One of my favorite items in this category is Safeway Select pasta sauce. It's really good — comparable to Classico, but significantly cheaper.

Seems like a weird solution, since you can accomplish the same thing PLUS kill all the bacteria with a bleach solution (a few tablespoons of bleach, a cup or two of warm water. I usually throw in a bit of dish soap for good measure). Squeeze it a few times in the solution to permeate the sponge and you're done. Comes…

For a while I used a complex Tasker setup to get a slow volume ramp-up on an internet radio station, but my favorite streaming app has since added a ramp-up alarm feature. It's great to wake up to a radio station I know I'm going to appreciate, and the wake-up is exceedingly gentle, ramping up the volume over about…

Get ten cast iron owners in a room and you'll have eleven opinions about how to season it. A while ago I ground off the old seasoning and reseasoned all my pans with the flaxseed oil method. I'm not at all convinced that flaxseed oil is necessary to make it work — I think the key is probably doing the seasoning…

VOTE: Dell SK-8135

I had heard read that you're supposed to look for one with a light spot, but I didn't realize it was supposed to be yellow. The last watermelon I bought, though, did have that yellow spot (I specifically took notice of the color of the spot this time) and it was fantastic. The best one I've had so far this year.

I don't think anyone has mentioned Snap Judgement, another storytelling show that plays on NPR stations, very similar in feel to This American Life, but with less of a white middle-class feel. The host describes it as "Storytelling with a beat".

Find a recipe that's relatively simple and quick, and that you really enjoy eating. For me it started out with dishes my parents made when I was a kid. Get the recipes from your parents and start making them occasionally. Eventually you get used to the process and you don't even need to refer back to the recipe any…

I used to ride 17 miles each way in the Los Angeles summer and I would get quite sweaty. Since I could wear casual clothes at work I would wear my usual shorts and Tevas while I rode (no, there's nothing wrong with riding in sandals as long as they're secure). I would usually ride without a shirt and put my shirt on…

I still use IM at work, both to communicate with my coworkers and with my wife (either on her phone or at home). At my current job, though, we're all using Google Talk, so some people use desktop clients and some use the gmail web site. I like GTalk because it lets me continue my conversation on my Android Phone when…

Re HD voice, it's about freakin' time! I still feel kind of burned that we made the switch from 2G to 3G without any improvement in voice quality or call reliability. I can't wait to be able to use HD voice on my own phone.

Not really a problem. Just turn off your speakers.

I continue to be astonished at the limitations of the Google Music Android app. I can't upload my playlists and I can't enqueue a song. It's either "play it now" or "play a group of songs that Google thinks is similar to the selected song. Is it really such a strange thing to expect to be able to create on-the-fly…

It's very revealing of the relative quality levels that a $300 program can nearly beat out a free one in a Lifehacker poll. I like CamStudio for its freeness, but man is it a pain to work with. It's a pretty long way from "It just works".

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when Camstudio is the best free option available. It works, but it's quite limited, and it's really easy to screw up the video. The biggest problem is that it has different units for "capture frames every" and for "playback rate". "Capture Frames every" represents recording speed,…

You have a very good point. It's certainly not an instant-starter.

I'm really surprised there's no mention of Powershell ([en.wikipedia.org] It's an incredibly powerful command line, and it's entirely native to Windows. There's no awkward fumbling with forward/backslash confusion, and it has a really nifty object-oriented command structure. The only disadvantage is that it's not…

I'm looking for a way to have arrangeable images on my Windows 7 desktop. I was thinking a sticky note program would work well, but I haven't found any that support images. It should be easy to drag-and-drop images into new notes and remain on the desktop — behind all other windows and icons. The ability to lock…

It looks nice, but lack of SFTP support is a deal-breaker. FTP is an archaic, insecure protocol that really needs to go away.

I like MPC-HC for a single reason: frame-step forward AND backward. SMPlayer sounds nice and all, but from what I've found through Google searches it can't single-frame step backwards. It's a non-trivial thing to do, but I'm an animator and it's important to be able to step both ways when reviewing animation and…