Lifehacker

When you’re paying down a large debt like student loans, it can be hard to determine when it’s worth accelerating your efforts to get rid of that hefty balance. Should you put every extra dime toward your loans, or should you focus on saving money?Read more...

iOS: All you need to create interesting, high-quality video content these days is a smartphone. With the right apps, what used to require extra gear and software can mostly all be done on a single iPhone—including recording multiple shots simultaneously. That’s all thanks to DoubleTake, a free iOS app that can record…Read more...

When talking about cornstarch, a lot of emphasis is place on the importance of creating a slurry. Swirling and suspending the starch in water or milk (or some other liquid) keeps it from clumping up in your sauce and ensures everything thickens up all nice and even like. Slurries are important, but they are only part…Read more...

Surgical-style face masks can slightly reduce the risk of transmitting respiratory infections, but are they really a good strategy for protecting yourself? Yes and no—here’s the deal.Read more...

Those of you who own a somewhat-new Pixel 4 Android smartphone might have noticed that Google forces you to use gesture navigation to interact with the newer iteration of Google Assistant. It’s not the end of the world, but it might be annoying if you hate swiping instead of tapping tiny virtual buttons at the bottom…Read more...

We all know Facebook tracks what you do while using its apps and website, but the social media monolith also collects data from third-party apps, services, and websites, even when you’re not using Facebook. It’s one of the ways Facebook’s targeted ads become eerily specific and seem to know what you’ve been looking up…Read more...

One of the topics readers most often ask me to write about is anxiety and mental health—both our own and that of our kids. This week’s Parental Advisory question mirrors a common “what if” concern among parents:Read more...

Over at the New York Times, reporter Julie Weed described the difficulties of finding cheap airfare when it’s you versus airline software technology, which changes airfare prices multiple times a day to benefit the airline. The greatest takeaway? There’s no single “right time” to buy a flight, given the fluctuating…Read more...

You need a good credit score to get a credit card, but you need a credit history to have good credit. This catch-22 of personal finance can be challenging for young people who want to start building their credit history, and parents who want to set their children up on strong financial footing.Read more...

The next time you get a notification from a credit card company asking whether you’d be interested in a credit limit increase, go ahead and say yes. Why? Because it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to improve your credit score.Read more...

Smoke and salt go very well together—just ask any dad with a Big Green Egg. Though you’ll usually find the flavor combination in some sort of barbecued meat, it’s equally stellar in a martini.Read more...

Neoprene Mask, 3 Pack | $10 | Daily Steals | Promo code KJMSKRead more...

Does it feel a little stuffy in here?Read more...

I assume my son must have had a least a couple of rattles or shaky noise makers during his baby and toddler years. I don’t really remember them, though. What I do remember is the thing we created for him that quickly became his all-time favorite noise-maker. It was a pill bottle (with a child-proof lid) partially…Read more...

If something is free—especially if it’s a complicated something, or something you’d probably have to pay for otherwise—the familiar saying is often true: You’re the product. It’s one of the reasons you’re always being advertised to across the web. Search engines, email services, messaging platforms, or other apps and…Read more...

Back in September, Japan Airlines made headlines for changing some of its flights’ seat maps to including “child icons,” meaning young children would be seated in those spots—a change designed for other passengers to find seating away from those infants on flights.

Having a personal copy of your work emails can definitely come in handy both before and after you leave a job. You can refer to them later, for example, to document feedback you received or projects you worked on—perhaps for samples for your next gig.Read more...

The “final” Windows 7 update, version KB4534310, apparently introduces a new bug that will require at least one more patch to remove. The bug is benign—all it does is cause your desktop’s wallpaper to turn black when you’ve set it to “Stretch”—but it’s still annoying.

We’re learning how to practice true self-compassion this week with renowned psychotherapist and Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach. Tara is the author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, and most recently Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the…Read more...

Boundaries are how we communicate our expectations for a relationship, letting others know the kind of behavior we deem acceptable or not. We do this in small ways all the time, like asking a partner not to yell during an argument, or even just saying, “I’d rather not talk about this” to a friend. But setting these…Read more...

You thought you were done; you’d ditched the diapers and somehow, in just a matter of days, you had entered the magical word of accident-free living. But now, seemingly out of nowhere, your toddler has regressed. As frustrating and baffling as it can be, potty training regression is normal. It is common. And, best of…Read more...

The spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus (also known as 2019-nCoV) throughout mainland China and into other parts of the world is alarming, but it can be hard to understand the current scope of the outbreak without solid figures. For those who are curious (or concerned), the Center for Systems Science and Engineering…Read more...

Sprint is feeling mighty generous nowadays. If you’ve been dealing with a cracked screen on your Samsung phone, the carrier is offering a special promotion where it’ll fix said screen for a mere $50—a huge savings compared to the hundreds of dollars you’d otherwise spend at a Samsung-authorized repair center.Read more...

Targeted ads, the kind that might appear on your Facebook feed or Twitter timeline, can feel awfully invasive; after all, they often appear using personal information like your location, age or search history. And thanks to a new service making waves on social media, they’re likely about to target you even more…Read more...

What do you do if you’re at a party and one of your friends starts taking pictures? Do you accept that anything you do at the event might end up on Facebook or Instagram? Do you reluctantly squeeze into the back of the group selfie?Read more...

Up to 40% Off Select Honeywell Air Filters | Home DepotRead more...

Right before Thanksgiving, I told you all that you should let your kids eat nothing but rolls at the big meal, if all they desired were rolls. That stance, which I shall not budge on, is rooted in a basic two-part parenting principle that everyone should adopt: 1. Don’t pick your food battles in other people’s homes,…Read more...

Text-message reactions—a practice iPhone and iPad owners should be familiar with, where you long-press a message to append a little heart or thumbs up/thumbs down to something—are simple ways to convey a reaction without having to come up with something interesting to say. I find they save a ton of time on my iPhone,…Read more...

You’re at a party when an acquaintance you can’t stand walks in. Shit, you think. Do I have to say hello? Can I pretend I didn’t see them? What floor am I on and can I escape through the window, unscathed?

What’s that one nagging item that keeps rolling over from week to week on your to-do list? Mending the seam on your favorite shirt? Cleaning off your desk? Filing a month’s worth of mail?

The final eight episodes of BoJack Horseman arrive on Friday, so plan to have people over to watch because it’s the kind of show that’s better with a crowd and it’s been a long week; you can’t be bothered to go to someone else’s house when you’re this exhausted. Tell them to make you dinner.

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February brings with the season premiers of fan favorites like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Good Girls, which means those shows will also be making an appearance on Hulu in February as well. On February 14th the streaming service is also premiering Season 1 of its original show, High Fidelity. As a fan of the book and the…Read more...

A Costa Farms House Plants Gold Box, Flint and Tinder jackets, and a Greenworks Snow Thrower Gold Box lead off Sunday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Back in 2016, Twitter made the call to shut down Vine, a video service that it purchased that specialized in the creation of 6-second looping videos. Now, almost four years later, one of the co-creators of Vine has released an app that brings those videos back: Byte.

The 62nd Annual Grammy Awards air tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT. This year’s award’s show is going to be hosted by Alicia Keys, and is expected to include performances by the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, Aerosmith, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, and Lizzo, amongst others.

Since January 1, I’ve started each morning by clearing out a dozen or so friend requests from Facebook, all of them from people I don’t know.

Today is the 2020 Senior Bowl. College seniors and NFL Draft prospects from teams around the country will face off against each other at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, AL. The goal behind the event is to show off in front of NFL coaches who might be deciding whether or not to draft these same players.

I fly at least four times a month these days, often more. While I always check in to my flights online the day before and have the app installed on my phone, I also always stop by the kiosk when I get to the airport to print a paper boarding pass.

According to a recent Kaspersky investigation, the “Shlayer” malware—which deploys an “Any Search” bar on a victim’s computer through fake Adobe Flash updates, of all things—is the most popular Mac malware. Ars Technica has a detailed breakdown of the investigation that is worth a read, but you should know the easy…Read more...

Imagine, if you will, Lifehacker staff writer Josh Ocampo standing outside a Tokyo 7-Eleven, clutching his gut while on waiting on hold with his bank. The chip on Josh’s debit card had stopped working mid-trip, which meant he couldn’t take cash out of an ATM. And the local clinic that could treat ”the worst case of…Read more...

Last week we talked about how to make ab wheel rollouts suck less, but maybe that’s not your style. Maybe you want to see how much worse this exercise can get. Or at least have something to aspire to.Read more...

There isn’t a single member of the Negroni family I don’t enjoy. The combination of spirit, bitter, and vermouth in (fairly) equal parts never fails to create a balanced drink that’s perfect for sipping from a coupe in a refined manner. It also gets you drunk pretty quickly.Read more...

Disney+ is one of the newest streaming services on the block, but arguably the one with some of the best content out there right now.

It’s a phase that many toddlers go through—and who can blame them? These fancy, newfangled toilets with their automatic flushing (often multiple times in one sitting) do not exactly make the potty training process easier for anyone. They’re loud and they sound like they’re going suck you and everything around you down…Read more...

Jeff Bezos might be (much) wealthier than you, but he’s not smarter than you—at least, not when it comes to basic smartphone security. As you probably read and laughed at (and then sighed at, after you looked up how much Bezos makes each minute), Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently sent Bezos a video file…Read more...

Google Drive is now available as a progressive web app (PWA) for desktop and mobile, giving users an alternative to launching the service in their regular browsers. PWAs look and feel like stripped-down apps, even though they’re basically living in a stripped-down version of your browser. They’re like the middle…Read more...

As of Friday morning, the coronavirus outbreak in China has resulted in at least 26 deaths and 800 others sickened by the illness, according to local health officials. Currently, there is one confirmed case in the U.S., with twelve others currently being tested for the virus, CBS News reports.

One of the most basic ways to save money, according to every personal finance book and website you’ve encountered in the past two decades, is to buy in bulk. Not only will you save money by snagging a lower per-unit price on the larger product, they all claim—you’ll also reduce your number of trips to the store for…Read more...

If your expenses and your income don’t match up, you have two options: cut back on your spending, or figure out a way to earn more money.Read more...