Lifehacker

We’re told to trust our gut when it comes to decision-making—but we also know that our gut can lead us astray.Read more...

Perhaps the most annoying response to “I don’t like that” is “You’d like mine,” but that’s exactly what Jeffrey Morgenthaler said to me when I told him I hated eggnog. Even more annoying? He was correct. Jeff’s nog is the only good nog, and it is made with tequila.

If you weren’t able to pick up a Google Home Mini for someone on your holiday shopping list, don’t fret—Google and Spotify are giving them away for free to all Spotify subscribers.

If you want to support a nonprofit organization without donating money, you can give your time by volunteering or spreading the word about the their work. Or, you could shop on Amazon to support your favorite charity.

I came across an advice column in The Guardian recently that weighed on my heart. A mother wrote in to ask for advice because her 10-year-old son had been talking about how nobody cared about him, he wished he’d never been born and his life wasn’t worth living. He had also, she said, mentioned suicide in “non-specific…Read more...

iOS 13.3 is here. While you wait for it to download and install onto your device, you have two options. You can scan through Apple’s list of fixes and changes—which only eat up a fraction of the time it takes to just download iOS 13.3—or you can stick with us, and we’ll show you how to set up the big parental control…Read more...

Last week, we discussed the ins and outs of buying a second seat on a flight just because you feel like it, damn it. This week, in other ways airlines get you to spend your money, former NBA player for the Golden State Warriors, Festus Ezeli, tweeted his experience on a recent Alaska Airlines flight—when the airline…Read more...

Echo Dot + 1-Month of Amazon Music Unlimited | $11 | Amazon | $9 for Prime membersRead more...

Google’s new “Feature Drop” program kicks off this month for the Pixel 2, 3, 3a, and 4 smartphones (XL models are included). There’s a lot you’ll find in this inaugural feature drop—though not all features apply to all Pixel phones—so here’s a quick list of the full batch of features and which phones are getting them:Read more...

If somebody wants to refer to a person whose gender they do not know, or who doesn’t have a gender, they can use a certain very common English language pronoun. You know which one I mean. I just used it twice. Congratulations to they on being Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.Read more...

Decorating Christmas cookies is an activity I desperately want to enjoy, but my lack of fine motor skills and short attention span make it difficult. Filling—and then using—a piping bag is also pretty terrible. There is no hack for instilling artistic talent into these talentless hands, but a squeeze-able sauce bottle…Read more...

Sometimes, when your toddler is throwing a fit because they asked for a banana and then you give them a banana, and the thought might cross your mind: Who or what is this irrational being sitting before me? It’s like I’m dealing with an alien life form that can’t adapt to its new environment. That is when it’s time to…Read more...

Two bagged salad recalls might make you want to skip your servings of vegetables this week. Or maybe forever.

Forwarding emails is an easy way to keep multiple parties in the loop on important conversations, but you used to be able to only forward one message at a time in Gmail. That’s all changing now—for better or worse, if your friends and loved ones like to blast you with annoying chain messages—as Gmail now lets you…Read more...

There are many reasons why you might want to track some of the locations you visit in Google Maps, but maybe not all of them. You might not want your friends and loved ones (with access to your phone or account) to know you hit up the local dispensary. Perhaps you’re planning a surprise party for someone and need to…Read more...

If you’ve been exploring your family tree through GEDmatch—which used to be a niche genetic genealogy site—you should know that they’ve been bought by a forensic genomics firm, Verogen. The privacy policy has not changed, though.Read more...

In the days leading up to Black Friday, FedEx estimated that they would ship 33 million packages on one day alone. And while Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals have mostly come and gone, it isn’t the end of shipping madness for companies like FedEx or UPS. UPS expects to ship 750 million packages this holiday…Read more...

I started preparing for next year’s taxes in October of this year. By the first week of November, I sent my CPA a prepared document listing my current business income and expenses (aka a “profit and loss statement”) as well as my anticipated income and expenses for the remaining two months of the year.Read more...

Cinnamon rolls are a pretty standard Christmas morning breakfast, but those made with store-bought dough rarely bake up as soft and gooey as their homemade counterparts. This is not to say they are bad, but I think the canned rolls work far better as waffles.Read more...

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. I work downstairs in business development. Can I pitch you some ideas over lunch?

If your allergies are acting up, chances are there’s dust hidden all over your house.Read more...

Sometimes parents wish they could have a conversation do-over with their kids. A “big talk” can smack us in the face when we least expect it. This week’s Parental Advisory question comes from the parent of a child who, at 6 years old, heard and subsequently used the N-word for the first time. But did they handle it…Read more...

TaoTronics Bluetooth Earbuds | $10 | Amazon | Clip coupon & use promo code KINJA070Read more...

As much as I’d love to have a single Google Calendar that tracks all my stuff, I don’t. Neither do you, I bet; from work, to rehearsals, to shared roommate house calendars, to calendars for that nonprofit you volunteer at, we all have to manage many events within our complicated lives. And Google’s making that …Read more...

In May, six tourists died of carbon monoxide poisoning while staying at an Airbnb rental property in Santiago, Chile. This wasn’t an isolated incident. In 2018, a couple visiting San Miguel de Allende, Mexico also died after unknowingly inhaling gas emitted by a heater in their Airbnb rental.

There’s a whole world out there dedicated to car modifications and aftermarket parts designed to improve your vehicle’s performance. You could probably wax poetic about which mod is the best for days—but Wyatt Knox from Team O’Neil Rally School has a pretty hot take for y’all: it’s not about what you add. It’s about…Read more...

You may reliably tip your dog walker, hairstylist, or babysitter for their time and services. But do you remember to give those same people an end-of-year bonus tip or gift? It turns out, we may not all be as diligent about handing out holiday tips or gifts to service providers as we might have expected

Do people still use Windows 7? Absolutely. And if they cling to it past January 14 of this coming year, they’ll have to pay a fee to Microsoft to continue to receive security updates. Most people won’t (and can’t) do this, as Microsoft’s paid security updates are geared only toward businesses, but a clever little hack…Read more...

As reporters raced this summer to bring new details of Ring’s law enforcement contracts to light, the home security company, acquired last year by Amazon for a whopping $1 billion, strove to underscore the privacy it had pledged to provide users.

Chrome 79 adds a new “shared clipboard” option to the desktop and Android versions of the browser, and it’s a welcome feature. It’s now a lot easier to ship notes, links, or reminders between your phone and desktop—no more third-party apps or wonky copy-and-pastes in Google Drive.Read more...

‘Tis the season to be partying and, when planning a festive gathering, it helps to have a theme, focus, or motif. I enjoy almost any kind of party, but my current favorite party concept is D&D—as in “dips and drinks.”Read more...

There are a slew of things for parents to be concerned about as our kids begin to navigate social media, online multiplayer games and the wider Internet on their own. There’s cyber bulling, hate speech and porn, to start with. But sexual predators also should be at the top of the list, having found online multiplayer…Read more...

Josh Gondelman, a.k.a. “The Nicest Guy in Comedy,” joins us this week to talk about what being nice really is, when it’s a quality that is not helpful, and the difference between “nice-ness” and “goodness”. Josh is a Peabody- and Emmy-winning comedy writer who has worked on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and is…Read more...

We’ve all seen that Peloton ad where a woman is gifted one of the company’s very fancy bikes. Some people find the ad cringe-inducing and bizarre; others would freaking kill for a Peloton under the tree.Read more...

Despite their convenience and user-friendly interfaces, ride-share apps like Uber still come with certain safety risks. According to its first public safety report ever, Uber said that 3,045 sexual assaults were reported among rides in the U.S. last year—a slight uptick from 2,936 reports in 2017.Read more...

Everyone poops. But not everyone poops the same.Read more...

iOS: If you listen to podcasts in the morning, maybe you should jump right into one from the moment you wake up. Next Up synchs with Apple’s Podcasts app to turn your favorite podcast into your alarm clock.

I often recommend Firefox over Google Chrome when it comes to user privacy, but despite the legitimate concerns over how much data Google collects on its users, the company has become pretty good about giving us control over how that data is handled—including letting us set timers to automatically delete some of that…Read more...

Most of us want to spend less time staring at screens and more time interacting with the world around us—which is all very well and good until you realize that you can’t navigate that world without a map, and you can’t meet up with someone without reaching out to them in some way beforehand, and it’s a lot easier to…Read more...

As one pediatrician and author says, some kids are like dandelions. They’re fairly resilient, able to cope with stress, change and adversity. And others are like more like orchids; they’re more sensitive, seeming to feel things more deeply or struggle with change or the unexpected. If you’re the parent to one of these…Read more...

If you’re someone who spends most of your day sitting at a desk, chances are you know how awful it can make you feel at the end of the day. Here’s how to set up an ergonomic workspace to keep you comfortable and injury-free.Read more...

Do you listen to The Upgrade, Lifehacker’s weekly podcast? It’s time to make your voice heard. We want to know what we doing better. What do you like about The Upgrade? What do you want to hear more of? What do you wish we would do differently?

Microsoft’s decision to reset the passwords of 44 million accounts, is actually a good thing. If your account is affected, thank Father Gates, because Microsoft is alerting you to the fact that it searched a database of more than three billion leaked accounts and found information belonging to yours.Read more...

In a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, Fakespot, a website that helps track fake reviews, estimated that more than one-third of reviews on major websites like Amazon and Walmart.com are a sham, generated mostly by robots or just people sponsored to write good reviews. Of course, this shouldn’t come as much of…Read more...

I’ve had the same phone number since 2003, and my father used the same phone number for at least five years prior to that. As far as my personal identity goes, my phone number ranks higher than my first AOL Instant Messenger username and somewhere just below my Social Security number.

Netflix! Disney+ and Hulu haven’t won yet! Don’t stop trying! What the hell is this slate of streamables? It’s the Slate of the Defeated, a weak, end-of-year nothingfest that says “Why bother?”. If you have to watch Netflix, you have to watch 6 Underground (Friday), a Ryan Reynolds-Mélanie Laurent flick in which a…Read more...

I’m a tremendous fan of a good road trip. I’ve driven across the country on three separate occasions, and love the experience of taking in all the oddities and experiences you get to have along the way.

Target is offering its gift cards for 10% off today, making it a great time to bring up my greatest holiday gift shopping tip again: buy discounted gift cards for yourself.

If you’re shopping for new clothing, then finding the thing you want is a relatively easy proposition. When you’re looking for vintage clothing; however, finding that perfect jacket, bag, or pair of jeans gets a bit more complicated. Gem is a website and app that can help.

10% Off Target Gift Cards | Target