Meh. Using the Naval Observatory's almanac for sunrise and sunset this year in Chicago, where I live, there's 10 days around the solstice where sunrise would be at 4:15 a.m. and sunset would be at 7:30 p.m. and that seems like a waste of summer to me. (Sunrise would be before 5 a.m. from April 23 to August 15.) …

FWIW, just about any city worth calling itself a city probably has a few glass studios — a quick Google search and then calling or checking their sites to see what lessons they have might score (ha!) you some good stuff. Scoring and cutting glass took about the first 10 or 15 minutes of my first fused-glass class, and…

D'oh! I realized I had a really great point but couldn't figure out a good way to phrase it, thought I'd come back to it, and, well, here we are. If I make any progress... I guess you'll be the first to know!

All of this makes sense, Alan, but sometimes,

I added the Shout Factory TV channel to my Roku Saturday night. The selection's pretty thin at this point, but their PR lists some good stuff to come. (Even a lot of the MST3Ks are from the crappy post-Joel era.) The ads are pretty unobtrusive, though — two or three brief ads before whatever you're going to watch but…

One of the reasons I buy my meat from an old-school butcher shop is that I can always ask about the best way to cook a cut. And vice versa... on my last trip there, I mentioned that I'd gotten a sous vide cooker, and they were happy to recommend cuts that worked well with it. I'm going to try those short ribs this…

The Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen empire came up with this a few years ago

Nice, Eric. I'd love to see a similar post for Qi, which is one of the things I love about my (admittedly aging) Nexus 5. Sometimes my phone comes off the pad feeling perfectly normal, but other times it's roasting hot, and then sometimes (like right now... I'm staring at you, phone) it doesn't even charge at all. The…

I actually like having them on the Desktop because it makes me deal with them immediately and then drag them to the Trash. But if I was working on some project where they'd be accumulating, this would be perfect. Great find, Alan! FWIW, I don't know if any of the utility "hidden prefs" apps like Onyx have been updated…

Oh, for sure, but are those people going to even change the channel from HGTV or Food Network anyway? If you've got that little curiosity, you'll probably never be anything more than a consumer anyway. But this is all thinking out loud... you wrote a really solid piece, and even those of us who already appreciate art…

Personally, I would go with "Make Art" over "Learn How People Make Art." In recent years I've taken up both photography and glassblowing — and found my voice in each. While you're still learning your own chosen media, you'll still get a better appreciation of art, but once you're consistently making works that are…

I echo AmyL's recommendation of OpenCulture, which has tons of free stuff in many media. And while I'm glad you mentioned Project Gutenberg up top, Herbert, I have to say that thanks to corporations' ongoing attempts to kill the public domain, you're often better off looking on other English-speaking countries'…

America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated has published two great paperback slow-cooker cookbooks. I've found the recipes to be pretty reliable, although there are a baffling number that have cooking times of four hours or so — sure, Chris Kimball, I'll just run home at 2 p.m., turn the cooker on, and head back to…

On a marginally related topic, I'd thought there was some way to change the default widths of the columns in Open and Save dialogs, but nothing ever seems to stick. Did this change in Yosemite or is there a trick I've somehow missed? (I went straight to Yosemite from 10.6.8, so this may have vanished or changed in the…

Spotlight will be fun to use when it puts a portal on the wall I'm aiming it at.

There are Apple menu items. There is a quick touch of the power button. There are the designated keyboard shortcuts. Why are these needed? Why do people love doing it the hard way?

In fairness to OP, it isn't that hard to throw in a sentence along the lines of "Of course, NFC payments of all kinds should work at them."

Start young. I'm 56 and haven't ever even had a driver's license. (I've driven, but obviously not my own cars.)

There's a great paperback by an inmate named Angelo called "Prison Inventions." I picked it up at Chicago's alt bookstore, Quimby's — it has lots of these sorts of things (almost every page is illustrated, too) and many tidbits about day-to-day prison life. Recommended.

Even though I'm pretty old (I even own fountain pens), I can't imagine sending a postcard, let alone a letter, to someone. But I'd still rather e-mail, text, or call. If I'm writing a letter in an airport, the first sentence is likely to be "If this letter reaches you, I'm probably dead." (I don't even remember what…