The end of your laptop or phone charging cable can take a lot of stress when you bend it to plug it in to give your gear some juice. We've shown you how to reinforce it with Sugru , but if you want something more durable, attractive, and multipurpose, try some paracord instead.
We love to-do lists, tracking tasks, and keeping an eye on everything that needs to get done. But Jeff Atwood suggests a different approach: every day, ask yourself what three things need to get done, and ditch the other lists.
When it's time to put away the electric blanket for the season (or starts to smell funky), it's time to clean it. Clean an electric blanket using a washing machine and a few simple steps.
Planning a wedding can be a stressful affair , but web site The Knot has a ton of stuff to get you started, from checklists to timelines to inspiration boards.
While a coupon can save extra cash while shopping, some people skip the due diligence of searching for one before checking out. Perhaps they think it takes too much time, or, more likely, that there just won't be one available that makes it worth it. That's why we dove deep into our coupon database to find out which stores are the best.
We all know the importance of investing. When we get to the point that we can start saving , it's instinctual (and rightly so!) to start looking at financial investments like stocks or 401(k)s. One reddit user, however, suggests that the first investment to make is in yourself.
Artichokes are members of the thistle family, which can make them a bit prickly and unapproachable—but they're really good for you, and tasty too. Since they're in season right now, this video from the folks at Panna shows you the fast, easy way to clean and prep them for cooking.
Google Maps is easily one of the most popular and powerful mapping tools on the internet. It doesn't have to do all the legwork alone, though. Here are some of the best extensions you can add to your browser to make Google Maps that much more awesome.
(Pete)
To protect yourself in case of an audit, you should keep our printed or digital tax returns for seven years. Keep these in locked cabinets or password-protected files. If the IRS suspects you of hiding income, you can be audited for up to six years, and you can be subject to random audits for three years. If you like to keep information about your income around, go ahead and keep them indefinitely.
Also keep supporting documents such as receipts, invoices, 1099 forms, sales records, charitable donation receipts, and any other documents that you would need to verify every penny that you claimed as income or deductions.
If you ended up taking the standard deduction, as many people with salaried jobs do, then you don’t need to prove your deductions. You can throw the receipts and such out, and just keep copies of any of the forms, digital or paper, that you would have mailed in with your return.
By “throw that out,” of course, we mean feed it into a cross-cut shredder at home or at a public shredding event, then recycle it.
How long should you keep your tax records? [Consumer Reports]
Not all of us — and certainly not all of you — will be celebrating Easter this weekend. But it is a spring Friday afternoon and just about everyone likes chocolate. So what better way to get through the end of the work week than to plug in your headphones (or turn down the volume on your computer) and waste a few minutes watching Cadbury Creme Eggs be brought into this world?
Sadly, there is no clucking bunny (that’s not a euphemism; though it should be) dropping fondant-filled chocolate eggs into waiting foil wrappers. The reality is exactly what you’d expect — chocolate goes into half-egg mold; white and yellow fondant is squirted into chocolate shells; halves of shells are book-molded together to form the Easter treat that introduced many a young child to the term “sugar shock.”
Gooey Goodness: Inside Cadbury’s Creme Egg Factory [Bloomberg]
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve nothing against animal crackers. I just haven’t eaten one since I was old enough to spell my name, and I’m not alone in having outgrown the novelty of biting off the heads of vaguely sweet, vaguely animal-shaped snack crackers.
In fact, the mammoth jug-o-animal-crackers we bought at Costco last summer to do this story on the warehouse store’s lack of childproofing on its detergent packaging has not even been opened, even though every visitor to the Consumerist Cave has been greeted with “Welcome… have some animal crackers, please.”
Animal crackers are a part of our history and yes, I guess they make a fine thing to shove in the mouth of a complaining, hungry kid, but giving them their own day — presumably at the behest of Big Animal Cracker and its allies at Big Milk — seems like giving out a “Not-Bad Attendance” award or a honoring a .215 hitter in baseball for simply being above the Mendoza line.
And yet, National Animal Cracker Day may not represent the nadir on the food holiday curve. As this calendar on Food.com shows, there are food-themed holidays basically every single darn day of the year, and the following are just some of the so-called holidays that have no need to exist:
January 10: Bittersweet Chocolate Day
On which we celebrate the chocolate you accidentally buy when not paying attention to the label.
January 22: Blonde Brownie Day
In honor of a dessert that would go well after a meal of jumbo shrimp and chicken cheesesteaks.
February 18: Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day
A celebration of a food that apparently some people somewhere eat.
March 6: Frozen Food Day
In remembrance of all the pizza rolls, frozen peas, and other foods that gave their lives to freezer burn.
April 24: Pigs In A Blanket Day
Because regular size hot dogs get all the glory…
May 6: Beverage Day
For those who have forgotten to consume liquids.
June: National Iced Tea Month
An entire month to ruminate on the wonders of taking a hot beverage and serving it cold.
July 1: Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day
Don’t you dare try to pass off a carton of neapolitan at this party; you’d just look like a fool.
July 15: Gummy Worm Day
An entire day just for one particular form of gelatin-based candies.
August: National Panini Month
Four weeks during which to celebrate every aspect and variation on sticking a sandwich between two hot pieces of metal.
August 31: Trail Mix Day
Here’s a day for that one jerk on your block who taints your Halloween loot with granola.
September 6: Coffee Ice Cream Day
Not so long ago, this might have been able to fall under the July 1 Creative Ice Cream Day celebration, but now coffee ice cream requires its own day apart from all others.
October 24: Bologna Day
This holiday has a first name; it’s “P-O-I-N-T.” This holiday has a second name; it’s “L-E-S-S.”
November 18: Vichyssoise Day
Gather the kids! It’s time to honor everyone’s favorite cold, potato-and-leek-based soup with a funny name.
December 30: Bicarbonate of Soda Day
If you can think of a better way to coast out the end of the year than spending an entire day celebrating baking soda, I’d say you’re delusional.
Lauren is upset with Procter & Gamble, the makers of Tide. While detergent pods are a boon to been laundromat customers and people who dislike measuring things. Some people have had trouble with the pods, though. Detergent isn’t supposed to stain your laundry. It’s supposed to do the exact opposite of that. Yet customers say that it’s discrepancies in the instructions that cause problems for pod people.
We know that some small children have been injured or killed after putting the pods in their mouths, which is scary and tragic. Parents, manufacturers, and even governments are working to put a stop to pod-eating. The pods are intended as laundry detergents, and are not intended as snacks, so what’s going wrong here?
Reader Lauren reports that the pods stained her clothing. ‘When I contacted tide I got a response back indicating entirely different usage directions then what is on their packaging,” she tells Consumerist. Here’s that response, alongside the instructions on the package of pods that stained her laundry:
Procter & Gamble, for their part, insist that consumers are just using the pods wrong. Ignore the needlessly complex water temperature directions and just remember that no matter what, the pod always goes in the washer first.
In an e-mail to our freshly laundered colleagues at Consumer Reports a few months ago, a Procter & Gamble representative explained to them that some common mistakes cause the staining, not inconsistent or confusing directions. Nope, nope, nope.
The most common contributors to the development of a blue/purple stain on fabrics is not placing the pac into the washing machine drum BEFORE adding the clothes and/or overstuffing machine with laundry. This is important to ensure machine has enough space to provide the agitation needed for the best clean and to maximize contact with ‘free water’ in the machine.
Hot off the heels of a new U.S. Public Interest Research Group study that found the airline garnered the most consumer complaints – 8 complaints per 100,000 customers – filed with the Dept. of Transportation in 2013, Spirit appears to be on damage control. Although we’re not entirely sure how helpful their latest actions will prove.
First, CEO Ben Baldanza continues his ever entertaining claims that his company is the “most consumer-friendly” airline by simply saying customers just don’t understand Spirit’s business model.
“Offering our low fares requires doing some things that some people complain about—more seats on our planes with a little less legroom, no Wi-Fi or video screens, and no refunds without insurance; however, these reduce costs which gives our customers the lowest fares in the industry,” Baldanza wrote in a letter to Bloomberg Businessweek and other journalists. “Judging by the number of customers on our planes and repeat customer rate, most people like this tradeoff.”
Missing from Baldanza’s list of tradeoffs consumers should be okay making are the fees charged for carry-on baggage, fees charged to talk to a human being, charges for printing your boarding pass at the airport and a lack of free water during flights.
Friday’s explanation by Baldanza is the latest in a string of mind-boggling declarations over the years.
In 2010, he famously declared those baggage fees to be a “consumer benefit.” And let’s not forget the company’s stance in 2012 that posting full airfares is the government’s way of hiding higher taxes in fares.
The CEO consistently maintains that Spirit is the most consumer-friendly airline despite being the only U.S. carrier on a list of the world’s worst airlines.
Following Baldanza’s statement, the company announced a new campaign offering discounts to the 99.99% of customers it says don’t file complaints against the company.
Spirit Airlines is celebrating the 99.99 percent! That’s right, over 99.99 percent of our customers did not file a complaint with the Department of Transportation in 2013. To the 0.01 percent – that’s OK, we know we aren’t the airline for everyone (though we’d love for you to save by flying with us again!). We are celebrating the 99.99 percent by running a $24 OFF* promotion. Book a flight for travel from September 3, 2014 through November 19, 2014 and you’ll save $24 off* of your trip.
While the promotion might seem like a valid attempt to squash consumer unease with the airline the $24 savings likely won’t cover your carry-on fee.
Spirit Airlines Celebrates the 99.99 Percent [Spirit Airlines]
Spirit Airlines Sees All Those Passenger Complaints as Mere Misunderstandings [Bloomberg Businessweek]
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, company chair Leonard Riggio discussed the future of the media-selling business and the current format of Barnes & Noble stores. Oh, and also a frequent topic of complaint for Consumerist readers: the company’s refusal to price-match its own website, even when not doing so costs them sales.
It’s not that the company doesn’t want to price-match, explains Riggio: it’s that they can’t, and it’s all your fault for doing research on the item that you wanted to buy. The only solution that experts at Barnes & Noble have been able to figure out? Sell exclusive items that no one online carries, which isn’t possible for a bookstore. “There are a certain number of customers who say who has the best price? They’ll come into the retail store itself with their phones and hit the button…” he told the WSJ. “The more you sell products that are branded outside of the store, that aren’t exclusive to the store, the harder it is.”
As for littler stores, Riggio agrees that comparatively tiny stores, 15,000 square feet or less, could be in the chain’s future. “The level of digital convergence from books to digital has decelerated,” he pointed out in a hopeful manner.
Riggio displayed less optimism when, a few weeks after the paper conducted this interview, he sold off $64 million worth of his stock, about 10% of the company.
Smaller Barnes & Noble Stores? ‘Yes, It’s Possible,’ Says Leonard Riggio [Wall Street Journal]
According to the South Jersey Times, the plaintiff attempted to use the MVC’s website to obtain a personalized plate that reads “8theist,” but her request was allegedly rejected for being objectionable.
However, claims the woman, when she tried “Baptist” on the MVC site, she says it was not flagged by the system.
“There is nothing offensive about being atheist,” she tells the Times. “I should be able to express my sincerely held beliefs with a license plate just like everyone else.”
The driver says her attempts to get an explanation from the MVC went without a response.
A rep for the MVC tells the Times that each plate request is reviewed on an individual basis. Without commenting on this specific plate, the rep says the MVC as an organization has “no objection and [we] continue to issue plates” that express an atheistic position.
However, just last year another NJ driver was initially unable to receive the “athe1st” plate he’d requested from the MVC after a clerk there deemed it offensive. Ultimately, after appealing to the commission, that driver was able to get the plate he wanted, but the plaintiff in the newer case sees this as evidence of a systemic problem at the MVC.
“The commission thus has a practice of denying personalized license plates that identify vehicle owners as atheists,” reads the complaint, “thereby discriminating against atheist viewpoints and expressing a preference for theism over non-theism.”
In January, Michaels, a large arts and crafts chain, warned customers that the company “may have experienced a data security attack.” On Friday, the company announced that sometime between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014 about 2.6 million or 7% of payment cards used at its stores were compromised.
Additionally, nearly 400,000 cards were affected at 54 Aaron Brothers stores, a subsidiary of the company, from June 26, 2013 to February 27, 2014.
While officials say the affected systems contained payment card numbers and expiration dates, there is no evidence that data such as customers’ names or personal identification numbers were at risk.
“After weeks of analysis, we have discovered evidence confirming that systems of Michaels stores in the United States and our subsidiary, Aaron Brothers, were attacked by criminals using highly sophisticated malware that had not been encountered previously by either of the security firms,” Michaels CEO Chuck Rubin says in a statement to customers on the company’s website. “We want you to know we have identified and fully contained the incident, and we can assure you the malware no longer presents a threat to customers while shopping at Michaels or Aaron Brothers.”
Michaels claims that there are only a limited number of fraud incidents have been reported, but the company is offering 12 months of free identity protection and credit monitoring services, as well as 12 months of free fraud assistance to affected customers in the United States.
Customers are encouraged to continue to monitor their payment activity and immediately contact their banks if any suspicious activity is found. The company continues to work with law enforcement authorities, banks and payment processors to investigate the breach.
“We are truly sorry and deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause,” Rubin says in the statement. “Our customers are always our number one priority and we are committed to retaining your trust and loyalty.”
The company first announced the possibility of an attack just weeks after the massive Target data breach that hit approximately 110 million consumers during the holiday season.
Following a string of data hacks, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outlined a number of ways consumers can protect themselves and where to get help if they suspect their information has been compromised.
Shortly after the data breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels were announced the conversation turned to what new technology could help prevent such attacks in the future. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February, senators discussed the possibility of “smart” chip cards.
The EMV (short for “Europay, Mastercard and Visa”) cards tiny chips embedded in them that encrypt the card’s information. Already in use in Europe, the chips cut back on card fraud because their existence makes cards significantly harder to clone: even if you get all of the information from a card’s magnetic strip, as through a skimmer, without the chip actually being present the card data is useless in a physical transaction.
Officials with Visa and MasterCard announced they hope to end traditional sign-and-swipe credit card transitions and switch to the chip-and-PIN system by 2015. In March, the companies formed an industry group to address payment security issues specifically the adoption of EMV technology.
Important Notice About Certain Customer Payment Card Information [Michaels]
(Chauncer)
Volkswagen is recalling 26,452 vehicles because of an issue that could result in a fire, Detroit News reports.
The recall affects the model year 2014 Jetta, Beetle Convertible, and Passat with a 1.8T engine and torque converter automatic transmission.
The company tells the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a notice [PDF] that O-ring seals between the oil cooler and the transmission my leak fluid, which could cause a fire when it comes into contact with a hot surface. Officials with Volkswagen say they are unaware of any crashes or fires related to the issue.
The issue was first observed in March at a Port facility during routine vehicle inspection. From there the company initiated an investigation and checks at dealerships. A stop-sale of affected vehicles was initiated on April 8.
Volkswagen will notify owners, and dealerships will replace the O-ring seals in the transmission oil cooler, free of charge, the company says.
VW recalls 26,000 ’14 cars for fire risks [The Detroit News]
The Reese’s seasonal peanut butter cup empire is now a year-round operation with hearts, pumpkins, and even footballs, but it all began with the humble peanut butter egg. What you might not know is that you can make this confection in your very own home, with ingredients that aren’t very hard to find.
Foodbeast has the recipe: the only ingredients you probably don’t have in your house right now are the chocolate coating and powdered peanut butter.
Thanks to the quirks of our food system, this project probably won’t be cheaper than buying a big bag of peanut butter eggs at the store, but it would be a fun project and you could use any fancy chocolate that interests you and might melt to the right consistency.
Plus, you can cake a page out of the Reese’s (cook)book and make them in any shape you want.
How to Make DIY Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs [Foodbeast]
The stalking capabilities associated with Facebook just increased. The social network has always allowed your friends to follow your every move – where you ate last night and who you’ve been photographed with last week. But with a new update, Facebook is taking friend stalking to an entirely new level.
Facebook’s Nearby Friends feature, which is currently being tested by the company’s employees, allows users to see which of their friends are close by, Mashable reports.
Much like the iPhone’s Find My Friends program, Nearby Friends uses geolocation technology in a users’ smartphone to determine which Facebook friends are close by to send notifications.
“The mission of Facebook is to connect people, to bring people together,” Andrea Vaccari, the product manager for the new feature, tells Mashable. “Nearby Friends sort of pushes that forward by making it a little easier to find new opportunities to meet your friends while you’re out and about.”
Using the new feature is fairly simple. Consumers can opt-in to the program, and then select a group of friends to share their location. The information will not be shared with the public or friends of friends on the network. Mobile users who choose to opt-out of the program will not have their locations shared.
The program will only share a friends’ general location such as “Bob is two miles away”. However, users can choose to share their exact location with a specific friend for an indefinite amount of time.
Users of the program can manually switch it off at any time and delete their data from the servers at anytime, officials with Facebook say.
Nearby Friends is the product of Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Glancee, which was building similar technology.
Take Our PollFacebook Launches ‘Nearby Friends’ Location Feature for Meet-Ups IRL [Mashable]
Police: Assault Arrest After Woman Punched in Face on Manassas Sidewalk Patch.com Victim was walking by a fight when man allegedly punched her, according to Manassas City Police. Posted by Greg Hambrick (Editor) , April 16, 2014 at 06:09 PM. Comment3 0. More. Repost; Print this page · Email; Flag as inappropriate ... |
