Living on your own can be scary if you've never done it before. Add to that the stress of starting college and being far from home and you can see why this life hacker could use some advice—and maybe a little reassurance. If you've got advice to share, jump in and help out a fellow reader!
    
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Windows: Firefox is still a fantastic web browser, but it has gained a bit of bloat over the years. Light aims to alleviate this by stripping many components from the browser for a light (get it?) weight application.
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The filters in your oven vents may not be something you need to clean regularly, but when you do, it's a hassle. You can simplify the process with a little baking soda and water.
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If you've ever been confronted with an ingredient you want to use but have no idea what flavors pair well with it, Foodpairing is a webapp that can help. Just type in an ingredient you want to use, and it'll offer up a map of ingredients and dishes that compliment its flavor.
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It turns out, your school teacher was right. You need math on a regular basis. While most people won't typically have need of orthogonal trajectories, here are some of the most vital math shortcuts for your everyday life.
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Web: A dictionary tells you the meaning of a word. WordHippo tells you the meaning and also finds synonyms, antonyms, words that rhyme with it, sentences containing it, other words starting or ending with it, its etymology, and much more.
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A common problem at potluck buffets is finding space to keep what everyone has got, and arranging it in a convenient manner. If you are hosting or helping set up the buffet table, The Kitchn recommends using post-it notes to label spaces for items in advance.
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Strange and magical things come out of Frito-Lay Japan. Things that we in Frito-Lay’s home country never get to see. The latest bit of corporate synergy/snack food horror to hit shelves across the Pacific? Mountain Dew flavored Cheetos.
Your first question probably is, “How much caffeine do they have?” The answer: we don’t know. We also can’t answer your other inevitable question, “why?” We can, however, tell you what they taste like. Based on an on-the-scene report (tonguewitness report?) from the Redditor who shared this marvel with the world, Mountain Dew Cheetos taste like…lemon-lime chips. “While they’re not as gross as I expected, they certainly aren’t enjoyable,” says ever-helpful jumblebutt. It’s a pretty weird taste.”
Of course, chips based on sibling-company sodas are nothing new at Frito-Lay, part of Yum! Brands and sibling of PepsiCo. After all, this is the company that gave the world Pepsi Cheetos and bacon Doritos.
If you want to experience the strangeness for yourself, you can buy the Cheetos yourself from importers like JBOX. If you’ve tried them, report back to us.
Japan never fails to amaze me… Mountain Dew flavored corn chips. [Imgur] (via Brand Eating)
The eye in the sky is watching us all. If you have the app for that.
It always seems like there’s one of two scenarios at a store: Either you can’t find a retail associate to answer your questions or you feel like screaming “I AM JUST BROWSING!” to the three or four constantly hovering in your immediate vicinity. If that second scenario strikes fear into your heart, prepare your heart to be extra fearful with the expansion of new, in-store tracking technology that works through your phone’s apps.
A company called inMarket is rolling out a system it calls iBeacons to more than 200 grocery stores — including Safeway and Giant Eagle — in Seattle, San Francisco and Cleveland, reports TechCrunch.
Okay, great, beacons, shopping, got it. So what do these tiny Bluetooth enabled devices actually do at those stores?
In a nutshell, they track shoppers. Let’s say you’ve downloaded an app for a certain retailer and it has tools that will for example, remind you once you’ve stepped foot in the store that you made a grocery list. You walk through the doors and bing! Your grocery list pops up as a reminder not to forget something.
Other apps might send you alerts about store discounts, items that are on sale or ways you can chalk up loyalty points toward other purchases.
(I imagine standing near the deodorant display and a message popping up reading, “Something smells ripe. Better stock up.”)
It all sounds very helpful, but the trade-off is that while you’re roaming the store, these iBeacons are tracking you, ostensibly to collect data about your shopping habits as well as send you helpful tidbits. They can pinpoint you to within a few feet of your smartphone, making marketing to you pretty darn effective. And as for that info they’ve collected, it’s likely that you won’t be totally aware of what it’s being used for in the future.
On the one hand, if you’ve already agreed to this kind of marketing/service when you download an app, it’s great to get the alerts when you’re actually in the store or near something you want to buy, instead of when you’re simply walking past it on the street and don’t want to be annoyed just because you’re nearby.
But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like your every move watched no matter where you turn in a store, then you’ll probably want to keep an eye out for any app using iBeacon technology or something similar. Yet another reason to actually read those Terms of Service before you hit “Install.”
inMarket Rolls Out iBeacons To 200 Safeway, Giant Eagle Grocery Stores To Reach Shoppers When It Matters [TechCrunch]
Baby — may I call you baby? — it’s cold outside in many places across America right now. It’s not just you that needs to keep warm, either: If you don’t want your home’s pipes to shatter from the cold and leave you without water and with a hefty plumber’s bill, you’ll want to do a few things to help ward against icy water pipes.
Our benevolent overlords at Consumer Reports have covered this before and the advice still stands. It’s important to keep the ice that may form in your pipes from creating a bunch of water from bottling up in the blockage and putting huge pressure on the pipes, causing them to crack, spring leaks or straight out burst.
Especially if you live in the South, where homes aren’t always insulated from cold temperatures due to how buildings there are constructed, it’s important to make sure you take care of any exposed pipes.
First of all — how do you know if you have a frozen pipe? You can often tell if a faucet or appliance isn’t getting water. If you turn on your sink and the water isn’t flowing, a temporary solution is to allow the faucet to drip slowly. An ice blockage might already be in place, but this drip takes the pressure off and might keep that pipe from bursting.
Even if the slow drip stops, keep the faucet on to release pressure.
“You want the smallest drip rate that will provide pressure relief. A slow trickle is overkill; just make sure there is a consistent dripping,” Bill Rose, a research architect at the University of Illinois’ Building Research Center told Consumer Reports. “If you have a single-lever faucet setting, provide pressure relief to hot and cold pipes by leaving the setting in the middle so water can drip out from both the hot and cold water supply pipes.”
To help your pipes, the below tips should go a long way toward preventing a big chill:
1. Turn off water to outside spigots — and don’t leave hoses attached to them in the winter.
2. Insulate your pipes if you live anywhere north of the Rio Grande. So, basically everywhere. You can cover pipes with insulation or warm up pipes prone to freezing with electric heat tape.
“Often we think of putting insulation on the pipe to protect it from the freezing air on the outside; this does have an effect, but the water must be able to give off heat to become ice,” Rose says. “Insulation can delay this process and prevent ruptures.”
3. Don’t turn your heat off totally when you go on vacation — leave it at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a broad rule, Rose adds, and might not work in all homes. For example, a house with a basement is good to go, but not one with a crawlspace. Call your plumber for his or her advice before you leave town. It could be good to fully drain your system if you’ll be gone for a long time.
Buckyballs: cute office toy, or powerful balls of magnetic doom? The inventor insists they’re the former, the Consumer Product Safety Commission insists they’re the latter, and the lawsuit fighting it all out just keeps getting uglier.
The small rare-earth magnets have proved exceedingly dangerous to children: they’re a size that’s easy to swallow, and if two or more of them end up in a kid’s digestive tract, they can attract each other, stick together, and cause tremendous damage. In 2012 a CPSC spokesman described the injuries as “like a gunshot wound,” only without entry or exit.
Many retailers pulled the product after the CPSC filed a complaint against the manufacturer, Maxfield & Oberton. Usually when the CPSC says a product needs to be recalled, the manufacturer recalls the product.
Not in this case, though. As the Washington Post reports, the CPSC must obtain permission to file a lawsuit and the convince a judge that a product is defective in order to force a recall. And so sue the CPSC did.
The CPSC filed a lawsuit against Maxfield & Oberton in order to stop them from selling Buckyballs back in 2012. But then in December 2012, the founder, Craig Zucker, dissolved the business.
As the business is no longer in operation to be sued, the CPSC is now suing Zucker directly, as well as two other companies, Zen Magnets and Star Networks, that also make similar rare-earth magnets. If the CPSC lawsuit is successful, Zucker could be found personally responsible for refunding customers up to $57 million.
The case is the first time since 2003 that the CPSC has resorted to a lawsuit to initiate a recall, according to the Washington Post, and it’s even more uncommon for such an action to name an individual rather than a business.
In addition to the current lawsuit, the CPSC is now considering regulation that would limit the attractive force of small magnets.
Federal regulators suing Buckyballs founder in rare product-recall case [Washington Post]
Don’t pull a Cherie. Though at least she had clothes on. (YouTube)
Did people in Australia not watch Punky Brewster growing up? Because surely if one Aussie man had seen the episode where Cherie gets stuck in a refrigrator during hide-and-seek (spoiler alert: SHE ALMOST DIES!) he never would’ve climbed naked into a washing machine and expect any kind of positive result.
Again, appliances are not toys. If refrigerators or washing machines were meant to be used as nesting places for humans, they’d be called HideInMes or CrawlInHereAndEscapeEasilys. But they’re not, which is why it was not a good move for a naked man to hide in a top-loading washing machine to surprise his partner.
The BBC says emergency rescuers had to use olive oil as a lubricant to eventually free the man after 20 minutes of effort. So not only is it embarrassing enough to be naked in a washing machine and unable to free yourself, but firefighters, paramedics and search-and-rescue squad members were all there to witness it.
A police rep says “it was just a game gone wrong” and that “It would be fair to say the gentleman was very embarrassed.”
Another officer issued the kind of advice we’re fond of dispensing to our readers, just in case you get it into your head that appliances are some kind of adult playground equipment.
“My advice would be for people not to climb into appliances – obviously that [can] cause a number of issues, as we’ve seen on the weekend,” he explained.
Or at least bring your own olive oil. Kidding! Don’t do it at all, obviously. Cherie would agree.
Australia police free naked man stuck in washing machine [BBC News]
A Maryland woman wanted a lot of mayonnaise on her burger. A lot. “A f***ton of mayo,” she told the co-worker who would be placing the order. When her co-worker placed the order at the local Smashburger, they used those exact words. Apparently, the phrase was evocative enough that Smashburger used those exact words on the order ticket and the customer’s receipt. (Note: un-censored receipt appears after the cut, in case you’re in a place where bad words aren’t cool.)
“I wanted them to know I was serious. I didn’t want a little kid’s amount of mayo,” the woman who eventually ate the burger told local news site Bethesda Now. She found the amount of mayonnaise on her burger satisfactory, but they couldn’t fit it all on the actual burger: she received an additional to-go container of mayo on the side.
Smashburger Provides Customer With ‘F*** Ton Of Mayo’ [Bethesda Now]
(So Cal Metro)
AT&T unveiled Sponsored Data at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As it’s done in the past when discussing the possibility, the company likened Sponsored Data to 1-800 numbers or free shipping, wherein the business is willing to pick up a cost that would normally have been paid by the consumer.
According to the company, when a 4G subscriber (not a prepaid user) gets data from a company that is involved in the Sponsored Data program, that data is paid for by the business and would not be charged against the user’s monthly allotment.
So, in theory, if you have a 2 GB/month plan and you were to stream 250 MB of data from a Sponsored Data partner, those megabytes would not be subtracted from the 2 GB.
Users will know if the site or app they are using is part of the Sponsored Data program by an icon that appears on their phone.
“Customers just look for the Sponsored Data icon and they know the data related to that particular application or video is provided as a part of their monthly service,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility.
The first group of companies to be announced as partners in the Sponsored Data program are United Health Group, Kony (not to be confused with Sony or Joseph Kony) and Aquto.
AT&T is trying to preemptively quell net neutrality concerns by saying that Sponsored Data partners will not be treated any differently in terms of the speed or quality of data delivery.
However, one big concern about programs like this is that smaller businesses and start-ups may not be able to compete with companies that can afford to pay for customers’ data use.
Say, for example, that Amazon took part in this program (though I stress there is no indication of this happening; this is just a theoretical example) and paid for a portion of users’ streaming data. It has the money and resources to make that happen, whereas a smaller company may not. So when choosing between streaming video companies, a user may be tempted to go for the company that won’t ding his data allotment.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether true data hogs like Netflix or Amazon would even open the door to programs like this, so until there are more than a few Sponsored Data partners, it’s hard to say what impact it will have on the market.
(YouTube)
We’re sure delivery drivers have faced worse foes than a ticked off turkey but it seems his defensive moves aren’t particularly attuned to fowl.
The workers at a Minnesota hospital who filmed this slice of life make no bones about delightfully funny the whole thing is, as the driver attempts to shoo the bird with a bit of fabric before making a run for it on the far side of the FedEx truck.
There’s really not much else he can, after shouting promises that he won’t ever eat turkey ever again on Thanksgiving, of course. It’s unclear whether he tried that tack, but he does finally make it back into the safety of his own vehicle.
You may not have heard of either company, but one of them probably runs a death-care business somewhere near you. More likely SCI, which owns around 1,450 funeral homes, 374 cemeteries (including 213 combination funeral homes/cemeteries) and 100 crematories. They’re the parent company of Neptune Society. That was one of the hurdles for this merger, in fact: the FTC identified 59 markets where the union of the two companies would eliminate competition and be generally bad for consumers. All of the funeral homes in town might have different names, but if they have the same parent company, that means they can charge higher prices. A merger between two competitors might “substantially increase the risk of collusion between SCI and the few remaining competitors,” warns the FTC.
In the affected markets, the FTC will require the two companies to sell 53 funeral homes and 38 cemeteries sometime in the next six months before they get hitched, in order to maintain healthy competition in the funeral business in that area.
If you’ve forgotten the major plotlines of HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” you can read up on SCI’s business model and the major complaints about the company in this great Businessweek piece from October.
FTC Puts Conditions on Service Corporation International’s Proposed $1.4 Billion Acquisition of Rival Funeral and Cemetery Services Provider [FTC]
How a Funeral Giant Overcame Antitrust Concerns and Gobbled Up Its Rival [Businessweek]
FURTHER READING:
Is Funeral Home Chain SCI’s Growth Coming at the Expense of Mourners? [Businessweek]
Joe Rickey Hundley was sentenced Monday. He pleaded guilty in October after reaching a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.
Several incidents at Veterans Affairs medical centers over the holidays have prompted the House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman to question whether VA has violated the civil rights of veterans in its care.
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Old log house in Oakton, Va., getting a new life Washington Post The Hampel family is preserving Fairfax's oldest documented historic dwelling, known as Squirrel Hill, in a novel way: By sandwiching the ancient log house between a new attached three-car garage and a new four-bedroom home. Jason and Sarah Hampel ... and more » |
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Prince William County community calendar, Jan. 5 to 11, 2014 Washington Post Sunday, Jan. 5. “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. “Art of the ... Habitat for Humanity hosts home repair meetingInside NoVA all 6 news articles » |
National Zoo panda cub Bao Bao is too young to go outside to play, so keepers brought the snow to her.
A former Chesterfield County volunteer firefighter faces charges of stealing a fire truck.
