pileofcrapola

Got a hot date tonight? If you really want to make an impression, then hit the gym before that and use Greatist's "ultimate pre-date workout".

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You don't need a clip to seal an opened bag of chips, and a pack of cookies is no different if you follow CrazyRussianHacker's simple folding method demonstrated in the video above. It's best seen than read about, but here's a short description if you can't be bothered to hit Play.

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While baking powder comes with an expiration date of roughly 18 months on the box, most bakers like Sally advise tossing out an opened pack after six months or checking if it's still good to be used. And here's the simple test to do it.

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It's easy to make your own hand sanitizer, but what if you want an alcohol-free, all-natural version? With a few common essential oils, you can easily make a homemade one for yourself, as noted by Dr. Lawrence Rosen at MindBodyGreen.

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Studies have shown that physical clutter can lead to stress and affect your thinking. And even when you are decluttering your house, there are some items that you think you should keep for later. The Simple Dollar's Trent suggests a neat trick: put an expiration date on them.

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Teaching your kids early to work within a budget pays off big for them down the road. Even when very young, kids are ready for the basic idea and as they get older, including them in your own budget planning helps them develop good habits from the start.

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Every day, we share our favorite tips, tricks, and downloads here on Lifehacker, but the fun doesn't stop there! We also have a few sub-blogs dedicated to their own special subject matter that you should check out.

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Electric heating blankets aren't hard to find, but the heating element often makes them not very flexible and too small to really get comfortable in. This project, from Instructables user Shenzen, uses carbon fiber heating elements to stay warm, flexible, big enough to curl up in comfortably, and safe.

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Grocery stores have lots of tricks to get you to spend more money, but one way to fight back is to go armed with a list—not just any list though, one organized by the layout of the store, so you know what to get, where to get it, and when to move on.

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Okay, okay. The title might be drawing a line in the sand that doesn't exist. After all, what's that saying… "never say never"? But when it comes to finances, sometimes making the long term commitment to shy away from certain purchases can help you avoid expenses that are regularly digging into your savings.

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In the past, Gmail has attempted to make it easy to unsubscribe from email mailing lists, but the option has been buried under spam reporting (which may not always be what you want to do). Now, though, you can unsubscribe to many lists with a single click.

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Every time you rent an apartment, you learn something new that you did wrong the time before. There are many types of landlords, maintenance people, problems, and laws that can throw you for a loop. While you can't prepare yourself for everything ahead of time, there are quite a few things I wish I knew before getting my first apartment.

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A Long Island man wanted only one thing for his 96th birthday celebration: a German apple ring cake from grocer King Kullen. Sounds festive and delicious. When the family cut into it during his party, though, they found something extra mixed in. Nope, not extra apple filling or a bonus cinnamon swirl. (Warning: there are photos after the jump.)

The birthday guest of honor knew exactly what this cake should taste like, and he said that the taste was off. He got the first slice at his birthday party on Thursday, and complained about the flavor. “He’s had all their cake. He loves their cake. It has to be King Kullen,” the man’s nephew told WABC news.

It was a gross-looking gray mass that they thought could be mold. Then they saw what was plainly a rat’s tail. After they stopped screaming, they took the cake to an attorney.

“I personally am of the opinion that this cake was tampered with,” the attorney told reporters.

Grocer King Kullen, for their part, claims that the store in question has no sanitary or rat problems, and they don’t make a habit of including rodent filling in their bakery items. They claim that they’ve never had an issue with rat-filled pastry in 30 years of running a bakery inside their stores.

The family’s attorney plans to send the cake for testing by state officials. We anxiously await updates to this story.

Family says rat found in birthday cake [WABC]

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Loaf Of Bread Comes With Baked-In Rodent Goodness

As we mentioned last week, if regulators approve the pending marriage of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, it would put pressure on the nation’s two largest satellite operators to combine in order to compete. And while Dish CEO Charlie Ergen isn’t talking about a tie-up with DirecTV just yet, he is pointing out that it would be hypocritical for the Comcast deal to be approved and a satellite merger to be denied.

“If you take the No. 1 and No. 4 [pay TV] providers and put them together, it’s hard to see why you can’t put No.2 and No. 3 together,” explained Ergen in a recent conference call to discuss quarterly earnings.

There was a previous attempt to combine Dish and DirecTV. In 2002, EchoStar (from which Dish was spun off in 2008) tried to merge with DirecTV, but that deal was scuttled when the FCC voiced concerns about one company having so much control over the pay TV market for the parts of rural America underserved by cable operators.

With regard to the Comcast/TWC merger, Ergen says “Nothing I can see is positive about this. If you are a pay TV provider and your name is not Comcast or Time Warner Cable, I don’t see anything positive.”

Dish Chief Says Comcast/TWC Deal ‘Puts Pressure On Everybody’ [MultiChannel News]

[via DSLreports]

You can take away an advertising slogan, but you can never take my milk mustache indicating that I do, indeed, have milk. The Milk Processor Education Program is dropping its 29-year-old tagline “Got Milk?” in favor of a new one to highlight how nutritional the stuff is. Only the California group is keeping the slogan instead of switching to “Milk Life.”

The national dairy milk industry is facing stiff competition from non-dairy products like soy, rice and almond milk, and as such decided it was time to introduce a new national campaign.

Got Milk? was first used by the California Milk Processor Board in 1993, which then licensed the use of the phrase to the national group in 1995. That group will still use the tagline.

The problem is people don’t seem to be drinking much milk anymore, and while the old tagline was popular,focus now is on things like the protein content of milk as it tries to compete with other beverages, notes Advertising Age.

For example, one TV ad shows milk powering athletic endeavors like running, playing basketball or rocking out during a concert onstage.

A print ad of a girl with an electric guitar reads: “What 8 grams of protein looks like when you unleash your inner rock star.”

Protein is “really in the news and on consumer’s minds,” said Julia Kadison, interim CEO of MilkPEP. “But a lot of people don’t know that milk has protein, so it was very important to make that connection between milk and protein.”

And now no one will ever ask if I have milk again. Feels a little sad.

‘Got Milk’ Dropped as National Milk Industry Changes Tactics [Advertising Age]

- The father grimaced and wept as he struggled to contain his grief at the death of his two children in a grenade attack during a weekend trip to a mall in downtown Bangkok -- the latest casualties in Thailand's months of political crisis.

- How's this for gall? Take away hundreds of dollars in subsidies that cellphone customers have enjoyed for years. Then pass it off as an improvement.

NBC4 Washington

Prince William County community calendar, Feb. 23 to March 1 Washington Post Sunday, Feb. 23. “Operation Urgent Fury: Invasion of Grenada,” photographs and artifacts chronicling the invasion of Grenada. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, National Museum of the Marine Corps, 18900 Jefferson Davis Hwy., Triangle. Free. 877-635-1775. Bird walk ... Park Police helicopter ice rescueWJLA Man, two dogs rescued from Lake ManassasW*USA 9 all 18 news articles »

NBC4 Washington

Man, two dogs rescued from Lake Manassas W*USA 9 GAINESVILLE, Va. (WUSA9) -- An elderly man and two dogs were rescued from Lake Manassas in Gainesville, Va. on Sunday afternoon, according to United States Park Police. Prince William County Fire and Rescue Department officials contacted USPP for ... Police helicopter rescues man, dogs from Va. lakeThe Virginian-Pilot all 8 news articles »

Popular soccer camp returns to Bristow Inside NoVA Chip Rohr Soccer Summer Camps return for a 36th year at the Linton Hall School in Bristow. These day camps are designed for recreational and competitive-level players from ages 6 to 13. While the camps teach fundamental skills and the refinement of ...

- A 65-mile stretch of the Mississippi River, including the Port of New Orleans, was closed to all water traffic Sunday as crews cleaned up oil that spilled from a barge after it ran into a towboat between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Coast Guard said.

- With California's agricultural heartland entrenched in drought, almond farmers are letting orchards dry up and in some cases making the tough call to have their trees torn out of the ground, leaving behind empty fields.

- A Delaware company has recalled 16 varieties of cheese after some of the cheeses were linked to a death in California and illnesses in newborns.

A man and two dogs are safe after a dangerous ice rescue in Prince William County Sunday.

This 9-week-old puppy arrived at WARL from down South with several littermates.

- Wildlife officials are investigating the death of a 30-foot-long whale found shallow water near an island in the Chesapeake Bay at the Maryland-Virginia border.

License plate numbers are collected from cameras and mounted on police cars but the information is kept for six-months or indefinitely, especially in Northern Virginia.

For the last several months, Comcast Internet customers have complained about a drop in quality of the Netflix streams being delivered to their homes, and Netflix’s own data showed a massive decline in connection speeds starting in October. But today, the two companies announced they have reached a “mutually beneficial” agreement that will hopefully turn that trend around.

Much like Netflix’s ongoing standoff with Verizon FiOS, the drop in speeds wasn’t an issue of the ISP throttling or blocking service to Netflix. Rather, the ISPs were allowing for Netflix traffic to bottleneck at what’s known as “peering ports,” the connection between Netflix’s bandwidth provider and the ISPs.

Until recently, if peering ports became congested with downstream traffic, it was common practice for an ISP to temporarily open up new ports to maintain the flow of data. This was not a business arrangement; just something that had been done as a courtesy. ISPs would expect the bandwidth companies to do the same if there was a spike in upstream traffic. However, there is virtually no upstream traffic with Netflix, so the Comcasts and Verizons of the world claimed they were being taken advantage of.

Today’s announcement, which doesn’t specify any financial terms, says that Netflix and Comcast have “established a more direct connection between Netflix and Comcast.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix wanted to put servers inside of Comcast data centers, but the Kabletown folks balked at the idea. In the end, Comcast will connect to the streaming servers at data centers operated by third parties.

Comcast claims that the arrangement will not just alleviate the current Netflix logjam but will allow the streaming video company to continue growing. That’s a major concern with ultra-HD 4K TVs gradually making their way into U.S. homes. As these become more common, and 4K owners demand more streaming content, Netflix will need reliable, higher-speed connections to subscribers’ homes.

A LINE IN THE SAND
The question is what sort of precedent this Netflix/Comcast deal sets for the rest of the marketplace. By making this deal with the nation’s largest cable company (which is trying to become even larger with its plan to purchase Time Warner Cable), Netflix will likely need to reach a similar paid-peering arrangement with Verizon, TWC, and others.

If a company wants to get into the streaming video business, paid-peering would now have to be considered part of the price for entry into the marketplace. Which is another reason one should be concerned about the proposed Comcast/TWC merger. By combining the country’s two largest ISPs, you’d create a single entity that could effectively set all the standards and rates for paid-peering arrangements; if a company wants to reach the home audience, Comcast would determine how much it will cost.

NET NEUTRALITY?
As we’ve pointed out before, the issue of peering was not covered by the recently gutted net neutrality rules. Those guidelines only dealt with whether an ISP deliberately blocked/throttled or unfairly prioritized traffic to a website. The congestion at peering ports occurs further upstream and is a matter of capacity.

To use a foodservice analogy. Imagine a restaurant has an incredibly popular dish that everyone wants to order. The kitchen has no problem meeting that demand, but orders aren’t getting to diners’ tables in time.

If that slowdown is because the waiters decide customers shouldn’t get that particular menu item, or that there are other menu items that should be delivered in a more timely manner — that’s a net neutrality issue.

But if that awesome food is slow to the table because there simply aren’t enough waiters and no off-work waiters are willing to come in for a few hours to help out because it’s their night off — that’s a peering issue.

Even with the recent appeals court ruling that neutered net neutrality, Comcast is still required to abide by those guidelines through 2018 as part of the terms of its recent merger with NBC Universal.

Crime Reports: Car Window Busted While Victim Was Driving and Tire Stolen ... Patch.com On February 14th, 2014 Manassas City Police met with a resident on the 9700 block of Main St for a report of larceny. According to the reporting party, someone(s) broke into her work vehicle sometime between 6:00PM on February 13th and 6:20AM on ...

Prince William County and Stafford County home sales Washington Post Prince William County. These were among sales data provided to The Washington Post by Lender Processing Services. To find sale and assessment records for homes elsewhere in the Washington area, visit www.washingtonpost.com/homesales. BRISTOW ... and more »