Lifehacker

In recent months Google Maps has gotten pretty persistent about letting me know where there are restaurants it thinks I should try or new places opening up in my neighborhood — and I hate it. As it turns out, I don’t really need the app to tell me what’s going on around me, and with each hot tip I get more and more…Read more...

Growing up, my mom would always turn on NPR when we would leave the house. Her idea was that if a potential burglar was scoping out the place they would hear the radio and either think the speakers were in the house, or at the very least think there was someone at home listening to the broadcast. I’m not sure how…Read more...

A good number of the trips I take, especially the trips I take to visit my family across the country, are done at relatively randomly-selected times. There’s not a reason I need to be home one weekend over the other, I just picked one, looked at prices, and booked a flight.

We’re serving up deals on a $70 Anova sous vide machine, a home theatre projector, a Masterbuilt electric smoker, and many more.Read more...

This $287 Masterbuilt 40-inch electric smoker makes cooking jerky, brisket, or (insert meat of your choice) as easy as dropping in some wood chips and hitting a few buttons. With 975 square inches of cooking space, it’s great for cookouts and family meal prepping. This model even has a remote control so you change…Read more...

Deadspin How ESPN Ended Up Paying Brett McMurphy To Post The Year’s Biggest College Football Story On Facebook | The Root The 8 Kinds of Black Donald Trump Supporters | Jezebel Bachelor’s Bekah Martinez Has Accused Bachelorette’s Leo Dottavio of Sexual Harassment [Updated] | Splinter Andrew Sullivan Can Fuck Right Off…Read more...

McDonald’s is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Big Mac this week. To celebrate, it started passing out MacCoins at its stores yesterday, a currency of sorts that can be used to, well, buy Big Macs. You get one by purchasing a Big Mac from the company using real money, making it essentially an elaborate buy one,…Read more...

It feels like Google has held the market on “point your camera at it to learn more” technology for some time now, first through its Translate app, which let you target signs in foreign languages with your smartphone’s camera and receive translations on the fly, and now via Lens, which expands this technology to give…Read more...

When you just want to turn your brain off and sleep, meditation apps are perfect. A guiding voice, or the sounds of something peaceful like rain, helps to fill the silence so your thoughts can’t creep in. The best ones strategically bore you into drowsiness. (You can look for sleep-focused meditation tracks, but I’m…Read more...

You know those viral videos where it looks like you’re spying on a text conversation? They vary in satisfaction, but they’re hard to turn away from. That’s sort of the concept behind Amazon Rapids, the chat-style storytelling app for kids ages 5-12. Young readers follow along as stories unfold through text bubbles.…Read more...

The almighty recommendation algorithm works in mysterious ways, and not always for the best. If your Netflix homepage has become an echo chamber, a little change in perspective could help you find your new favorite movie.

Sometimes you want to Google (or Bing? up to you...) something, but opening up another browser tab feels like a touch too much effort. If you use MacOS, try this handy keyboard command that makes search queries from Spotlight automatically open in your default browser’s search engine.

In my mind, egg whites exist only as a delivery system for egg yolks. Though they are a great source of protein, whites have almost no flavor, which is why I’ve never understood those people who add more of them to their scramble. (I don’t understand athletes, is what I’m saying.) Yolks should be the star of any egg…Read more...

When last we corralled the Lifeahacker staff’s Weekly Upgrades, our editors were buying a bunch of new headphones, improving our online security, figuring out ways to survive the summer heat, and working on our sleeping habits.Read more...

The Trump administration has made it easier for people whose employers don’t offer health insurance benefits to buy short term plans that are cheaper than plans compliant with the Affordable Care Act, but offer far fewer benefits and don’t have to cover pre-existing conditions.

“It’s very easy to get intimidated,” says Hamayal Choudhry, the robotics engineer who co-created the smartARM, a robotic hand prosthetic that uses a camera to analyze and manipulate objects. “You have this idea for a project, then think, I don’t know a thing about this.” Here’s how Choudhry and his partner Samin Khan,…Read more...

Happy weekend, and welcome back to 3-Ingredient Happy Hour, the weekly drink column featuring super simple yet delicious libations. Today we are going to be playing around with a sweet and tart three-ingredient icon: the margarita.Read more...

If you’ve been patiently waiting for a simplehuman trash can to go on sale, today’s your lucky day. This 10 gallon stainless steel step can is $30 off, the best discount we’ve seen in a year, and just $2 away from its all-time low price.Read more...

Accidentally leaving a child in a hot car is a tragic mistake that anyone could make. Blame our faulty brains, among other things. (And if you haven’t read Gene Weingarten’s 2009 Washington Post story on hot car deaths, make a point to do so—it’s masterful.) As parents, the sooner we realize we’re not insusceptible,…Read more...

When you’re traveling with a larger group, you seem to always be receiving or sending a “Where are you guys?!” text, particularly this time of year when music festivals are in full swing.

Grab a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, a sticky charging cube, popular Gourmia coffee brewers, and many more of Friday’s top deals.Read more...

Back at CES in January, French company Blade seemed to promise the moon. For a monthly fee, the company would give users access to a high-end Windows 10 machine, with the latest CPU from Intel and a beefy Nvidia 1080 GPU built in. The computer would be housed at a server farm, which means as long as you had an…Read more...

My kids have gone to a lot of great day cares, summer camps, and other places where they live it up for hours and then come home raving about how much fun they had. But then when it’s time to drop them off the next morning, they forget all about that and cry at having to leave me. One thing that helps: a selfie video.

Deadspin The Helmet Rule’s Debut Was Really Messy | The Root White Woman Snatches Protest Sign From Black Woman, Cries to Police When She Gets Punched in the Face [Updated] | Splinter CNN Interviewed a Bunch of QAnon Conspiracy Theorists for a Truly Wild Segment | The A.V. Club Roseanne’s old friends are openly…Read more...

In this week’s Tech 911—the column where we offer reasonable answers and explanations for of your deepest, darkest tech confusions—a Lifehacker reader wonders why she can’t access some of Gmail’s best features with a third-party email client (and a non-Gmail address).Read more...

There’s still one month left of summer, and if you’ve been listening to your more sun-sensitive friends at the beach, or had to go out to buy aloe on one too many occasions, it might have occurred to you to invest in a beach umbrella. Follow your intuition on this; a beach umbrella is a great investment in your skin’s…Read more...

As students prepare to head to college campuses across the country, there’s one financial decision they have to make that has nothing to do with FAFSA or textbooks: What to do about their health insurance.

Splinter The New York Times Really Fucked This One Up | The Root White Woman Snatches Protest Sign From Black Woman, Cries to Police When She Gets Punched in the Face [Updated] | The Concourse Mission: Impossible — Fallout Might’ve Ruined All Other Action Movies | The A.V. Club 10 episodes of The Venture…Read more...

The next time you buy a movie, and it comes with one of those “redeem this code to get the digital version on your favorite platform” notices, make sure you’re picking the right service if you want the highest-quality video across as many other streaming services as possible.Read more...

Owning a home has been part of the American Dream for decades. It was a sign of attaining a certain level of wealth, and the stability that comes with it. And for many, it was a great investment.

The past few weeks of antics have had many MoviePass users considering hitting that unsubscribe button. A few of them, however, have found the process not quite as intuitive as they thought.

Before my daughter learned to speak, she learned to sign, and the first sign she mastered was “more.” More meant more—as in, “Give me more milk before I scream-cry in 5-4-3-2-1 ...”—but for her, it also meant “again.” Sing that song again. Push the toy cash register button again. Make that funny sound with your…Read more...

West Nile Virus has its moment every summer and fall, and in recent weeks many states have started reporting their first human cases of the season. Here’s what to know about this mosquito-borne illness.Read more...

You know not to get your pet high on purpose, but sometimes your dog finds your stash, or they happen upon an edible “while” “walking” “in” “the” “park” (hey, it could happen). Here’s what to do.

True, fermented pickles are always going to be more flavorful than quick pickles but, as Epicurious reports, Mark Bittman adds a bit of smoky depth by grilling the vegetables first.Read more...

Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert, advice columnist and author of the New York Times bestselling book, My Boyfriend Barfed In My Handbag ... And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha. Her flagship column, “Ask a Clean Person,” debuted in 2011. Here on Offspring, we’ve launched a new iteration of it, focusing on parenting…Read more...

We know we’re not supposed to let email run our lives, but we do it anyway. We use email as a to-do list, as an idea saver, as a place to email ourselves notes. And if that works for you, then here’s one more tool: The free Mailist extension for Chrome and Firefox collects your unread bookmarks and emails them back to…Read more...

If there’s one truism when it comes to your money, it’d be not to let your emotions get the best of you: You don’t want to sell when the market’s tanking, splurge on something you can’t afford when you’re in a bad mood, or continually give money to a loved one with no strings attached.

The charm of cats is that they’re temperamental, as likely to bite as to purr when you reach for them. There may come a time when you have developed a close enough relationship with your feline that it at least signals when it’s about to attack; in that case, why not carry it around like a baby?Read more...

I have seen recipes that call for the green part of the green onion, and I have seen recipes that call for the white part of the green onion, but I have never seen recipes that call for the stringy little roots of the green onion. (Until now, because I’m about to write one.) The little white allium threads are edible,…Read more...

Every box jump involves a leap of faith. You’ll probably land on top of the box, on your feet, and not make it into one of those box jump fail compilation videos (seriously, do not Google). But how do you convince your brain and body that a solid landing awaits?

This is one race to the bottom we can get behind: Fidelity announced it will offer two fee-free index funds, besting Vanguard and Schwab as the first fund company to do so.

Chrome: If you’re a travel junkie—or, better yet, need a little inspiration to plan your next trip—you’re going to love the Chrome extension “Random bnb.” It’s incredibly simple, but it does a great job of reminding you that there are gorgeous places in the world you can stay at right now and, in some cases, not even…Read more...

The standard or “stable” version of Google Chrome offers plenty of handy customizations and quality-of-life improvements, but if you want to get the latest experimental features before anyone else, you’ll want to check out Chrome Canary.Read more...

The benefits of “mindfulness” and ways to attain it have long been promoted, but the number of self-help books, forums and apps devoted to the practice has absolutely exploded over the past few years. As tech continues to encroach on all aspects of our lives and we find we have a hard time getting away from it all,…Read more...

Damn, we’re excited to go back to Portland. Over a hundred commenters gave advice for visiting or living there in this week’s Hack Your City. While rapid growth threatens to stifle what made the city so attractive, for now Portland is still a quirky, fun, easygoing city where it’s hard to have a bad time.

If you’ve just realized it’s August and you still haven’t been anywhere, don’t despair. Fall isn’t just about wearing cute jackets—it’s about travel deals.Read more...

Parents who share a Netflix account with their families know the distinct pain. After putting your kids to bed, you sit down to watch a sexy new drama (or for me, The Great British Baking Show), and up pops on your TV screen: “Because you watched Lalaloopsy: Festival of Sugary Sweets, here’s Luna Petunia, My Little…Read more...

The beach seems like a fun place to take a toddler—in theory. But then you get there, and there are giant waves and stuff. Your kid yearns to frolic in the water, but you can’t let her. And so she sits there, staring longingly from the shore like Baby Moana, munching on gobs of sand.Read more...

What sets the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale apart from other sale is the fact that none of the items are old or cast-offs. The basis of the sale is showcasing incoming products for the fall season and letting customers buy them at sale prices.