Lifehacker

Every home baker wants a stand mixer, and they often go on sale just in time for holiday gift-giving. If you’re committed to buying one for yourself or someone you love this year, don’t default to the cheapest Kitchenaid on Amazon. Depending on your needs, a vintage mixer might actually be a better choice.

If you were hoping to apply for an Affordable Care Act health insurance plan for 2020, you should know that the deadline for applications submitted through Healthcare.gov has been extended.Read more...

BioLite FirePit and Solar Carry Case | $200 | Amazon | Use the promo code KINJAFIRERead more...

While you’re thinking about your own financial lessons from the past year, take a look at some of the most popular stories here at Two Cents in 2019. They range from the practical to the absurd, but they’re all on this list for a reason: They contained some kernel of financial wisdom you can take away and apply to…Read more...

A solid plumbing system, if well-maintained, could—and should—last for decades. This is a good thing, because replacing the whole thing is a huge and costly project.

It’s a pretty well-known fact that Alexa-enabled devices and Google Home products record everything you say to them. What you may not know is how to delete these recordings or turn this feature off entirely. In the video above, I show you how.Read more...

We’ve all got stories about that neighbor. The one who never cuts the grass. The one who never cleans up after their dog. The one who plays video games—with the sound enhanced by a subwoofer—in the middle night, right up against your shared bedroom wall.Read more...

We all know the tricks about when to buy airline tickets, like booking exactly 65 days in advance of your planned departure date or on a Tuesday morning because that’s when flights are cheapest for some reason. But when is the best time to purchase upgrades?

GoPenguin Travel Toiletry Bag | $8 | Amazon | Clip coupon and use promo code 4BPV3YJARead more...

Email newsletters keep blowing up, so we’re following up on Lifehacker’s 2017 staff recs with a new batch of our favorite newsletters. Here’s what kept us informed and entertained in 2019.Read more...

As you install more and more software on your Mac, your menu bar might start to get cluttered with extraneous icons. This not only looks messy, but it can make it a bit of a chore to access settings for your various apps.

We’ve all heard the phrase “engage your core” as it relates to lifting. And your core strength is crucial—we’ve written about it in the past—it’s the difference between a crappy deadlift and a great one. Or a mediocre pushup and one with perfect form. Basically, if you’re doing anything requiring some kind of…Read more...

No matter how many sci-fi movies depict it, we’re not going to be able to achieve eternal life by uploading a digital version of our consciousness to the cloud anytime soon.

While taking a peaceful scroll through your Facebook feed, you may have seen videos of Snoop Dogg advertising a debt relief program from something called the Debt Council.

A lot of advice about persuasion assumes a relatively equal power dynamic. But sometimes you need to persuade someone higher up than you in a hierarchy: your boss, their boss, a project leader. For that you need four specific strategies: focus on common goals, get to a neutral space, let them build your case with you,…Read more...

Electric cars might be the way of the future, but the variations in charging plugs across different brands and models make finding a compatible electric vehicle (EV) charging station a lot more difficult than simply pulling up to a gas station. Thankfully, Google Maps on Android now has an “Electric vehicle settings”…Read more...

Last week, I wrote about a resource for parents of children with autism—a book that outlines parenting advice from adults who also have autism. It struck me as such an important concept that we can often overlook when our children receive a diagnosis or struggle in a way that is personally unfamiliar to us; we ask…Read more...

Ever dreamed of making a podcast of your own? Of being the next Teri Gross or Joe Rogan? This week we’re learning how with the help of Lifehacker’s own video producer Abu Zafar. Abu recently produced a 3-part video series for Lifehacker called How to Start a Podcast and he joins us this week to talk about some of the…Read more...

I don’t need more than good ol’ Alexa on my Echo, but if you’d prefer to chat with Samuel L. Jackson, Gordon Ramsay, or Pikachu (to name a few celebrity voices), you have options. Jackson is my favorite of the bunch, but he’s not free: it’s $0.99 to download the skill right now, which will bump up to a whopping $4.99…Read more...

You might already be wary of gas pump skimmers that can steal your payment information from the card reader. Now, Visa has issued a warning about a new threat at the pump: hackers working through the gas station’s sales system.

Everyone who eats chicken loves a boneless, skinless thigh. Juicy, tender, and well suited to everything from flash-frying to slow braising, they’re the perfect cut for just about any recipe. But all this is common knowledge by now, which means boneless thighs aren’t the budget-friendly hack they were even a few years…Read more...

Vanna White has been turning letters on Wheel of Fortune for 36 years, and has worn nearly 7,000 evening gowns in the process.Read more...

There are lots of reasons you might want to start working from your home, after you’ve become a parent. The commute is eating up too much of your day; you want to move to be closer to extended family but you want to take your job with you; or you simply crave the additional flexibility that working from home can…Read more...

I used to be a big fan of Starbucks’ wacky contests—those that reward you randomized stickers, tokens, or other trinkets on a digital playing field for completing various “buy stuff from Starbucks” challenges. And in saying that, I might as well be saying, “I’m a sucker.” It’s a lot shorter.Read more...

Oral B, Crest, and Gilette Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

Redditors love to ask each other for their favorite fun, mindblowing, counterintuitive, or disturbing facts. Every few months a new “fun fact” thread ends up on the front page of Reddit, and thousands of people pitch in with their favorites. I looked at years’ worth of threads, collected the very best facts, and…Read more...

It’s awards season, and Netflix has got a few certain winners in the mix. If you’ve already hoovered Marriage Story and The Irishman, you’ll want to set aside Friday for the big premiere of The Two Popes, which stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as Benedict and Francis, and is essentially exactly the same as The…Read more...

KitchenAid Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

Over the past few months I’ve had to go to a handful of different doctor’s appointments around town. I live in San Francisco and don’t own a car, so going to those appointments always means Lyfting to them. Without fail, before each and every one of them I end up getting ready to head out the door and then realize I…Read more...

Last night I attended a holiday party where my contribution was a plate of sausage and cheese balls and a 750ml bottle of Old Fashioneds. Both were well received, but the Old Fashioned perhaps caught the most attention. As it turns out, a lot of the party-goers had never considered making a bunch of them at once, and…Read more...

Last month Instagram started hiding the likes on some posts from U.S. accounts. The idea behind the move was to allow users to “focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes you get.”

Lifewit Shoe Storage Organizer, 2 Pack | $22 | Amazon | Promo code L9AO7OQ4Read more...

Working from home is fantastic in a lot of ways. Working alone at home can make things like lunch breaks and what clothing you’re wearing pretty flexible. It can also something like cleaning up your space optional, in some cases so optional that you might not do it all. No one is going to see your home office, right?

YouTube can be a great place to find music to listen to. Since it’s a video site; however, often that music comes with a video that can be distracting when you’re really just looking for some tunes. Music Mode is a Chrome Extension that can help.

This morning Samuel L. Jackson helped me out with a little holiday baking. By “help,” I mean that was the one that told me it was time to take some cookies out of the oven, a job normally reserved for my kitchen Alexa.

LG 27" 4K UHD IPS Monitor with FreeSync | $300 | AmazonRead more...

For eight years, I’ve been unable to grow leg hair along my shins.

Just in the nick of time before a new round of tariffs was supposed to go into effect, the U.S. and China have announced a limited deal to end the trade war. Eventually.

The Game Awards were last night. And while we do love a pretty trophy (and are sad The Outer Worlds didn’t take top honors), there’s more to the event than pixel pageantry. Coinciding with the big day, there’s also a PC “Game Festival” going on—all on Steam—that features some great time-locked demos you can play right…Read more...

An annoying lock screen bug has been bothering some unlucky Android users for months now, locking them out of their devices by way of a weird authentication loop. The bug has been present as far back as September, when it was originally spotted on Pixel XL devices. It remains unfixed and, worse, seems to be cropping…Read more...

With Boris Johnson winning the election in Britain, you’ve probably seen a bunch of headlines about how Brexit is sure to happen. But it’s not that simple. Let’s break down the event and what it means for the U.K.—and what it might (eventually) mean for us in the U.S.

Tonight’s nearly full moon is still a visual treat in the night sky, but there’s another light show going on at the same time: the Geminid meteor shower. It’s the second-to-last meteor shower of the year.Read more...

Do you love birds? Do you also not hate being outside in the cold? There’s an annual census of birds that occurs each year around this time, and in many locations there’s still time to sign up to help.Read more...

When we got all excited about Apple’s new Communication Limits that allow you to restrict who your kid can talk to (and when), we didn’t realize Apple left a big loophole that makes it very easy for your crafty child to bypass these restrictions.Read more...

Google Photos has a few AI-driven features that enhance your photos and build “automated creations” on your behalf—such as slideshow videos, collages, and animations of your shots. For example, the Google Photos AI might create a slideshow based on your hiking adventure last weekend, giving you a neat way to view your…Read more...

With all the hacks we test every day, it’s hard to differentiate which ones are trendy, and which are real game changers.Read more...

If you’re flying home for the holidays, get ready for lines of all kinds—according to a forecast by advocacy group Airlines for America, more than 47 million Americans will fly in the days leading up to Christmas and through January 5, 2020, representing roughly 2.6 million passengers a day.

God I love content-aware fill. At Lifehacker I frequently want to illustrate a post with an image that’s not wide enough (like above). So I throw it into Photoshop, I expand the canvas size, I select the new blank parts on the sides, and I hit my cmd+option+F—my custom shortcut for Edit > Content-Aware Fill.

Closing a credit card isn’t always great for your credit score. If you’re closing your oldest credit card, for example, it might reduce your overall age of credit— and the credit bureaus often dole out a few extra credit score points for people who have maintained the same credit accounts for, like, decades.Read more...

A holiday riff on a classic cocktail is a fine thing, but the “seasonal twist” always seems to start and stop with cinnamon. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with cinnamon—it’s accessible and uncontroversial, it reads as sweet without adding actual sweetness, and it is even purportedly good for your blood…Read more...