Lifehacker

I grew up in North Carolina, a few miles from the campuses of Duke and UNC. The rivalry between the two schools is a serious one, even in just a regular game, but today’s game could determine who is the No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, which makes the stakes even higher.

I started covering the camera on my laptop around five years ago. At the time, my decision was prompted less by a security concern and more because someone handed me a camera cover at a conference, but the threat is most definitely real.

Come on now, we’ve all done it.

This week, while rearranging my bar cart, I rediscovered a bottle of cachaça, which I had only ever used to make the iconic caipirinha. It’s a great drink, but I hate monotony, even in my cocktails, which led to me searching the internet for other, non-caipirinha uses for the Brazilian sugar cane spirit.Read more...

I confess, I haven’t really touched iOS shortcuts much since the feature’s big debut last September, but don’t let my laziness dissuade you from fiddling around with them. If you’re just getting started, you should find some awesome premade shortcuts to integrate into your device instead of spending way too much time…Read more...

The A.V. Club Stan Lee’s Captain Marvel cameo raises a lot of questions | Splinter Here’s Donald Trump With the Founder of Robert Kraft’s Favorite Massage Parlor | The Concourse What You Need To Know About Meghan McCain’s Jewish Heritage | The Muse A Quick Reminder That Hae Min Lee’s Family Didn’t Ask For This | The…Read more...

There’s no shortage of rewards credit cards out there, and as more players enter the game, redemption opportunities are widening as well. But as Dan Frommer points out for Eater, redeeming your points for travel rewards is likely the best value.Read more...

As a millennial, I’m being ruined financially by avocados. I can’t stop smearing them on every possible edible surface—and they’re so dang expensive! That’s why this little tip on how to get the most avocado meat for your buck is so exciting.Read more...

Baby Shark doo doo doo doo doo doo. Turns out that the pervasive toddler tune about a generation of sea life can more than drive parents crazy after hearing it for the 28th time today: It can help save a life.

Here’s a reminder: Even if you’ve preemptively frozen your credit reports, you should check them for suspicious activity every few months.

So you’ve finally booked that overseas vacation that’s been marked on your calendar for months now. Congratulations!

As a parent, you might walk past your child’s room and see her happily typing away on a Google Docs page. “Lovely!” you think. “She’s probably working on her science report or finishing up her essay on the rise of RBG.”

I’m trying to stop saying “I know.” I say it too much to my friends or my wife when they’re just trying to be helpful. But unless someone’s actually being a dick or assuming I’m an idiot, I don’t need to protect my ego that hard. I win more points if I say “Thanks!” or “That’s true!” and keep the conversation going.…Read more...

A very common, almost tired complaint you hear about recipe blogs is that it takes too long get to the actual recipe. Usually, doing so requires scrolling past a story involving at least one elderly matriarch, a note on a husband’s manly appetite, and six photos of the same bowl of soup. (Sometimes there is also a…Read more...

My husband and I have both been eyeglass/contact-wearers since childhood, so I’ve always assumed it’s only a matter of time before things start to get a little blurry for our son. But he hasn’t started squinting or complaining of headaches, and he gets a yearly vision screening at school, so I figured all is well for…Read more...

Recycling is in trouble. There are many reasons for this, chief among them a string of new bans and restrictions on recycled goods set forth by China. But there’s another, related reason why so much of what Americans try to recycle is now winding up at an incinerator or a landfill.

A diversified portfolio is one of the keys to a successful long-term investment strategy. But can your assets ever be too diversified?

Do more with your freezer.Read more...

Deadspin Antonio Brown Is Still A Steeler Because He Didn’t Want To Be A Bill | The A.V. Club After three super fiascos, Deadpool finally made a superstar out of Ryan Reynolds | Jezebel Heidi Montag On The Hills’s Lack of Diversity: ‘Audrina Has Darker Hair’ | The Root Thin Skin Mints: Conservative Columnist Wants to…Read more...

The iPhone’s brightness doesn’t go low enough. In the pitch dark, even the dimmest setting can be too bright. But you can make the iPhone’s dimmest setting even dimmer, thanks to a tip from redditor manawesome326. We’ll take you through it step by step.

Everyone has questions about wireless networking—and that’s totally OK. There’s plenty you might not know about wifi, even if you’ve successfully set up your router and are sitting there, right now, browsing Lifehacker on your laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet.

Deadspin Andrew Wiggins Update: Ah, Hm, Well, The Thing Is | The A.V. Club The Passion Of The Christ was the blunt-force weapon evangelicals were looking for | The Slot ‘The Mother’ and Alabama’s Baby Roe Case | Splinter Oh God No Oh God No Oh God No Oh God No | The Grapevine This Ain’t It, Amanda Seales |Read more...

You remember America’s Funniest Videos, right? That 90s homemade video clip show hosted by Bob Saget that mostly featured people falling and pets doing weird things?

As our sister site Kotaku has explained, all video games should let you pet the animals. Sadly, many games include dogs, but no way to pet them. Until Congress gets its act together and outlaws this oversight, a new Twitter account, Can You Pet the Dog?, tells you which games do and don’t let you pet the dog. And it’s…Read more...

I grew up in a house of caffeine obsessives. My father drinks a whole pot before anyone else even opens their eyes, and my mother and sisters drink much more throughout the day than their tiny bodies should be able to process (at five-foot-four, I am the tall one). When I’m around them, I feel like I too am a coffee…Read more...

As a bookish, curious kid growing up in a rural, working class area in the 90s, my life revolved around three things: my soccer team, the library, and Pizza Hut. The latter two were intrinsically connected for reasons I will explain shortly (and the first certainly helped burn off the calorific aftereffects of the…Read more...

Few things are more frustrating than a canceled flight, particularly in the U.S. You can be strung along for hours, waiting with your increasingly agitated fellow travelers, only to be told you’ll have to wait until the next day to actually take your flight.

When my daughter was a toddler, she loathed brushing her teeth, but once we found a toothpaste flavor she enjoyed (pink bubble gum, of course), her perspective immediately shifted to “OOOH CANDY!” Every time I squeezed some onto her toothbrush, she complained, “That’s so little!” She wanted a whole mouthful of the…Read more...

It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you need another thing to help yourself get organized, even if you’re feeling fatigue about all the apps and services you’re already wrangling. Notion is an all-in-one workspace app that can help you feel less overwhelmed with all the pieces of a particular project, even if…Read more...

If you’ve ever worked from home with a young child underfoot, you know it is an unwritten rule that the second you get on an important phone call, your kids will spill something, hurt something or just generally need SOMETHING from you.Read more...

The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine is a fertility clinic that helps patients and researches new genetic approaches to fighting infertility and hereditary disease. Dr. Mandy Katz-Jaffe works in research and patient care, developing the genetic technologies that she and her team use in their practice. We…Read more...

If your closet is anything like mine, it’s full of things you should probably toss.

The average new car payment is $551 per month, that is up ten percent compared to three years ago. Car buyers that bought or leased cars back in 2016 are getting some sticker shock and that is leading to some of them putting themselves into dangerous financial situations.

Granting permissions to apps takes a certain level of trust—trust that an app is honest about the parts of your phone’s hardware and operating system it has access to, and what it does with the data therein. Trust is especially crucial with VPN apps, the point of which is to obfuscate your mobile internet activity…Read more...

At this point in my life and career, I feel I have a handle on how to peel and eat fruit, but every once in a while I’m surprised by an approach I had not previously considered (like peeling a mango with a pint glass, which works very well). I am not, however, impressed with the technique shown in this viral tweet.Read more...

Think about the last time you had an awkward interaction, or made a small mistake at work. What was your reaction?

Android / iOS: A Lifehacker reader alerted me about the existence of Ubiquiti’s WiFiman app in a recent Tech 911 post—thanks, Rick!—and I wholeheartedly recommend it if you’re an Android user. The app also exists for iOS, and it has a few fun features, but it’s not nearly as useful for learning more about all the wifi…Read more...

Weary moms and dads, ever wish you could do more parenting while lying down? Behold, this T-shirt designed by Japanese software engineer Ken Kawamoto.

The Concourse Alex Trebek Has Cancer. Damn, Damn, Damn. | Very Smart Brothas Your R. Kelly Jokes and Memes Ain’t Funny | Splinter The Leaked Chats That Show How a Far-Right Group Is Trying to Infiltrate the GOP | TV Club After a creative exodus, is the magic gone from American Gods? | Jezebel R. Kelly Thinks His…Read more...

It has come to my attention that not everyone is eating their brie rind. This is silly, because brie rind is good, and—if you’re scraping the the gooey center out of a wedge on a communal cheese plate—it’s pretty dang rude. But even beyond brie, a lot of folks shy away from perfectly edible, sometimes delicious rinds,…Read more...

A security flaw in Google Chrome was under active attack last week; although Google’s most recent Chrome update (hopefully) automatically fixed the problem in your browser, it’s important that you double-check that you’re running the newest version (72.0.3626.121).Read more...

If you replaced your iPhone battery with a third-party alternative and need your device repaired, you’re in luck: Apple will now service iPhones with third-party batteries, MacRumors reports.

As a parent, the idea that my kid—or any kid I know—could be thinking about suicide is one I’d like to push far, far away. No. God, no. Not possible.Read more...

I hang my geeky head in shame for never trying this earlier, but I just noticed the other day that you can right-click in Gmail to pull up a useful Gmail-themed context menu. In fact, it’s probably faster to organize your emails this way then to select an email and use the chubbier buttons toward the top of Gmail’s UI…Read more...

Who can we really trust among Amazon, Yelp, and the countless other review site that depend on customer intel to inform buying decisions?Read more...

There’s a statistic for everything, especially in investing. Writers and financial experts love to pick out minutiae from the markets and posit that they mean something BIG and EXPLOSIVE about the state of the economy—and now that you know it too, you have some sort of investing edge. (If you were paying attention to…Read more...

Regular cleaning of your kitchen requires you to either ignore what’s going on underneath your fridge, or moving it so you can clean properly. Here’s how to do the latter, because eventually the former will catch up with you.Read more...

I’ve traded old, expired car seats for sweet coupons at Target in the past, but if these types of promos didn’t exist, I wouldn’t know what to do with these clunky things. In researching how to recycle a car seat, I’ve learned that it is quite the process. You can look for a local recycler that will accept it, but…Read more...

You’re in a rush to get to work when suddenly all hell breaks loose—on your face, that is.

As of this week, Windows 10 Mail finally has a Dark Mode worth using. After a few weeks of testing with Insiders, the upgraded Mail and Calendar app now includes a more useful version of the feature for the email side of the app: one that actually makes the whole app dark, and offers the ability to quickly go “bright”…Read more...