Make sure the grate you have is properly sized for your fireplace. If the logs are hanging out too close to the front, you're going to get ash and smoke inside your living room.

I don't know *how* smoky your room is getting, but mine smells a bit and I figured out that it was from the fireplace tools. After fudging with the logs for a bit, they'd have tiny bits of smoldering ash on them that would emit trace amounts of fireplace smoke that added the room each time I took them out.

Wow, I asked my chimney sweep and he said unless you are literally heating your home with your fireplace (or burning wood with an extraordinarily high moisture content, which is bad for a number of reasons), every couple of years is fine. Every 30 fires seems excessive.

I have no idea, but would like to share that I've heard this is one of those jobs that is better performed by someone with the right tools and experience.

If you install a permanent firescreen (like this [www.amazon.com]) it'll look nicer and won't destroy the functionality of the fireplace. Keep the glass doors closed and it'll plug your drafts.

I spoke with the guy who delivers my firewood and if you're actually trying to heat your home, you want to add what's called a fireplace insert. Something like this: [www.lennoxhearthproducts.com] My understanding is that it draws in air from the chimney so long as you keep the door closed, so the end result is a…

Definitely clean it out. You can sprinkle it in your garden or whatever, but be aware of the fact that this alters the pH of the soil, so if you're going to do this, you should monitor the pH of the soil so you don't take it out of balance.

Use properly-seasoned firewood with low moisture content.

I have some store-bought hickory smoked salt that I really like, and what I really like is that the granules are turbinado-sugar-sized, for lack of a better way to describe it. Kosher is probably a safe way to go, but I'd lean towards sea salt as you suggested.

In your "Best Stuff To Buy in 2011", bycicles -> bicycles #corrections [cache.gawkerassets.com]

I think LH did an analysis of the paper towels + toilet paper thing and found that you often end up paying more at costco/sam's club, if you're not careful.

I asked my in-laws to buy me a CostCo gift card after reading about this trick a while back (I'm pretty sure it was on LH, too), and when they went to buy it, they double checked with the management that I'd be able to use it, who they said I had to be a member even if I had a gift card. So it might be worth checking…

Important to realize that geofencing options ("remind me when I get home") are lost when you push to RTM. If the built-in Reminder app let you specify a manual repeat frequency, I think I'd probably switch to it.

My battery life has been getting worse each day since upgrading to iOS 5. It wasn't like this at all during the betas. I wonder if iCloud is causing it somehow, as that's the only thing that's changed, really - specifically, I wonder if the requests are taking longer to come through or something. Fortunately I'm…

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is much more likely to happen if all your contacts and calendars exist only on your phone and are not synced somehow (iTunes / MobileMe / Exchange).

I still don't get the "walled garden" metaphor. The qualities I associate with a walled garden include beauty, order, a relative absence of undesirables things like weeds, and attention to detail. If owning an iOS device is like getting access to a "walled garden", it sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

I bought some from Pizza Kone, the chain, and the biggest problem I had with this particular implementation of pizza was that the cheese is not evenly distributed. It tends to be all in the first few bites, and the sauce beneath (assuming you're eating it fresh) is kind of insulated and as such remains hot. So you…

I wonder how this works in a group sms when not all parties have iMessage

Haha, these clever use posts crack me up and paint such a hilarious picture of the überlifehacker with his mayonnaise-softened hair, relaxing in his house with melted-crayon-repaired floors, lit up with solar-powered soda bottle lamps, swallowing butter-coated pills :)

I've been using iMessage for about a week now with a few people who are running iOS5, and I've had cases where it used SMS instead of iMessage intermittently (meaning, one message is iMessage, then one is SMS, then it goes back to iMessage). Maybe because reception was poor, maybe Apple is still working out bugs, I…