pileofcrapola

Tennis balls are good for more than just tennis. If you have a few leftover, you can repurpose them in all sorts of handy ways.

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The travel season is fast approaching, and juggling tickets, hotel reservations, rental cars, itineraries, and other plans can be maddening. Which app or service do you use to keep it all organized so you get where you're going on time and safely? This week, we want to hear which travel planning services are the best.

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There may be as many ways to set up and stick to a budget as there are types of spenders and savers. Here's one more. By aligning your budget with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you may more easily prioritize your spending and align it with the things that matter most in your life.

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Aspire News is a new app out for iPhone and Android that's made for people in abusive relationships. It's an interesting idea, and one that might actually help a lot of people.

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Most of us tend to think of our budget in terms of how much we can afford. It makes sense, that's how money works. However, finance blog Consumerism Commentary suggests planning some of your monthly budget around what you do, rather than how much you can spend.

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Video chat on smartphones has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, and the tools available for Android have matured from gimmicky to genuinely useful. You have a lot of great options, but we think that Google Hangouts deserves the crown for the overall best and most well-integrated method to see and talk with friends.

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BookBub features deeply discounted ebooks on a variety of platforms, including the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Google Play Books, and others. Every day you'll get a fresh email with new discounted or free titles to download and enjoy, with quick links to grab the book for your preferred ereader.

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Whether you're stuck in a hotel for an extended stay or your dorm room just doesn't have any other options, your coffee maker is a surprisingly reasonable place to cook a meal or two. You actually have a bunch of options for meals in those coffee makers, but NPR breaks down the three basic cooking types that anyone can use a coffee maker to cook with.

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Playing videos on Android can be frustrating from time to time, but we've found that BSPlayer offers the best balance between features, compatibility, and ease of use.

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The holiday shopping season is coming up soon and it won't be long before everyone and their mothers (especially their mothers) are trying to find the best deals on everything. Here are some of the most useful tools for finding the best deals you can.

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Coffee Filters are cheap, and you can buy huge packages of them at the dollar store. Even if you don't brew drip, you can use them for other things, like keeping the interior of your car clean and free of lint, splatters, and stains.

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Okay, so you have debt. It's frustrating sure, but it's not the end of the world. Millions of people are in the same boat right now, and many of them are steadily working their way toward being debt free. You can do it too. No matter how you got into debt, you can make it out.

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We've shown you how to use a sharpening stone to keep your knives in top condition before, but sharpening flat can make it tricky to get the right angle. This stand-up jig, however, keeps the stone in place and makes adjusting your sharpening angle easy. Plus, it's easy to make.

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Most water filters make filling a glass a gaming of waiting, but EveryDrop changes that. The small raindrop-shaped device filters water through it almost as fast as it would come straight out of your faucet and lasts quite awhile.

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When the country’s biggest meat producer says “This isn’t working out,” it’s a big deal: Tyson Foods announced that it’s effectively dumping an Oklahoma pig farm by terminating its contract, after a news investigation showed undercover videos of alleged abuse at the facility.

NBC News says the video has workers on tape kicking, hitting and throwing pigs around, as well as slamming piglets into the ground. Frown face.

“We’re extremely disappointed by the mistreatment shown in the video and will not tolerate this kind of animal mishandling,” said Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for Tyson Foods. “We are immediately terminating our contract with this farmer and will take possession of the animals remaining on the farm.”

Meanwhile the farm’s owner says the video does show “mistreatment” of the animals and says the issue won’t end here.

“I was stunned that anyone could be that callous in their treatment of any animal,” he said. “After viewing the video, I immediately returned to my farm and terminated the employees seen in the video.”

The animal rights group Mercy for Animals sent an activist undercover to work as a farmhand from mid-September to mid-October. While he was there, he captured footage at the business that supplies pork products to Tyson. The group says what happens in the video, as witnessed by the activist, violates a state animal cruelty law.

“This factory farm is hell on Earth for pigs,” said Nathan Runkle, executive director of Mercy for Animals. “Tyson has allowed a culture of cruelty and neglect to fester at this factory farm facility. This is some of the most sadistic and malicious cruelty to animals I have ever witnessed.”

The undercover worker says it was pretty much an awful experience to see the “commonplace and constant” abuse, which he says included hitting, kicking, throwing, striking animals with the edges of wooden boards, sticking fingers in their eyes, and leaving piglets to die slowly after they were slammed into the ground “in failed euthanasia attempts.”

“On three separate occasions, I reported abuse to the owner,” he says. “After each report, the abuse continued by workers, and all of the workers I questioned told me that that owner had not spoken to them recently about animal handling.”

The owner denies the undercover worker ever brought up the alleged abuse, saying his workers only used approved euthanasia methods when necessary.

“It is a part of the business and there are prescribed methods of euthanasia and I follow those to a T,” he said.

Anyone with a strong stomach and brave heart can watch the video over at NBC News, but be warned that it’s very graphic and could be upsetting. Because piglets… little piglets. Ugh.

Tyson Foods dumps pig farm after NBC shows company video of alleged abuse [NBC News]

In an effort to guard against sleepy or fatigued pilots taking a snooze behind the controls, as well as air traffic controllers who might doze off, the Federal Aviation Administration has announced a new regulation requiring both kinds of staff undergo testing for sleep disorders if they’re overweight.

The FAA’s federal air surgeon announced the new rule yesterday. It could apply to about 125,000 of the country’s 600,000 commercial and private pilots, reports CNN, and an unknown number of air traffic controllers out of the 14,500 in the country.

The requirement says that any pilots and controllers with a body mass index of 40 or greater and a neck circumference of 17 inches, as discerned during routine medical examinations, would have to get tested for obstructive sleep apnea.

To put that in real life terms, a 5’11″ man who weighs 287 pounds would have a BMI of 40, says the National Institutes of Health. Sleep apnea can cause fatigue and is almost universal in people who fit those criteria, writes Dr. Fred Tilton, the federal air surgeon, in a statement announcing the new policy.

If a pilot turns out to have a sleep disorder, he or she will have to get treatment for it before getting a medical clearance to fly.

Once all of those pilots have been dealt with, the FAA says it will also look at those with lower BMIs “until we have identified and assured treatment for every airman” with sleep apnea, Tilton wrote.

The nation’s largest association of commercial pilots hasn’t weighed in on the policy yet, but a group representing private pilots is asking the FAA to wait a bit before it implements the policy, noting that just because there are sleepy pilots don’t mean those pilots have sleep apnea.

“This policy seems to be based on one incident involving an airline flight,” Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Vice President Rob Hackman said in a prepared statement. “Analysis of a decade of fatal general aviation accidents by the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee didn’t identify obstructive sleep apnea as a contributing or causal factor in any of the accidents studied.”

There have been numerous incidents of pilots falling asleep on the job, where afterward the pilots said they were overly tired and fatigued. One involved two pilots on a Go! Airlines flight where both pilots fell asleep and overshot their destination by 26 miles. In that case the captain was later diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea.

It’s also happened in Britain, when both pilots on the plane fell asleep, but in that case both had only had five hours of sleep before starting that flight.

Air traffic controllers have also gotten sleepy on the job, including one air traffic controller fired in 2011 for taking an intentional nap and two others who didn’t mean to do so.

The FAA says this new rule is in line with a National Transportation Safety Board recommendation and is “designed to help airmen and aviation safety by improving the diagnosis of unrecognized or untreated obstructive sleep apnea.”

FAA: All overweight pilots, controllers must be tested for sleep disorders [CNN]

Costco’s had some explaining to do after the pastor of a non-denominational church in California happened upon a particular display of Bibles at his local Costco store. He says he was shopping for a gift for his wife when he found a bunch of Bibles with price tags reading “fiction.”

He of course snapped a photo and tweeted it out to his congregation, telling KTLA-5 News that tried to find somebody to ask about the books, but couldn’t.

His tweet included the caption: “Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of fiction…hmmmm.”

“I checked to see if the other Bibles were like that, and they were,” he explains.

As for his tweet and his congregation, he tells KCBS-TVthere’s been a range of reactions.

“A lot of people were upset. Some people were fine with it. To me, I don’t know why you’d label something as fiction,” he said.

The pastor says Costco reached out to him and said that the problem was an error by distributors. The company has since issued an apology, saying:

“Costco’s distributor mislabeled a small percentage of the Bibles, however we take responsibility and should have caught the mistake. We are correcting this with them for future distribution,” Costco said in a statement. “In addition, we are immediately relabeling all mislabeled Bibles. We greatly apologize for this error.”

Whether you believe it’s the word of God or just another work of fiction, the pastor says it can be a learning experience, telling KCBS-TV he thinks any discussion of the topic is good.

“It’s caused a lot of controversy, it’s caused a lot of conversation, which I think conversation is good,” says.

We’ve embedded the newscast that doesn’t have autoplay below.

Pastor Finds Bibles Labeled as ‘Fiction’ at Local Costco [KTLA-5 News]
Simi Valley Pastor Finds Bibles Labeled As ‘Fiction’ At Local Costco [KCBS-TV]

- Alabama's parole board wrote a new ending for the infamous "Scottsboro Boys" rape case Thursday by approving posthumous pardons more than 80 years after the arrests.

10 Best wants to know what you think: what's the best NFL stadium? 

Prince William County Schools clear family graveyard to make way for high school.

Some high school seniors from Northern Virginia are making connections with students all over the world and they are doing it from outer space.

Despite the dispute over whether there were beds available for Creigh Deed's son, Pete Earley, another father of a son with mental illness says it's difficult to get treatment.  

Prince William County Schools clear family graveyard to make way for high school.

Consumer advocacy group lifts "Don't Buy" rating

Thursday, the largest Roses department store in the U.S. and the first in Prince George's County opened in Forestville

Reviewed.com says you really want to think -- and research -- before you buy some of these doorbusters.

When it comes to financial literacy, Americans are getting failing grades, but not these kids in Silver Spring.

WUSA9 Consumer Reporter, Lesli Foster, finds new crash tests are exposing serious flaws with many popular pet restraints now on the market.

WUSA9 Consumer Reporter, Lesli Foster, finds new crash tests are exposing serious flaws with many popular pet restraints now on the market.