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I don't know about you, but I'm through with winter. The cold. The snow. The slush. It takes a toll. Especially on car windshields. Here's a few tips to keep your windshields clear and your wipers in good working order this winter.

Stuck wipers: If you park on the street like I do, you're well acquainted with what this weather can do to your windshield wipers. A light snowfall, ice or sleet can cause your wipers to stick to the glass. Try and turn on your wipers, and you could damage the blades or—if they're really stuck— even burn out the wiper motor. 

Solution: This one's easy: When you park your car, lift the wiper arms away from the windshield so that they're standing upright. Not only will you eliminate the risk of them sticking to the glass, they'll also be out of the way should you need to sweep snow or ice off the windshield.

Snowy or icy windows: Whatever you do, DON'T try pouring warm or hot water on your windshield to melt the snow or ice—the extreme contrast in temperatures could crack your windshield. Don't whack at the accumulation, either; you could damage the glass.

Solution: A good old-fashioned ice scrape works best, but what if you don't have one? Use a kitchen spatula, preferably plastic. It'll do the same job as the ice scraper.

A dirty windshield: Snow, sleet and road-salt residue can splash on your windshield while driving, making for a smeary, sloppy mess that's hard to see through. And if your wipers are old, worn or damaged, they may make matters worse by smearing the gunk all over, further reducing visibility.

Solution: Check your wiper blades regularly to make sure they're in good condition, and replace them every six months. And use windshield washer fluid that contains a de-icing agent. It's less likely to freeze, which could clog the fluid jets or cause frost to form on the glass, reducing visibility. Windshield wiper fluid with de-icer is typically yellow or orange, not blue, so look carefully and read labels before buying.

Amazon gets big attention for eye-popping experiments such as delivery by drone and “anticipatory shipping,” a process they’ve just patented where they will package stuff you haven’t ordered yet—but are likely to—and ship it closer to you, so it’s ready when you do order. But another, less publicized innovation of theirs is also worth noting—and shopping. Next time you want to order from Amazon, start at smile.amazon.com.

What it is

A way to give to charity every time you shop at Amazon. You shop the same way you always do, and your Prime account still works—but the big difference is that Amazon will donate money for every dollar you spend. The donation is a small-sounding 0.5 percent, but imagine how that adds up. 

How it works

Go to smile.amazon.com and choose your favorite cause from its deep list, or add your own. Shop as usual. That’s it! There are some restrictions on eligible purchases, but the site's FAQs say that “tens of millions” of products are eligible. And you won’t get a tax deduction, so you’re doing this just for the good of it. Want to spread the wealth? You can change your charity at any time.

Have you found other ways to do good while you shop? We’d love to hear about them! Happy shopping!

Dropping your phone and cracking the screen can completely ruin your day. While most handsets aren't built to be repaired, with the right tools and a little know-how, you can fix many problems with your handset for cheaper than an insurance claim.

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We all know that we need to spend our money wisely. What may be difficult to keep in mind is that every dollar spent is yet another piece of our future we lay.

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We all know the feeling after booking a flight to the beach or downing second glass of post-raise celebratory champagne—we're ready to spend. Opportunities like this are around every corner. But tempting situations, whether a friend brandishing a weekend getaway or a store window showcasing the tablet of your dreams, don't have to be a bad thing for your money. Instead, we can choose to see them as opportunities to make good spending decisions instead.

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When the lights go out or there's a natural disaster and you need to fend for yourself, proper preparation is key. Even better is knowing how to make use of the common items you may find in your home, or wherever you go. Channel your inner Macgyver and pick up a few tips from this graphic.

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App reviews at Google Play and the iTunes App Store are pretty broken. They can be helpful, but you have to sift through the tech support rants, device-specific complaints, and half-legible reviews first to find something useful. There are better ways to tell if an app is any good.

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You're halfway through blowing the leaves off your lawn or edging your driveway when everything stops and you realize you've pulled your extension cord out of the socket at the other end. Save yourself the 50 yard walk back to plug it in and some wear and tear on the plug with this simple hack.

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One of my family's favorite ways to save money on groceries is to stock up when we find a great sale. For instance, when our favorite spaghetti sauce went on sale for $1 a jar, we bought 30 of them. This ensures that we won't be buying much sauce at full price, saving a good .38 to .50 cents a jar on something our family of six uses lots of. But then we've got another problem: where do we put 30 jars of spaghetti sauce?

This post originally appeared on Three Thrifty Guys.

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Kitchen space is always at a premium, and that space under your cabinets is probably being wasted. The Family Handyman has a great guide to building custom toe-kick drawers for some extra storage along the floor.

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If your finger's a bit swollen and you can't get your wedding band off, this hospital trick might be just the ticket. All you need is an elastic band.

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Unless you fill your trunk, storing things there usually means a fair bit of sliding around while you drive. Some cars come with nets or other rigs that can be useful when you have a few bags of groceries, but not really when you're carrying boxes. These DIY cargo blocks offer a simple solution.

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- The owner of a private zoo in central Poland said Tuesday he feels three times lucky with the birth of white lion triplets who are getting loving care from their mother.

- A former Southern California educator was jailed on felony charges that could send her to prison for life after a former female student accused her of sexual abuse in a YouTube video that's gained nearly a million views and prompted another girl to come forward.

- Could too much sugar be deadly? The biggest study of its kind suggests the answer is yes, at least when it comes to fatal heart problems.

- Four national Native American organizations on Monday asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the treatment of American Indian and Alaska Native children in the private adoption and public child welfare systems, saying civil rights violations there are "well-known and commonplace."

Some drivers, however, have found a way to cheat the system: fake disability parking placards, council member Jim Graham says.

You could go grocery shopping with a stack of coupons and build a pantry stockpile, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. One man who enjoys couponing is applying his skills to stock the pantry of an entire community, supplying a facility where families can pick up essentials when they’re struggling.

The facility called the Care Cabin, a building on the elementary school campus stocked with food and household goods. It began because a huge number of children in this school are from households without a stable address, and more than half qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.

Yes, the products promoted with coupons are often unhealthy and pricey, but judicious couponing can also yield cheap laundry detergent and canned staples.

These are the products that line the shelves of the Care Cabin, where students, parents,

The “Coupon Guy” of Casselberry, Florida spends about $2,000 of his own money every year to stock the Care Cabin. Through his couponing hobby, that money yields him food and household items with a retail value of about $10,000.

Casselberry coupon guru helps pay it forward with donations [WFTV] (Thanks, catastrophegirl!)

The ghost of pink goop is still haunting McDonald’s. The chain’s Canadian arm is seeking to dispel the idea that a machine pumps out tubes of pink stuff to fill your chicken McNuggets, with a new video showing how the chicken bits are made. So far as we can see, there’s no pink stuff. At least, not on camera.

Back in 2010 the fast food world was rocked and shocked by the image of what looked like pink soft serve gushing from a tube into a cardboard box, purportedly on its way to filling McDonald’s McNuggets. Mickey D’s has denied that the image had anything to do with its food, and is now trying to set the record straight for good with a new video showing how they’re actually made.

In the video filmed inside one of the chain’s nugget factories at Cargill in London, Ontario, workers show the start-to-finish process of making McNuggets, from chicken de-boning to meat shredding to the mix of seasoning and chicken skin.

“We don’t know what it is, or where it came from, but it has nothing to do with our chicken McNuggets,” says the supply chain manager for McDonald’s Canada in the video, showing the photo of the villainous pink goop.

Then it’s on to the nugget shaping machine which cuts the mixture into the bell, the ball, the boot and the bow tie, before they’re battered and partially fried, then bagged and frozen for shipping to McDonald’s restaurants.

When someone approaches you with a deal that seems irresistible, sometimes there’s a good reason why. For example, the person offering you a truckload of televisions for $900 each when they retail for $3,000 may not be a legitimate representative of the electronics department at Sears.

It’s hard to see logic through a filter of greed, though. The man who bought the TVs in Nashua, New Hampshire saw a great business opportunity and planned to resell them.

Police say that the alleged fake salesman had called him up, offering a great deal on a “tax-free” TV sale. The customer decided that he would take ten of the deeply discounted televisions, because why question such a great deal? He could turn around and resell them.

The two men met up at the local Sears, where the fake salesman wore a Sears name badge and collected the $9,000 in cash in exchange for a legitimate-looking receipt. Then he disappeared.

The fake Sears salesman has been charged with theft by deception, a felony.

Police: Man posing as store employee tricks victim out of $9,000 [Nashua Telegraph]

Reader C. visited the post office recently, and what he saw upset him. The good news was that his post office was doing brisk business. It was early in the morning still, but it received a lot of packages. The bad news was that these packages were piled on the floor in the lobby.

“[A]pparently the back area was so jammed with already-mailed packages that there wasn’t any more room to send them through to the other side,” he complained to Consumerist. Photos? Of course he took photos.

Isn’t that good news? Hurray, people supporting the postal service! Hurray, a busy local government entity! Yes, but there’s a problem with this workflow, too. “Any joker could simply walk in and walk out with several armloads of packages,” notes C. “and no one would ever know what happened! Hell, I could have done it if I’d wanted to.”

C. told the people behind the counter about his package-related concerns. He also contacted his local postmaster, but didn’t hear anything back. We passed his photos and story on to representatives of the U.S. Postal Service, but we didn’t hear anything back either. It could be that this is just how they’re dealing with an era when they have to cut back on staffing levels, but computer-addicted customers keep buying and selling stuff online and printing their own postage at home. Or maybe C. caught them on an off day.

People talk about the death of shopping malls in America, but it may be death that is breathing new life into some of these retail relics.

The AP reports that Forest Lawn, the operators of several cemeteries and mortuaries in Southern California, has spent the last two years selling its services via a number of in-mall kiosks in the area. And it’s only one of the funeral home chains turning toward more traditional retail locations to do business.

“We try to reach our audience where they are at and the mall is a great way to do that,” a rep for the company tells the AP. “And it’s also, perhaps, a way to reach people who might be a little leery about coming directly into one of our parks.”

That may not be such a bad move. Sure, there are plenty of funeral and burial plans that can be arranged well in advance, but there is just something grim about visiting a funeral home or a cemetery for shopping purposes.

“Funeral planning is something everybody knows they must do, but at the same time it’s something nobody wants to do,” explains the executive director of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. “Nobody gets up on a Saturday morning and says, ‘Gee, it’s a nice day. I wonder if I can go out and get myself a burial plot.’”

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With traditional banking institutions finally out of the payday lending game, who’s left to swoop in to take care of the unbanked? Apparently, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) thinks the United States Postal Service has what it takes.

In an op-ed on the Huffington Post Sunday, Warren endorsed the idea that the USPS could use its infrastructure to extend basic banking needs, such as debit cards and small-dollar loans, to those who are ignored by the banking industry, ThinkProgress reports.

“With post offices and postal workers already on the ground, USPS could partner with banks to make a critical difference for millions of Americans who don’t have basic banking services because there are almost no banks or bank branches in their neighborhoods,” she wrote.

Last week, the Postal Service Office of the Inspector General issued a white paper suggesting the USPS could make nearly $9 billion by partnering with banks to offer financial services to those Americans who are unbanked or under-banked.

In an interview with Consumerist last week, Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Ruth Goldway echoed the report’s findings saying post offices would be an excellent resource for providing safe, secure access to basic financial services.

Providing payday loan-like services would be one of the cornerstones of the Postal Service’s financial plan and could potentially save Americans hundred of millions of dollars each year, the USPS report says.

The USPS would offer small-dollar loans with low-interest rates. As an example, the report compares a traditional $375 payday loan to a “postal loan” of the same amount. The traditional loan has a 391% interest rate, adding up to $520 in fees, while the “postal loan” would come with a mere 28% APR and $48 in fees.

For the financial services dreams of the USPS to come true, they would have to find banks to partner with. And while banks are promising to find alternatives to their shuttered small-dollar, high-interest payday loan-like services, they are also facing tougher requirements by federal regulators.

More stringent regulations are the reason Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Regions Bank, Bank of Oklahoma and its affiliates and Guaranty Bank discontinued their deposit advance programs last month.

After the banks announced the discontinuation of deposit advance programs the National Consumer Law Center urged them to follow certain criteria, including capping the annual percentage rate at no more than 36%, when considering new small loan programs for consumers.

Elizabeth Warren Proposes Replacing Payday Lenders With The Post Office [ThinkProgress]

When you see a co-worker pass around the inevitable Girl Scout cookie order form and grumble about how you had to do door-to-door sales back when you were a kid, keep this story in mind. A family alleges that a Girl Scout selling cookies in a California neighborhood had a gun pulled on her by a potential customer.

The girl’s father accompanied her on her sales call, and phoned police. The neighbor was taken into custody and his weapon seized.

For the sake of the girls and the cookies, we hope that this isn’t a sign that we’re about to see a repeat of the Girl Scout Cookie Crime Wave of 2013.

Man Allegedly Pulls Gun On Girl Scout Selling Cookies [CBS Chicago]

If you’re going to fire hundreds of employees, at least have the guts to do so individually. After years of dedicated, time-consuming work, hundreds of online media employees were let go during a series of conference calls last week; taking “it’s nothing personal” to an entirely new level.

On Wednesday, hundreds of Patch editors were laid off during what can only be described as an impersonal rehearsed conference call. The lay-offs leave only a few hundred employees to maintain more than 900 hyper-local sites, the New York Times reports.

With hundreds of employees across the country, maybe it’s safe to assume the higher-ups at Patch just wanted to get the bad news over with so they used a conference call? But still, such an informal “thanks for your work, but you’re no longer needed” message has to sting.

Still, the cold touch and complete disregard to the editors and advertising sales representatives is alarming. Although, maybe not totally unexpected. Remember when CEO Tim Armstrong fired an employee during an all-company call last year?

Media blogger Jim Romenesko posted a transcript and recording of the conference call on his site.

Patch Chief Operations Officer, Leigh Zarelli Lewis provided the straight-forward firing to employees:

“Patch is being restructured in connection with the creation of a joint venture with Hale Global. Hale Global has decided which Patch employees will receive an offer of employment to move forward in accordance with their vision for Patch and which will not. Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at Patch and today will be your last day of employment with the company.”

The news of lay-offs, billed as a reorganization, came just weeks after the company was sold to Hale Global. It remains to be seen what exactly Hale has in store for the remnants of Patch.

Wednesday’s cuts come after another significant round of lay-offs in August. However, many of those employees were allowed to stay on with the company until October.

The hyper-local news organization was once a shining star for AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. Armstrong helped to create Patch and later assisted in its purchase by AOL in 2009.

In December, Armstrong seemed optimistic on the future of Patch, saying the company had more digital traffic than many traditional media players.

Still, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars, Patch’s time was clearly running out this last December. After making a pledge to AOL investors that Patch would be profitable by the end of 2013, Armstrong was forced to go back on this promise and the majority stake of the company was sold to Hale Global.

Listen when Patch lays off hundreds of employees on a conference call [SFGate]

Cable lobbyists seem to be buckling under the pressure of consumer unrest in Kansas. Last week, the Kansas Cable Telecommunications Association announced a protectionist bill that would all but squash some city’s hopes of getting improved broadband service.

On Monday, the KCTA, whose members include Cox, Time Warner Cable, and Eagle Communications, said they would “tweak” the bill’s language to make it less restrictive, Ars Technia reports.

While it wasn’t specified how the language would be tweaked, officials with the board maintain the bill was created with the protection of consumers in mind.

KCTA president John Federico told Ars Technica the board stands firm on their belief that municipalities should not use taxpayer dollars to directly compete with private telecom providers.

Under the bill’s (PDF) current language, cities and towns may not provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications, or broadband service, with the exception of unserved areas. The bill goes on to define unserved as an area where 90% of the households lack access to broadband service.

The bill also garnered attention for its restrictions on public-private partnerships, that could prevent future broadband programs, similar to Google Fiber, from operating in the state. Kansas City is home to the country’s first Google Fiber municipal network, which is in direct competition with Time Warner Cable in the area.

Federico denied the bill had anything to do with Google entering the telecommunications fray in Kansas City.

Kansas City laid out significant incentives for Google to come hook up their city to a speedy, reliable network. Existing broadband providers like Time Warner Cable did not particularly appreciate Google’s receiving those incentives. Cable companies in general are not exactly fans of municipal networks. And yet the added competition among broadband carriers, or even the specter of it, works out well for consumers.

The bill was scheduled for discussion Tuesday, but KCTA members said they would ask for a postponement.

Other states have attempted similar legislation in recent years; a bill barring municipal broadband in Georgia failed to pass in 2013.

Cable lobby will “tweak” bill banning municipal broadband in Kansas [Ars Technica]

Major credit card hacks: they’re not just for big box retailers or upscale department stores anymore. The newest place your credit card info is being stolen from? Hotels.

You’ve probably never heard of the White Lodging Services Corporation, but you very well may have stayed in one of their hotels. Hotel chains have franchises, just like fast food restaurants, and White Lodging operates approximately 170 various hotels all over the country, including some Sheraton, Hyatt, Hilton, Westin, and Marriott locations.

The data breach appears to have taken place over the vast majority of 2013, as security expert Brian Krebs reports. Investigators working through a pattern of credit card fraud found that what the cards all had in common was a stay at a White Lodging hotel between March 23, 2013 and the end of the year.

The affected cards seem mostly to have been used not for room reservations, but for other uses–particularly restaurants and gift shops–inside the affected hotel locations, Krebs reports:

Sources say the breach appears to have affected mainly restaurants, gift shops and other establishments within hotels managed by White Lodging — not the property management systems that run the hotel front desk computers which handle guests checking in and out. In the case of Marriott, for example, all Marriott establishments operated as a franchise must use Marriott’s property management system. As a result, the breach impacted only those Marriott guests who used their cards at White Lodging-managed gift shops and restaurants.

Marriott told Krebs that White Lodging is, “in the midst of the investigation and are in close contact with the banks and credit cards companies. We are working closely with the franchisee as they investigate the matter.”

If you stayed in a hotel in 2013, or ate at a restaurant in one, it’s worth checking to see if it was a White Lodging property, just in case.

And as we keep seeing again and again, if you’ve used a credit or debit card pretty much anywhere, you should be aware of breaches and take steps to protect yourself. A need for vigilance is the downside of convenience, these days.

Hotel Franchise Firm White Lodging Investigates Breach [Krebs On Security]

“Whatever you are passionate about, Time Warner Cable invents ways for you to enjoy it even better,” Time Warner Cable declares in commercials that run for its subscribers. Unless you’re passionate about professional football, live near Los Angeles and you’re a Time Warner customer still using a standard-definition TV. Then you had to scramble for an antenna during the second quarter of the game. [LA Times]