Lifehacker

If you’re struggling to pay rent due to COVID, make sure you take advantage of the just-launched $25 billion rental assistance program, which is part of the relief package passed last month. If you can prove hardship, up to 15 months of your rent could be paid for.Read more...

Tuesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

Discovering that anyone in the home—but particularly one of the kids—is allergic to the family pet can be upsetting. Our pets are members of our family, so discovering that their mere presence is negatively impacting the health or physical comfort of your child creates a stressful situation. But if it happens, and…Read more...

I hate saying that “this is kind of the norm” when talking about a data breach, but here we go again. A social-media management company called Socialarks recently suffered a data leak to the tune of more than 408GB of personal data for around 214 million Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts worldwide. That’s…Read more...

Protein powder is gross in most things, I’ll be honest about that. It makes oatmeal gooey, and it’s an acquired taste in almost everything but smoothies (where it’s mostly hidden by the ingredients). But there’s one dish of actual food where it’s truly at home, and that is a bowl of yogurt.Read more...

In the wake of last Wednesday’s insurrection on Capitol Hill, Big Tech platforms have begun purging certain right-wing services and accounts known to traffic in conspiracy theories and promote violence. The scrubbing includes the removal of at least 70,000 Twitter pages known to promote QAnon; the president’s own…Read more...

In case you weren’t already swimming in streaming service subscriptions, Hulu is offering a discounted $2 monthly plan for students. However, note that if you’re long past college and happen to have an .edu email address, that won’t be enough to qualify as a “student”—Hulu is verifying that you’re actually attending…Read more...

The best hummus is smooth and creamy, but a lot of homemade hummus comes out much more textured than its restaurant-made counterparts. Unfortunately, the key to truly smooth hummus lies in the removal of the chickpeas’ flimsy little skins. Fortunately, though, peeling them is not hard.

If you are active on TikTok, or social media in general, you may have noticed a marked increase in rhythmic chanting on your feeds lately. Seems the young kids have adopted a new craze, and it is complex remixes of old time-y sea shanties.

Bulk snacks and the AeroGarden Harvest lead Tuesday’s best deals.

Although it already feels as though this winter has stretched on forever, technically we’re less than one month into the season. And while some parts of the country have been slammed by winter storms already, others have mostly experienced relatively mild weather so far. But it’s only a matter of time before we’re…Read more...

If it seemed like kids didn’t have much to say about their school day before the pandemic hit, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not interested in discussing their day now. Before, they used to actually leave the house several days a week! They used to go into a different structure, separate from your home, …Read more...

Pungent foods like onion and garlic like to leave their mark. They often result in a very savory, allium-y pair of hands, which I never minded, but some are deeply offended by. That seems to be driving force behind Rub Away, the stainless steel odor-absorbing bar.Read more...

Later today, Nvidia’s “GeForce RTX: Game On” live event will give us our first look at the company’s latest gaming-focused hardware. (Here’s hoping any new announcements drop the price and raise the availability of its top-shelf graphics cards.)

AeroGarden Harvest 6-Pod Countertop Garden | $150 | Macy’s

After Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, House Democrats have made impeaching the president a renewed priority, even as the clock ticks down on the last days of his term. So far, House lawmakers’ efforts to levy impeachment proceedings are contingent on whether Vice President Mike Pence and Trump…Read more...

Top Pick: Schmidt’s Deodorant, Lavender + Sage | $9 | AmazonRead more...

Once he assumes office, President-elect Joe Biden is expected to ask Congress to immediately cancel $10,000 in student debt for all federal loan borrowers and extend the payment moratorium on federally backed student loans that’s scheduled to lapse this month. But will debt forgiveness pass the Senate? It’s…Read more...

I swear, I leave the internet for approximately nine days and I nearly miss a viral cooking hack. (I’ll never take time off again, I promise.) But even though I might be the last to see this popular tortilla folding video, I think I might be the first to have waffled the tortilla after folding it.Read more...

I won’t bemoan the the right-wing exodus from Twitter, Facebook, and various other social networks over the past few months. (The fewer people sharing messages of support for armed insurrection or coddling Nazis on my social networks, the better.) But the fact that many of of these people fled to the “free speech”…Read more...

Monday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

When our children are young, we are privy to many of their innermost thoughts. In fact, it’s not unusual for a preschool-aged child to verbalize nearly every thought in real time, a sort of running dialogue of what is happening inside their brain—which can be both endearing and exhausting. At a certain point, though,…Read more...

As of today, small business owners struggling to cover overhead costs can apply for a second round of Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) tax-deductible loans. The program includes changes that targets smaller and minority-owned businesses. Here’s what you need to know, and how to apply.Read more...

This week we’re learning how we can use hypnosis and the placebo effect to our advantage, with help from science journalist Erik Vance. Did you know, for instance, that you can still benefit from the use of placebos even if you know that you’re taking a placebo?

Tipping isn’t second nature to many (and also has an ugly history of manipulation). Over time, though, it has become customary in service-based industries. Tipping isn’t mandatory, but it’s an expected and kind thing to do for someone who, say, carries your entire bed up five flights of stairs. But deciding how much…Read more...

Just about every commercial gym has a giant wall of mirrors, whether surrounding the whole space or lining the portion of the gym with the dumbbell rack. Watching yourself in the mirror can help you to make sure you’re lifting with the correct form and using the right muscles—so what the heck do you do if you’re…Read more...

I have many dish towels, and they have a tendency to get quite dirty. But as my laundry basket is far from the kitchen—all the way in the bedroom—I often end up letting the dirty boys hand out in the food prep area far longer than is appropriate, telling myself I will “take them with me the next time I travel to that…Read more...

Aside from one Republican Senator who’s currently mulling a decision to switch her political affiliation, Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol hasn’t necessarily compelled Republican lawmakers to flee the party en masse. The Trump era, with its normalization of incendiary rhetoric, only saw a handful of lawmakers…Read more...

Despite what we see in movies, getting asked out on a date isn’t always a magical, flattering experience. In fact, chances are good that you aren’t actually interested in the person and have no interest in seeing them socially or romantically. Having said that, turning someone down is never easy either—especially if…Read more...

Massages are one of life’s simple—but sometimes confusing—pleasures. With so many different varieties, it can be hard to know which kind would be best for your needs.

I was struck the other day by the most basic pre-pandemic desire: I wish I could go out to eat with my husband and son. It’s not that I miss the food that much—we’ve gotten a lot of takeout and dined outdoors a few times before winter hit. It’s that I miss the spontaneity, the ease with which we used to make those…Read more...

Click N’ Play Gigantic Piano Playmat | $31 | Amazon

I didn’t use Windows 10's search feature often, because I didn’t find it very useful. By default, it’s handy to look up an app in a pinch or skip to a settings window without having to navigate through a tree of options, but that’s as much as I would interact with it. So I’m willing to forego that functionality to…Read more...

One of the conveniences of playing games through Steam is the app’s built-in controller support. The client automatically recognizes dozens of controllers when you connect them to your PC, and more are added all the time—including the new Xbox Series X and Xbox Elite controllers. Steam even supports the Series X’s…Read more...

A sale on select Nintendo Switch titles and a Crux Artisan juicer lead Sunday’s best deals.

Winter can be pretty rough on our skin—especially for those who live somewhere with forced-air heating. This is true not only about the skin on our faces, hands and arms, but also on our head. That’s right: the scalp. And up there, dry skin = dandruff. If you’re not a fan of the usual dandruff shampoos, or they just…Read more...

Have you ever wondered how restaurants decide how much food to buy? Like, what if one day, all the diners want the salmon, but the next week they’re all about beef? Will there be a lot of perfectly good, but unused salmon in their fridge? Sometimes!Read more...

There’s still so much we don’t know about Mars, but thanks to some recently released photos, we’ve gotten a much better look at the Red Planet’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon. Although, that’s not exactly accurate: the one on Mars—called Valles Marineris—is nearly 10 times as long and three times as deep as ours on…Read more...

Listerine Cool Mint Antiseptic Mouthwash | $5 | Amazon

After spending the week glued to the TV and our devices, we could all use a break from screens. Fortunately the night sky has a whole weekend’s worth of entertainment lined up for us, in the form of a rare three-planet conjunction featuring Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. The last time this particular combination…Read more...

One of the biggest challenges of shopping for clothing online—other than the arbitrary sizing—is figuring out if a certain color is going to look good on you. Sure, you probably have one or two go-to colors: shades that people have told you look good on you. And that’s great! (Although we should note that relying on…Read more...

A water flosser and a 65-inch Westinghouse Roku 4K tv lead Saturday’s best deals.

If your new year’s resolution was to cut down on your screen time—how’s that working out for you? It’s barely a week old, and 2021 has already been a nonstop stream of major news events demanding our attention and the constant refreshing of our news feeds.

This week’s events in Washington D.C. were met with shock and horror from world leaders around the globe. Images of a U.S. Capitol building under siege by an incensed mob of right-wing extremists earned rebukes from the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, and the coup attempt…Read more...

Top Product: Uni Ball Jetstream RT | $27 | Amazon

Friday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

Microsoft’s Outlook and email apps on Windows, Mac, and the web are getting some big changes in the coming months as part of the company’s “One Outlook” initiative. Why wait, though? You can get a preview of what your Outlook experience is going to turn into right now.

After jokes about a coming pandemic baby boom in early March 2020, reality seems to have sunk in: According to The Atlantic, a “baby bust” is much more likely. A significant portion of the population has reported experiencing a decreased sex drive since this mess began, according to the Collaborative Outcomes Study on…Read more...

I’m almost surprised I have to write this, but when my friends and roommates come to me with technological quirks to solve, I always hit them with one answer off the top of my head. And more often than not, it’s the single thing they need to do to fix any issue they’re having.Read more...

With the Democrats’ Senate runoff victory tipping the balance of power in Washington, Joe Biden’s legislative agenda suddenly has new life. So what about those $2,000 COVID-relief checks—can we realistically expect to receive additional stimulus money soon?