There are no shortage of clever methods for getting a stripped screw out of wood. However, as Lifehacker Australia points out, you can also make it easier by shifting the object the screw is in so that it's not being pulled so tight.

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Following a recipe is a great way to get started in the kitchen. However, once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can learn the few choice ratios that govern dozens of different dishes—and free yourself from the restrictions of recipes. Here's how it works.

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It's not news that a lot of us spend too much time on our smartphones. However, some research has shown that prolonged usage of phones instead of larger, more open devices like a desktop, can have a negative impact in our posture, mood, and confidence.

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Last week my wife was surfing the internet to find out the ideal temperature and cooking time to bake a potato. As she was digging for the information, she discovered an interesting fact: to properly bake a potato, you should place it bare on a cooking sheet (though, coated with oil and your choice of seasoning, of course). Mind blown.

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KFC’s recently launched Go Cup, which combines the thrill of eating fried foods with the exhilaration of being stuck in traffic on the way home, is just the latest from the attention-seeking food-marketers at Yum! Brands who brought you the Double Down, the Doritos tacos, and cheese on donuts. But Stephen Colbert thinks KFC could still make it even more convenient to clog your arteries while clogging the intersection.

On last night’s Colbert Report, the host admitted that KFC’s “new potato-and-poultry Big Gulp… is a good idea, but it could be gooder.”

“Last time I checked, the cup-holder is still an arm’s length away from the ol’ grub chute,” continued Colbert, “and it’s not like you can put the Go Cup between your legs because that’s where the tub of Ben & Jerry’s goes.”

Colbert then generously suggested what he believes is an improvement on the Go Cup — the Wheel Meat, “A one-piece, circular macro-nugget that mounts snugly onto your steering column.”

No more reaching for that snack while you’re enjoying your evening commute. It’s right there in your hands, along with sauces that automatically coat the Wheel Meat as you steer. You don’t even need to take your hands off the steering wheel, as you can just lean forward and chow down directly on the Wheel Meat.

Of course, reminds Colbert, safety first: “Remember, it’s hands at 10 and 2, mouth at 12.”

[via Eater]

Considering how expensive home repairs can be — and how dang easy they make fix-it jobs look on TV — it can be incredibly tempting to save some money by doing it yourself. But DIY isn’t always the less-expensive option when you figure in the costs for all the things that could possibly go wrong.

If you’ll allow a personal anecdote…
When our youngest child was a mere babe in swaddling clothes, our furnace decided to call it quits. In the middle of a very cold winter. At about 9 p.m.

I called our regular fix-it guy, but he was doing emergency repairs for all the other homeowners whose heat called it quits that night. We’d be lucky to see him in about 48 hours.

So I did one better. I took advantage of my brother-in-law, a contractor by trade. Even though he lived more than two hours away, I sent him digital photos of the burner’s innards, and he talked me through some online diagrams. He diagnosed the problem, I asked my husband to buy the $20 part we needed on his way home from work, and we fixed it, saving hundreds of dollars (though who knows how it would have gone without the over-the-phone guidance of the bro-in-law).

My husband and I never feared do-it-yourself projects. To be sure, we’ve had success with many, such as my hubby’s awesome bookcases and a refinished antique dining room table.

But over our 14 years of homeownership, we slowly decided that for the most part, DIY isn’t for us anymore. We’d rather spend our free time doing what we want rather than being chained to spackle, nails and deck stain.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Indeed, we recently called a handyman to change a broken stove-top fan, fix a stubborn and jiggly toilet paper holder and replace a fallen closet shelf. Sure, we could do it, but we’re busy. We have other priorities. (At least we realized that after the new closet shelf spent several months untouched in the garage.)

“My handy days are behind me,” my husband told the handyman.

That’s right. We’re proud to say we’re no longer DIYers — mostly. We don’t own a lawnmower, but we shovel our own snow. We’ve fixed our garbage disposal several times, but we don’t do grout. We’ve taken down wallpaper borders and painted, but we’ll never do that again.

To make up your mind about your own prospects, ask yourself two questions: are you qualified, and is it worth your time and effort?

PICKING THE RIGHT JOB

There’s no doubt that most DIY projects — small and large — will save you lots of money in the short term. The biggest cost for most home repair jobs is labor, so by doing the work yourself, you’re only paying for supplies.

Of course, many contractors get discounted supplies, so it’s possible you’ll pay more for materials than would a pro. Still, saving on labor could make DIY the smart move.

Unless you muck it up, of course

If you’re inexperienced, you could do more harm than good and end up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to have a pro come in to clean up your mess.

So before you start, choose wisely.

*Entry-level: Landscaping, painting, installing trim and redoing closets are great jobs for first-timers. They don’t require a ton of skill to do a passable job and the odds of you doing something disastrous are minimal (assuming you don’t have some crazy, Edward Scissorhands hedge sculptures in your yard).

*DIY at your own risk: Hanging interior doors, wallpapering, patching drywall, kitchen and bathroom tiling, cabinet and drawer repair… These are all jobs that many homeowners will attempt at some point, and at which they might have some success. But they are also the types of DIY projects that, if they go awry, could leave an eyesore that will remind you of your ineptitude for years to come.

*Don’t try this at home: If it involves hard-core plumbing, electrical wires or gas lines, skip it and call a pro. It’s not worth blowing up your home, flooding your basement or administering your own electrotherapy just to earn another DIY badge for your collection.

If you hire a pro for a doable DIY job, consider paying attention to how she does the work so that you can see how it’s done properly for future reference.

If you decide to give it a go, and even if the job seems simple, take the time to research the correct materials and surf the web for tips and instructional videos. There are seemingly countless sites offering home repair advice, instructions and videos, like DIY Network, PlanItDIY and of course YouTube.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING
DIY projects can bring great satisfaction. There’s nothing sweeter than looking around your home and seeing what your own hands have created.

That is, unless you hate working with your hands.

Before you pick up a tool belt, consider your skill level and motivation to get the work done. If you’re itching to get your hands on some power tools, you’ve passed the first test. If you’re on the clumsy side, you may want to step back. And if you’re a procrastinator (remember my closet shelves?), you may be better off with a pro.

Next, estimate how long the job should take. If you want to redo an entire bathroom, expect months of weekends and late nights. If you want to plant a few shrubs, it will only take a few hours.

When you know how long a job should take, consider how you want to spend your free time. If you’d rather be riding bikes or playing FIFA soccer on the XBox with your kids, call in a pro. If you’d enjoy creating a masterpiece to call your own, go for it.

Don’t forget the money. Yes, you’d save by doing-it-yourself, but what is your time worth? Go back to that project time clock. Compare how many hours a project will take (including shopping for supplies, renting or buying tools, learning how to perform the task — then add some padding to go along with your learning curve) and compare it to your hourly wage.

If you estimate a job would take 10 hours and you earn $20 per hour, that’s $200 of your time to do the work, not counting the lifestyle cost to you.

Then, try this “What’s Your Time Worth” calculator for another perspective.

Could a pro do it faster, and for less?

You might be surprised.

You can read Karin Price Mueller’s stories for The Star-Ledger at NJ.com, follow her on Facebook, and on Twitter @kpmueller.

PREVIOUSLY ON HOW TO NOT SUCK:
How To Not Suck… At Getting Out Of Debt
How To Not Suck… At First Year College Budgets

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Yes, we spend much of the fall whining about Christmas creep, Halloween creep, and retailers’ methods of mashing up the holidays so that one could, in theory, hand out candy canes to trick-or-treaters. We admire eye-catching displays when we see them, though, and this one from a small local pet store is just so wonderful.

Of course, a pet store is an establishment that doesn’t depend on sales of seasonal décor items. The occasional tree-shaped squeaky toy and pumpkin biscuit, definitely, but not shelves of artificial trees and perfume gift packs. Maybe that’s why we find this display more beautiful than cynical.

Still, we’re holding out for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas all in one display. If you find that, you know where to find us.

At this point in the year, we can’t be sure whether an Easter item still on store shelves is early for Easter or just lingering months after the holiday. That’s the mystery of the Mounds Eggs that Micah found on the shelves of a Walmart in Georgia.

He found these just last week, but look at the pretty Easter eggs decorating the package. Are they early? Late? All we know is that coconut ice cream is delicious, so we contacted Walmart. When they let us know, we’ll update you.

The eggs, and their Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg cousins, are clearly marketed for Easter. That much is clear. Is this a case of Easter creep or bad inventory control? It’s Walmart, so really that could go either way.

Prince William County crime report Washington Post Prince William. These were among incidents reported by Prince William County police. For information, call 703-792-7245. DUMFRIES AREA. ROBBERIES. Cape May Ct. and Allen Dent Rd., 9:29 p.m. Oct. 14. Two men assaulted a woman and demanded ...

PotomacLocal.com

Boo Ball Part of Area's Haunted Happenings PotomacLocal.com Good morning – The Head Start Program needs a volunteer with a background in Finance to work on the Self Assessment Committee to review their fiscal system. This is a very short-term position for just a couple of 1 hour meetings in November. Please ...

- A Facebook page seeking to preserve the "Black Pete" clowns in blackface who accompany St. Nicholas to the Netherlands during the holidays has become the fastest-growing Dutch-language page ever, receiving 1 million "likes" in a single day.

story building that had withstood air strikes and artillery -- now reduced to a mountain of rubble. Enormous chunks of concrete, their twisted steel reinforcements ripped bare, balanced precariously on piles of debris. Only cracked concrete frames on the ground floor bore any semblance to what had stood there before.

- Creepy crawlies, in the form of a venomous spider infestation, has forced a school in Britain to close a week before Halloween.

- Britain's 3-month-old future monarch, Prince George, was to be christened Wednesday with water from the River Jordan at a rare four-generation gathering of the royal family in London.

- The Food and Drug Administration is trying to solve a stubborn mystery surrounding the deaths of almost 600 dogs that ate jerky treats, and officials are hoping pet owners and veterinarians can help them figure out what exactly may be causing the illnesses.

0.

- A solar-powered "condor cam" in the hills of Big Sur, on the Central California coast, allows the public to view North America's largest birds from the comfort of home.

- After she made her First Communion as a little girl, Jennifer Haselberger was distraught to learn the Catholic church had no saint Jennifer, and she had no saint to call her own. So her mom opened up a book and pointed to Joan of Arc.

- The federal government is going into uncharted waters. It is deep-sixing the giant paper nautical charts that they've been printing for mariners for more than 150 years.

A 14-year-old Massachusetts high school student is facing a murder charge in the death of a 24-year-old teacher found dead in the woods behind the school.

Dead Boston Marathon suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, implicated in 2011 triple killing, according to court filing.

Have you ever gotten so angry with your teenager, you wanted to send them to Siberia? Well, a local mother did just that.

A forgetful bridegroom made a hoax bomb threat rather than admit he'd neglected to book the venue for his wedding.

A Manassas family managed to escape the flames that engulfed their home in the Lake Jackson area early Wednesday morning.

Little Planet

If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?

Samantha Harper

Last week, we looked at at life on a giant world. This week, let's look at a small one.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is a story about a traveler from a distant asteroid. It's simple and sad and poignant and memorable.[1]For another take on the Petit Prince, scroll down to the last section of this wonderful piece by Mallory Ortberg. It's ostensibly a children's book, but it's hard to pin down who the intended audience is. In any case, it certainly has found an audience; it's among the best-selling books in history.

It was written in 1942. That's an interesting time to write about asteroids, because in 1942 we didn't actually know what asteroids looked like. Even in our best telescopes, the largest asteroids were only visible as points of light. In fact, that's where their name comes from—the word asteroid means "star-like."

We got our first confirmation of what asteroids looked like in 1971, when Mariner 9 visited Mars and snapped pictures of Phobos and Deimos.[2]Here's a picture of Phobos looking like the archetypical asteroid. The archived images from the mission are at the NASA Space Science Data Center, but strangely, the NSSDC refers readers to someone's personal Tripod page to browse the actual images. These moons, believed to be captured asteroids,[3]Ironically, while Phobos and Deimos look like asteroids, new research suggests they're not. See Craddock, Robert A.. "Are Phobos And Deimos The Result Of A Giant Impact?". Icarus (2010) solidified the modern image of asteroids as cratered potatoes.

Before the 1970s, it was common for science fiction to assume small asteroids would be round, like planets.[4]Not always; plenty of people had a good idea of what they would look like. And there were stranger ideas ...

The Little Prince took this a step further, imagining an asteroid as a tiny planet with gravity, air, and a rose. There's no point in trying to critique the science here, because (1) it's not a story about asteroids, and (2) it opens with a parable about how foolish adults are for looking at everything too literally.

So rather than trying to take things away from the story, let's see what strange new pieces science can add. If there really were a superdense asteroid with enough surface gravity to walk around on, it would have some pretty surprising properties.

If the asteroid has a radius of 1.75 meters, then in order to have Earth-like gravity at the surface, it would need to have a mass of about 500 million tons. This is roughly equal to the combined mass of every human on Earth.

If you stood on the surface, you'd experience tidal forces. Your feet would feel heavier than your head, which you'd feel as a gentle stretching sensation. It would feel like you were stretched out on a curved rubber ball, or were lying on a merry-go-round with your head near the center.

The escape velocity at the surface would be about 5 meters per second. That's slower than a sprint, but still pretty fast. As a rule of thumb, if you can't dunk a basketball, you wouldn't be able to escape by jumping straight up.

However, the weird thing about escape velocity is that it doesn't matter which direction you're going.[5]... which is why it should really be called "escape speed"—the fact that it has no direction (which is the distinction between "speed" and "velocity") is actually very significant here. If you go faster than the escape speed, as long as you don't actually go toward the planet, you'll escape. That means you might be able to leave our asteroid by running horizontally and jumping off the end of a ramp.

If you didn't go fast enough to escape the planet, you'd go into orbit around it. Your orbital speed would be roughly 3 meters per second, which is a typical jogging speed.

But this would be a weird orbit.

Tidal forces would act on you in several ways. If you reach your arm down toward the planet, it would be pulled much harder than the rest of you. And if you reach down with one arm, the rest of you gets pushed upward, which means other parts of your body feel even less gravity. Effectively, every part of your body would be trying to go in a different orbit.

A large orbiting object under these kinds of tidal forces—say, a moon—will generally break apart into rings. This wouldn't happen to you. However, your orbit would become chaotic and unstable.

These types of orbits were investigated in an interesting paper by Radu D. Rugescu and Daniele Mortari.[6]Rugescu, Radu D., Mortari, Daniele, "Ultra Long Orbital Tethers Behave Highly Non-Keplerian and Unstable", WSEAS Transactions on Mathematics, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2008, pp. 87-94. Their simulations showed that large, elongated objects follow strange patterns around their central bodies. Even their centers of mass don't move in the traditional ellipses; some adopt pentagonal orbits, while others spin chaotically and crash into the planet.

This type of analysis could actually have practical applications. There have been various proposals over the years to use long, whirling tethers to move cargo in and out of gravity wells—a sort of free-floating space elevator. Such tethers could transport cargo to and from the surface of the Moon, or to pick up spacecraft from the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. The inherent instability of many tether orbits poses an interesting challenge for this kind of project.

As for the residents of our superdense asteroid, they'd have to be careful; if they ran too fast, they'd be in serious danger of going into a tumble and losing their lunch.

Fortunately, vertical jumps would be fine.

The annual weekend event at the castle is one of Europe's most popular Halloween events. 

More than 300 motorists have been cited for texting while driving in Virginia since a new law went into effect July 1.

The shooting rampage also left two students wounded. The shooter then fatally shot himself.

Maria Calata shares her moments with a tiger in Thabazimbi, South Africa

He was burned in the Springwood fires on October 22, 2013 in Castlereagh, Australia.