Lifehacker

There’s something about Halloween that can make a good TV show great. Maybe it’s the over-the-top on-set decorations—the kind we’d set up at home if only we had the energy (but, hey, a pumpkin on the front stoop works, too). Or maybe it’s all those makeup artists who can make a beheaded person look truly convincing,…Read more...

You see The New York Times’ “election needle,” and you get anxiety. You read FiveThirtyEight, and you wonder how your candidate can lose after being up by some seemingly impressive number of “points” or polls prior to an election.

AMD officially announced its brand-new Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs today, and gave graphics-starved gamers a little taste of what they can expect from the release of Big Navi later this month. We’ve extracted as many details as possible from AMD’s event. Here’s what you need to know if you’re looking to make a system upgrade…Read more...

PBS Kids and Sesame Street are continuing to provide opportunities for parents to speak with their kids about race and racism. Over the next week, two specials—PBS KIDS Talk About: Race and Racism and The Power of We: A Sesame Street Special—will premier to encourage families to view together and discuss the topics.Read more...

I don’t know a single person who doesn’t adore a crispy potato. In fact, we love them so much, we have figured out how to enjoy them for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Breakfast potatoes come in two main forms: hash browns and home fries. I don’t care for the latter, mainly because they’re too large. I like my…Read more...

The president stated that he’s “not contagious at all” after spending time in the hospital due to a case of COVID-19, and would like to appear at an in-person debate next week. (The debate commission has said the debate will be remote.) Could he be correct? It’s complicated.Read more...

October is shaping up to be a pretty great month for astronomical events. Not only does it offer two chances to see a full moon—with one involving an appearance by Mars, too—there are also a few meteor showers on the night sky schedule. And as it turns out, one is happening this week. Here’s how to catch the Draconid…Read more...

If you’ve listened to National Public Radio at all over the years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard Guy Raz’s voice. Formerly the host of All Things Considered, he made the jump into podcasts nearly a decade ago, hosting shows like the TED Radio Hour, How I Built This, kids series Wow in the World, and Wisdom from…Read more...

The LifeProTips subreddit is a favorite among the Lifehacker staff. Like us, these folks are interested in finding and sharing the quirky little tricks that make life easier or better. Some are hacks for a specific moment in time; others are evergreens that withstand the passage of years. But each one—according to the…Read more...

Like Jaqen H’ghar, the Apple Watch has many faces. And while it’s easy to manually swipe through all the different options, there’s no need to do so: If you enjoy using different faces for different activities, such working, working out, and working on making a body-sized impression in your couch when you aren’t doing…Read more...

No matter how dedicated you are to the concept of “cleaning as you cook,” you will make at least a small amount of mess every time you prepare a meal. It’s inevitable, but the goal is to minimize the amount of mess you have to clean after cooking, and every small preventative measure helps.Read more...

Let’s say you’re looking at your credit reports and spot a credit inquiry you don’t recognize. An unfamiliar inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unauthorized, but it’s worth looking into. Here’s what you can do.Read more...

Wednesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

Buying the latest gaming hardware is a notoriously difficult experience, but this year is particularly bad. All of Nvidia’s new RTX 30-series GPUs—as well as the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X—sell out in seconds once orders open up.Read more...

I love when a new browser update arrives, because it’s always fun to see which talked-about features are live and which require a little coaxing to appear. Such is the case with Google’s recent launch of Chrome 86, which rolled out to everyone yesterday.Read more...

My wife is a great flirt. With me, with her friends, with an audience. She knows that flirtation isn’t just for people you’re just getting to know. Flirtation is just as important years into a relationship as it is at the start. Maybe even more so.

Days after Regal announced the indefinite closures of their movie theaters in the U.S., we now know what will happen to their Unlimited subscription program, launched last July. The good news is that if you’re a subscriber, you won’t be paying for movies you can’t see (or losing rewards you can’t redeem)—but you can’t…Read more...

Even though my apartment rarely contains more than two people at a time, I cook as if I’m feeding a family of four. This is mostly due to my line of work, but it’s exacerbated by my tendency to overestimate how much food I can eat at any given meal. Food storage is therefore critical, and while I have tried a wide…Read more...

Welcome to the big day: The launch of System Reboot, Gizmodo’s new podcast on how to repair a broken world.Read more...

Last I checked, I have very good credit, but that fact has little to do with fiscal responsibility and a lot to do with automatic online bill pay. Every time I wind up with a bill I can’t set and forget—like the rent at my last apartment—I fail to pay it on time almost every month. And even when I do remember I need…Read more...

A Cyberpunk 2077 pre-order and The Mandalorian Monopoly lead Wednesday’s best deals.

There’s a reason why parents insist that kids wear helmets while riding bikes or scooters, and why many have become more hesitant before signing them up for Pee Wee football. We’ve learned a lot about concussions in recent years and, as parents, we’d really rather our children not experience head injuries.Read more...

Spotify rolled out its new “lyrics search” feature into all of its apps without fanfare, so you’re excused if you had no idea it even exists. (How many of us spend time typing out I would choke on the rinds, but the lack thereof would leave me empty inside into the search fields of our favorite music apps?)

Somehow, it has only been a week and a day since the first presidential debate of the 2020 election season. If you watched it, you may even still be recovering from the chaos. Well, it’s time to regroup, because the first and only vice presidential debate is on tonight. Here’s what to expect from the face-off between…Read more...

With the exception of my weekly Bake Off viewing, I don’t spend my free time watching very much food content, and I usually avoid any sort of celebrity cooking video. Having a lot of money is the ultimate hack, so—unless they’re the Barefoot Contessa or some other rich food personality—they rarely have any reason to…Read more...

Every time you take a photo with a digital camera or smartphone, your device adds extra information to the image file—metadata about the image that’s stored within the image itself. This EXIF data, as it’s known, is short for “Exchangeable Image File Format,” and it includes the date, time, and geographic location of…Read more...

What is the best printer for most people? Let’s face it: Most people don’t need a printer. At this point, putting ink to paper is pretty pointless and, barring a few specific cases, you’re going to dust off your printer once a month at best. That said, if you want maximum resolution and to ensure your ink tanks won’t…Read more...

Amazon Echo Show 5 + Blink Mini | $50 | Amazon Prime Day ExclusiveRead more...

Venmo unveiled a branded credit card to a limited number of its users yesterday, with plans for a US-wide launch in a few months. The card features a scannable QR code, some pretty good cash back rewards, and is simple to use.Read more...

Tuesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

As we hinted last week, our October challenge is an all-around health reset, aiming to help you get all the basics of your health back on track. Today we’re sharing a calendar with something small you can do each day for the next four weeks.Read more...

Great news for people who hate doing dishes: if you have a dishwasher, washing your dishes by hand is a colossal waste of water, energy, time, and money, and you can prove it with math.

I never gave much thought to the look of the various icons on my device—especially since I’m an iOS user, which means you’re generally stuck with what you get. However, the launch of iOS 10.3 back in 2017 let developers offer supplemental app icons people could use, and iOS 14 has blown the door wide open for…Read more...

Part of the “new normal” of the pandemic is the uptick in COVID-related scams. More than 200,000 Americans have lost a sum total of around $145 million to them since the start of the year, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Here are some of the common frauds catching people off guard.

Google’s October Android security patch is rolling out today. These regular updates patch OS-level security bugs for all Android devices, but this month’s patch also has a number of bug fixes for Pixel devices running Android 11.Read more...

I’m kidding. The photo is a joke, I’m not here to suggest you store your kid’s sippy cups by wedging them between two tree trunks. That seems like a solution that only works for this one specific sippy cup, and surely you’ve got more than one. In fact, you probably have multiple, as well as plastic water bottles of…Read more...

For a large portion of the country, it is grape season, a vastly underrated fruit season. Most of us have access to grapes all year, but fall is when they really show off. And whether you’re partaking of the season’s more unusual grape offerings or simply enjoying a standard green table grape, you should pick, wash,…Read more...

We test a lot of hacks from the youthful abyss that is TikTok, but today we are trying out something so austere, it has been covered in The Gray Lady. (I assume that this lady does not yet have a TikTok account, as we had to read written piece.)Read more...

Good sleep matters, but even if you have what it takes to get a good night’s rest you still have to combat the world around you. You can’t control the sun or the noise outside, but you can do a few things to make your bedroom dark and quiet when you need it so they don’t stand between you and a good night’s rest.

Karen Walrond has been many things in her life—a lawyer, speaker, photographer, author, leadership consultant, and a mother. She was born and raised in the Caribbean, met her husband-to-be in London, and they are now raising their teenage daughter, who they adopted at birth, in Texas. Walrond and her family are also…Read more...

A PlayStation Plus subscription and up to 30% off Anker speakers lead Tuesday’s best deals.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are the first living-room video game consoles to have all-digital versions at launch. That means no discs to fiddle with, and is a lower price tag—at first.Read more...

Even if they haven’t gone so far as to get formal self-defense training, many people (particularly women) have considered what strategies they’d deploy if they were attacked by a stranger. A popular thought is that one would use an object on your person as a weapon of defense—like keys, for instance.

If your WhatsApp conversations are anything like my Facebook ones, they’re probably stuffed with piles of GIFs, pictures, and videos. This normally isn’t a big deal, because all this content gets stored on a server somewhere—out of sight, out of mind.Read more...

In this pandemic era, true vacations are few and far between. Flying to a destination is not ideal unless absolutely necessary, and some places are re-imposing stricter quarantines and business closures in response to rising COVID-19 case numbers.

Luxury is a tricky concept. Expensive things are often thought of as luxurious, but luxury has less to do with price point, and more to do with time and labor. Though it shouldn’t be, having the time to shop, cook, and feed oneself at a leisurely pace is quite luxurious, as are goods that require a lot of labor or…Read more...

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten much better as a culture at recognizing burnout at work. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve made the changes necessary to address the root causes of burnout, even simply being able to identify when we’ve reached that point (or are about to) has been a step in the…Read more...

iPad 8th Gen (128GB, Gold) | $395 | Amazon

If you’re tired of seeing your mailbox stuffed with pre-screened credit offers, you can opt out from those mailings for five years, or even permanently. All it takes is filling out a form.

If you’re looking for a quick and dirty exit to a romantic entanglement with someone you’re not too likely to run into again, ghosting can seem like a tempting, blissfully simple option. (Especially when social venues are closed, and online dating makes for countless relationship options that are easy to enter, and…Read more...