The absolute minimum equipment needed: tea bags. We make our own tea with fine loose leaf tea and unfilled tea bags, such as the ones from Finum. When people come over and want coffee, we just put coffee grounds in instead of loose tea. Steep like tea in hot water for as long as you like. This actually requires ZERO…

Umm, I'm not saying don't do it, but doing this to save $1.50 is kind of ludicrous. Mixing, boiling, cooling, transfering to a bottle, cleaning up . . . makes that $1.50 seem well spent. And realy maple seem reasonably priced. Now, doing it cause you like to make your own, and use real sugar, and tinker with the…

If the simplest answer is the best one, then I find this FM thing to be over-complicated. First, no one has an FM transmitter just lying around, so you'd have to buy that. Also, I don't actually have any good FM radios lying around either. Next: it's kind of a pain to have some computer in the other room controlling…

This is awesome and I'd love to just copy this to my desktop. It turns out that even understanding how this is put together will take me about 2 hours. Rainmeter is very cool and customizable, great. But also just infuriatingly user unfriendly. When you load these skins they don't seem to look anywhere close to the…

Wow. The headline and article are what's cobbled together and weird ass. This thing looks damn impressive. And I just watched the latest Terrafugia video, as impressive as that is, they always seem to creep along on the road at about 10mph. This thing seems to be blasting down the road. Very cool.

And the related fact that when you're using it while plugged in, it doesn't seem to charge, just treads water. I have a phone that does this on the car charger, and it's infuriating.

I think they have concluded that to really clean up Chernobyl, they're going to have to get rid of the concrete sarcophagus and actually dispose of the mess inside properly (though as we know in this country, 'properly' has still to be defined). Plus now they will have a huge mound of radiated concrete to break apart…

To say that WD40 is not a true lubricant is not at all correct. WD40 is essentially a very very light oil suspended in solvents. The solvents dissolve grime, old grease, and help loosen rust and solidified gunk. When the solvents evaporate, it leaves behind the very very light oil. I would say the oil is about 5W…

So here's some innovation: the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. Wacom caliber stylus plus some pretty cool art and note and sketch apps. For that matter, Win 8 tablets will probably have great stylus capability (Win 7 tablets already do, they're just not great tablets.)

This is one of the apps demo'd on the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 that makes you see how much a tablet needs a really well done, accurate, precise stylus. And no, the capacitive styli you have to use on an iPad don't cut it, like using a slightly smaller finger. You need a real Wacom style fine pointed pressure…

Someday you can try to pry email out of my cold dead hands. It's a pain sometimes, but all the things it enables me to do in a relatively short amount of time, on my schedule, just makes it about the last thing I want to ditch. Email basically has enabled me to largely ditch the telephone, which I hate, except for…

This article is offensive in just about every way.

Windows on ARM will be more power efficient and fast, no doubt. But you lose the entire point of Windows which would be all the Windows software you're trying to run. Sooooo . . . basically you have a brand new OS with virtually no apps in the catalog. Probably Mango apps or whatever they are calling the Win phone…

Where the reflections glint off your subject's eyes? A small detail, and not even the most important one, in how to light a portrait.

I typically don't notice much of a speed improvement in browsers, but I just did the upgrade from 8 to 9 on Win 7 x64, and I have to say it seems really much faster. Gmail of all things is like instantaneous, actually noticeably faster on FF now than on Chrome (!) I use both browsers quite a lot daily, and on 3…

I've pretty much told my family we aren't really going anywhere on a plane until the youngest kid is 3. We took a near two year old on a 5 hour flight. He screamed the first 45 min of the return leg, and when he wasn't screaming he was squirming over the seats.

You still have to switch users. On my Win 7 box, this takes about 25 seconds while the screen goes black, pick the other user, enter password etc, even if both are already logged in; quite a bit longer if the other user has not logged in.

In terms of hassle, it's actually much better than Office. I use three computers regularly, and another on occasion. I can download the full LO suite to all of them and keep them updated to the latest version, always, easily, without licenses, keys, paid updates that you are very tempted to skip and probably will,…

When I really really need to be on the ball, I put things down on paper. I've used Google tasks and at least 10 different apps on Android and other computer kind of task managers and I always go back to paper. I have half-letter sheet clipboards with stacks of blank paper. I draw a little blank square in front of each…

This actually is pretty much exactly what I've been looking for. USB charger, bluetooth audio. Here's why it makes sense. It covers all the scenarios. One: you want to play music with your Android in your hand, browsing and adding tracks to your now playing list. This works because it's playing over bluetooth…