Twitter handle worth? If it's considered "desirable" (aka short and simple), it'll get you around 100 bucks, or, if you prefer, the affections of a teenage girl.
Having a flash drive is more or less a must, but the biggest downside is that they often get stolen, and it's not hard to figure out why. They're small, so they easily fit into pockets, and a lot of people store valuable information on them. Want to pretty much guarantee no one takes yours? Disguise it as a broken USB cable like Windell Oskay of Evil Mad Science Labs so it just looks like a piece of junk to would-be thieves. The materials are pretty simple: a flash drive (the smaller the bett...
Jake von Slatt of The Steampunk Workshop kept breaking the rear glass panel on his iPhone. So, he ended up making his own gorgeous replacement out of brass to replace the standard Apple logo ones who kept getting. The only problem was that it made his signal strength super weak, so he figured out how to transfer the etching onto a glass back. Here's the basic rundown of how he accomplished this feat...
It may be surprising, but those cardboard toilet paper tubes are dead useful for so many things besides just keeping the circular shape of your TP roll. As shown before, you can make car dash mounts for your mobile phone, but that's just one of the many beneficial uses from a seemingly junk cardboard tube. You probably go through quite a bit of bathroom tissue over the course of a year, especially if you're using it for facial tissues, too. So, the next time you throw away that lonely little ...
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.
Assuming everyone knows of the recent "String of attacks" passed between Obama and Romney, I just want to talk about how useless this entire thing is. I'll try to be as un-biased as possible.
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.
There's a strange grey area for "guerrilla filmmaking" on YouTube. Generally, someone shooting a video needs to get permission from the people in it to show their faces. But on YouTube, that "rule" is more of a suggestion (and sometimes not even that).
Need to figure out the area of a trapezoid for a household project? Even if you just want to sound smart, there is a simple formula that can be used every time you need to find the area of a trapezoid. Try the formula and see how good you are at geometry.
Need some help figuring out how to pick the perfect avocado? Learn how with this green grocer's guide. As you might expect, once you know what to look, feel and smell for, the process of selecting ripe avocados is a simple one. So simple, in fact, that this clip clocks in at just 26 seconds. For more information on how to tell when an avocado is ready to be eaten on the day of purchase, take a look.
On this map, you can do this great glitch on Killzone 2 for PS3. There's a lot to do on this map, so there's sure to be many more glitches, but you'll have to figure that out yourself. Just watch the whole video walkthrough to find out how to find the Outside Pyrrhus Rise Glitch.