Well, that’s the problem. When it’s good, it’s great! I’ve Slacked screenshots of traffic delays to let my coworkers know I’ll be late... And it’s just at that ratio where I don’t want to kill the good notifications to get rid of the stupid ones. Waah waah, I guess.

I mostly avoid Google Maps because it’s way too aggressive at telling me about places I don’t care about. “Continue to receive commuting updates?” There’s no way to tell it no, not at 2 on Sunday morning. Passing a random landmark? Here’s all about it, including the bar’s best cocktails... at 8:45 on Monday morning…

The best Kickstarter I backed is the Bedjet. The designer worked on NASA spacesuits’ HVAC systems and so brought a lot of great features to this. The V2 has very fine-grained control, including some programmability — I blast turbo heat while I’m getting ready for bed and then bring it down to 86° in a mild breeze once…

I mean, just throw the teabag into the hot water and watch for it to turn the right color. I can usually get two or three uses out of one.

This was obviously going to turn into a sharing thread, I guess. I’m sorry for your loss, Kristin. It’s the hardest “right thing to do” we pet owners will ever do. Last fall my cat, approaching 19, started to fail bit by bit, and just as the cliché had told me for years, I knew when it was time. I called the vet on…

I’ve found the best thing is to blame it on yawning. It’s easy to yawn so hard that your eyes water. Doing whatever you happen to do after a big yawn — maybe a little shake, stretch, a mini-yawn — you’ll even get away with rubbing your eyes a bit to clear ‘em out a bit.

I don’t do any prep ahead of time. I do prep while the pans (I use cast iron which means I have 10 minutes or so) are heating. Everything starts when I turn the stove knobs and take stuff out of the fridge. That said, I’m not trying to talk you out of anything. I just don’t want to eat the same thing twice in a week…

Well, now, put that energy to work chopping vegetables and you’re halfway there! I honestly don’t keep track; I start heating up the pans, prep while they’re heating, everything’s ready to cook by the time they’re hot. I keep my fridge in the 34-36F range, so if I throw three things in there Sunday night, they’ll all…

Well, there go my weekend inverted autoerotic asphyxiation plans. Thanks, Patrick. Hmph.

I asked my butcher about his vacuum packaging, and he explained that the plastic is rated food-safe ranging from storage to room temperatures, but not at temperatures in the sous vide range. (He’d asked his vendor because he cooks sous vide himself.) Yours might be different, of course, but ask before something nasty…

For that matter, deal-a-day sites like Woot and Meh have been selling vacuum packaging kits pretty frequently. It’s pretty easy to do my own portion control, and if it’s something I’ll want to cook sous vide, it’s ready.

I only ever do one meal at a time — I don’t do leftovers and try not to eat the same thing more than once or twice a week — and it’s the opposite of wasteful, because I only ever cook what I need. Only need to eat light? Easy. Ravenous? Easy.

Talking to an actual plumber (I can’t tell if Wirecutter did) revealed to me that (his words) “the column of water is the only thing that matters.” If the capacity of the bell is large enough that there’s still air in there when you start working, it won’t be as effective. He explained how to use a larger plunger bell…

Glad you like it... I’ve used it for a while and think it’s both a neat visual and a useful tool. But I like to stay neutral when I mention these thins in case someone hates it or the programmer killed someone’s favorite teacher or something. (And yeah, I figure there’s a bit of a battery hit, but we can see that as…

I use a live wallpaper called LiveWater on my Nexus 6P. The water level on the home screen drains as the battery drains.

#replyfail. Sorry. Meant to go in the top level.

The reason this doesn’t make any sense is that my anxiety will have gotten the best of me half an hour before I leave the house.

This is something I’ve always wondered about. Are the kernels of popcorn that we put in first supposed to be worse than the rest of the batch? I’ve never eaten a bowl of popcorn and thought, “Hey, that one just wasn’t as good as the rest.” But I like popcorn too much to risk making a crappy batch on the stovetop to…