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It's not news that sleep is tied to learning—even a 90-minute nap can significantly help boost your brain power—but if you want to cement new knowledge in your brain, recent sleep research demonstrates that a good night's sleep shortly following your studies has a significant impact on your ability to retain information.
The study in question asked participants to memorize related word pairs (e.g., circus – clown) and unrelated word pairs (e.g., cactus – brick). Some participants learned the words at 9am, some at 9pm. The 9pm crowd went to sleep shortly after learning the words. The 9am crowd did not.
The results: Sleep made no difference when participants were asked to recall the related words, but when participants were asked to recall unrelated word pairs, the 9pm group—the group that slept right after learning—did significantly better. So where your brain already has a strong semantic roadmap for learning (as is the case with the related word pairs), sleep doesn't have a major effect. Where it's forming new connections, sleep makes all the difference.
Stick that in your mind pipe next time you need to do some serious cramming. Photo remixed from Muhammad Rehan.
Memory for Semantically Related and Unrelated Declarative Information: The Benefit of Sleep, the Cost of Wake | PLoS ONE via Scientific American
If you’re like me, you probably procrastinate a lot. And if you procrastinate a lot, inevitably that means you’re going to staying up late writing a paper or finishing a problem set. Even when I wasn’t doing schoolwork at night, I still found myself browsing the web and watching videos – just staring at a screen late at night regardless of the circumstance. The more I did this, the more difficult I found it to fall asleep. I would just lie in bed for what seemed like an eternity before finally falling asleep. At first, I didn’t really believe there was a correlation between viewing my screen(s) and having difficulty falling asleep. Then I found F.lux, tried it out, and now I’m a believer.
F.lux’s developer page cites several studies that show how the light emitted by screens under normal circumstances is 6500K – essentially sunlight. The way our bodies/eyes work, if we’re blasted by the equivalent of sunlight, then of course it’s going to be difficult to easily fall asleep. To help you sleep better, F.lux adjust your computer’s white balance automatically when the sun sets in your area to a warmer color temperature (3400K by default but you can set it to whatever you’re comfortable with). At first, I found the yellowish Halogen setting at night kind of weird, but it only took a few days to get used to it.
F.lux is free and available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and iOS. Download your version here! In addition to its basic functionality of changing the color temperature to match the time of day, you can also 1) choose a fast or slow transition at sunrise/sunset and 2) disable F.lux for an hour. While F.lux is obviously not useful if you need to be doing color-sensitive work (IE Photoshop), if you’re just word processing or browsing the web and have trouble sleeping, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot.
What do you think of F.lux? Let us know in the comments!
Deryck Wong is a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Business Administration and Economics. He is a man of eclectic interests - namely sports (everything except hockey), video games (Xbox, PS3, and Wii), and spending way too much time on his MacBook Pro and iPhone reading tech/productivity blogs. He’d like to channel that interest to help fellow students out and let them know about all the cool and interesting things he finds in his spare time. If you want to talk about any of those things or just want to say hi, email me at deryck@hackcollege.com
Our minds are basically organized like human computers. They function to a great extent in much the same way. So, if we want to improve our daily productivity, efficiency and focus, we need to empty the cache of temporary “files” and reboot for our brains to allow us perform at our peak levels.
Otherwise we can easily experience brain overload with too many circuits firing simultaneously and so many programs (thoughts) working in the shadows that we often “freeze up” and cannot remember everything or simply process the information in a much slower and less efficient manner than we’d like.
It sounds odd, but when you stop to consider, it actually makes sense. The best part is that’s not difficult or time consuming at all. It really only requires a few minutes each day and surprisingly simple tools.
1. Choose your best time – Ideally, this process is best done, twice each day, first thing in the morning and again before bedtime, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Choose the time that works best for you. Any time will work. The key is to do it consistently.
I have found that I need to my morning coffee, breakfast, and exercise first. My brain has to wake up a bit. I apparently need a caffeine kick, fuel and stress release in order to form coherent thoughts.
2. Choose your method of logging – Any number of apps on your phone will work well to record thoughts and tasks. If you prefer, you can use the voice-recording feature. Even the basic note function works fine. An organizational program or document, such as Outlook, OneNote, or Evernote on your computer will work as well.
Though I tend to be a “techie” by nature, I still prefer to use a pen and pad for this process. Sometimes the simplest method is the most effective. Whatever tool you choose, make sure it’s quick, and readily accessible.
3. Quickly dump everything you’re keeping in your head – And I mean everything… Not just tasks, but thoughts, concerns, questions, and ideas too. Get it all out. Don’t worry about sorting them; you can do that later, just get them out of your head so that they can stop spinning around, using up precious brainpower and space.
Once you’re finished, ask yourself if you need or want to act on any of these items today.
If the answer is yes:
Add those tasks to your ongoing task or to-do list (you have one of those right?)Cross them off or remove them.
If the answer is no:
Is it an idea? – Add it to an idea file, work notebook, or document to pursue later.
Is it really more of a question or concerns you have? – Record it in a journal or notebook to mull over at another time. (If you never go back to consider them, they probably weren’t that important.)
It’s that simple. It should take no more than 5 – 10 minutes
By making it a habit to set aside a few minutes each day to empty and organize your brain, you can drastically improve your ability to focus, complete tasks, and achieve your goals. A streamlined mind is much more effective than a perpetually overloaded one.
In addition, an overloaded brain forgets things; important tasks, details and deadlines. The quality of our output suffers as well. We are simply unable to concentrate and use our intelligence and skills to their highest potential.
As a side benefit, you’ll find better balance, less stress and increased energy. Swirling thoughts cause an enormous amount of stress and prevent our minds from truly ever resting. This results in brain fatigue, which keeps us exhausted and irritable.
When we’re unable to let go of thoughts and responsibilities that plague us, we are no longer constantly preoccupied. We are better able to quiet our mind and enjoy the other parts of our lives. When we aren’t stuck in our head, we can fully engage with the rest of the world outside us.
Love wine but don't have the time, patience, or inclination to aerate your wine in a decanter forever before drinking? Former Microsoft CTO and master chef Nathan Myhrvold suggests a method he calls "hyperdecanting". Sounds fancy and high-tech, right? It's basically shorthand for "put your wine in a blender for a minute and it'll taste better".
Just about anyone who enjoys an occasional glass of wine will initially recoil at the idea. (I did.) Wine has an almost mystical quality for most of us, and surely only an unsophisticated fool would dump a perfectly good bottle of wine into a blender. But Myhrvold takes a scientific approach to food, the culmination of which can be found in his insane $450 book Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, and in an article last year in Bloomberg Businessweek, he explains his method:
I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving. I call it "hyperdecanting."
Although torturing an expensive wine in this way may cause sensitive oenophiles to avert their eyes, it almost invariably improves red wines—particularly younger ones, but even a 1982 Château Margaux. Don't just take my word for it, try it yourself.
In his article, Myhrvold goes on to suggest how you might set up your own blind taste test to "determine with scientific rigor whether your tasters prefer the hyperdecanted wine". While we haven't given hyperdecanting a go just yet, decanting is a common practice, and at least in theory, hyperdecanting seems to make sense. A few folks have documented their hyperdecanting efforts, including all-things-four-hours author Tim Ferriss, a hyperdecanter who uses a submersion blender:
The wine obsessives at Vinum Vita tried it out, too (video at the top of the post), and at least seemed to agree that it changes the flavor of the wine.
Ever hyperdecant your wine? Share how it worked for you in the comments. As for us: We've got a (cheap) bottle of wine waiting to be blended this weekend.
How to Decant Wine with a Blender | Bloomberg Businessweek via Four Hour Workweek
Ever notice some foods, like oatmeal, fill you up quickly, but others, like rice, you can go on eating seemingly forever? Researchers have measured this "satiety" food index as well as how long a food will keep you full to help you choose better snacks.
This "Are Bananas as Bad for You as Cookies" infographic from Massive Health maps the satiety index (PDF) that researchers from the University of Sydney produced for foods across six food categories.
The satiety index measures how full you feel after eating 240 calories of food and how long after eating you feel full again, while the sugar crash scale or glycemic index measures how quickly you get a sugar high from the food and then crash (a low glycemic index is preferable, meaning the food sustains you longer.)
Looking at the chart, the foods at the top right corner are those with the greater satiety and lower glycemic index: More filling and less crashing!
As Massive Health says, you can put the index to work by making easy snacking swaps, since choosing the right food can mean the difference between one snack or five throughout the day. Instead of eating bananas, then, go for oranges or apples. Instead of cereal, try eggs or all-bran for breakfast.
Here's the full graphic (click to expand or right-click to save):
Are Bananas as Bad for You as Cookies? | Massive Health
Windows/Mac/Linux: The free, open source sound editing program Audacity has been updated with a few new features. The most notable include improved effects, a ton of new keyboard shortcuts, and a handy automatic crash recovery mode.
The big change is the subtle improvements to the sound effects, but you should also notice an increased stability on new operating systems, a new import feature for WAV and AIFF files, and a significantly better device toolbar to manage your inputs and outputs. The new list of keyboard shortcuts is also a handy way to move audio around. You can check out the huge list of changes and big fixes in the release notes if you want to get into the details. Audacity is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
This week on Ask Lifehacker we're not talking about the new iPad, but what we'd buy instead. Firefox 11 finally brings add-on sync and March Madness proves that piracy isn't always the best option when you want to watch TV online. Also, we extend a Wi-Fi signal from a house to a barn, figure out a use for OS X's dashboard, and start training for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
You can watch the episode by clicking the play button above, but there are plenty of other ways to get it:
This week we're not talking about the new iPad, Firefox 11 finally gets add-on sync, Dropbox offers another 3GB of free space to beta testers, and paying to watch March Madness online is actually better than stealing it.
00:34 The new iPad comes to stores (but here's what you can buy instead) The iPad still dominated the news cycle a week after its announcement, but we're not going to talk about it. Instead, we discussed what we'd buy instead. Pash picked a new Apple TV ($99), Whitson went for the Nook Simple Touch ($99), Dachis opted for home improvements ($?), Melanie picked a fancy new bicycle ($500), and Alan decided it was time for a souped-up home theater PC. (Some of us actually did upgrade to the new iPad, though.)
02:25 Firefox 11 Keeping with its rapid upgrade schedule, Firefox 11 was released and came with a highly-desired feature: add-on sync. Firefox users have been missing this option for quite awhile, as it has been glaringly present in Chrome for over a year, but it has finally arrived.
03:58 Get 3GB free Dropbox space! Love Dropbox as much as we do? They're offering 3GB of free space if you want to beta test a new version. You get to check out the latest Dropbox app and get free space? That seems like a pretty sweet deal. The only downside is that if you nabbed some free space the last time they offered it to beta testers you won't be able to take advantage this time around.
06:52 Paying for March Madness is better than stealing it! A shocking surprise: a media company has actually provided a way to consume media online that's a better alternative to piracy. For $4, you can watch all the March Madness games. If you're a cable subscriber, you may not have to pay at all.
Each week we answer five questions from readers and listeners. Here's what we tackled this week.
11:51 How can I extend the range of my router through a hill and to a barn? Not without a repeater! But you can make one out of an old router easily. Also, installing custom firmware DD-WRT will allow you to boost your router's transmit signal a little bit. You can also boost that signal slightly with a cooking strainer, but that's not going to help you get past the hill and to the barn. Your best bet is probably going to be buying an industrial router and using the old one as a repeater, actually extending Ethernet cable to the barn, or getting cellular internet by tethering your phone or just using an independent device.
15:30 How can I get an app made with no coding skills? You should be careful about trying to make an app when you don't know how. You should at least learn the basics so you understand how programming works and be informed when you're discussing plans with a developer you hire. Since you only have the idea, you want to be able to communicate as effectively as possible with your developer(s) and that involves knowing at least a little bit about programming. If you want to hire a developer, of course, you're going to need some cash. Kickstarter is often a good way to raise it.
You want to avoid hiring just anybody, though. If you seek out a developer simply looking for work you'll end up hiring someone who is pretty much in it just for the money. Ideally you want someone interested in your idea as well. To find someone like that, go where the developers go. Join developer forums online and get to know people. You might just meet the person for your project.
But if you really want to do it yourself and won't learn how to code, tools like AppMakr will create apps with no coding skills required. What you can do with these apps is pretty limited, but it might be better than nothing. Alternatively, if you are just afraid of learning Objective C or Java and want a framework to help, Corona uses a very simple language called Lua to create iOS and Android apps. Alternatively, Adobe Flash can create iOs and Android apps as well, but you're slightly limited by how much you can really do.
18:30 How can I put OS X Lion on my Core Duo MacBook? Not easily, but it is do-able! Basically, you need to trick your MacBook into thinking that it's a Lion-friendly machine or remove its hard drive and install it via another computer. This OS X Daily Article will walk you through the whole process.
21:08 Are there any OS X widgets that sync well with iOS apps? While most of us feel the OS X Dashboard is becoming a little obsolete in a world of widget-friendly mobile devices, there definitely are widgets worth adding. DashNote adds Simplenote functionality, which will let you sync notes from your computer to virtually any other machine, mobile device, and (of course) the Simplenote webapp. On top of that, Dachis likes Delivery Status for package tracking and Whitson likes iStat for system monitoring (even though he doesn't use OS X anymore). Also, never underestimate the usefulness of web clips. If you can't find the widget you're looking for, see if you can clip the same functionality from a web site.
24:12 How do I host a website from Dropbox? Put the files in your public folder and copy the public links. (Details here.) DropPages and Pancake can help make the process a little easier, and Scriptogr.am can turn your Dropbox into a blog.
Each week we talk about our favorite downloads. Here are our picks for this week.
27:17 Social Fixer (Web Browser) Whitson discovered that Facebook can be a whole lot better with one browser extension called SocialFixer. Last week he detailed all the great things it can do, but he really loves how it fixes the way Facebook hides some of the messages you receive in an inbox buried deep within the user interface. You can also use it to find out who has unfriended you, turn off the chat bar, filter stuff, and much more. It pretty much works with whatever web browser you use, so if you want a better Facebook you should have no trouble using Social Fixer to get just that.
Download SocialFixer (Free)
30:07 Zombies, Run! (iPhone) Dachis spent this week training for the inevitable zombie apocolypse with a game called Zombies, Run!. It throws you into a story where your helicopter crashes in the small village known as Abel Township. You're then required to run as fast as you can—literally—to escape the zombies that are after your brains. It works by tracking your GPS location as you run to judge distance and pace. You'll pick up items and earn achievements as you go. The farther you run, the farther you'll move along in the story. If fear motivates you, this app is a great way to get off your butt and exercise.
Download Zombies, Run! ($8)
32:38 Sparrow (iPhone) Pash started using Sparrow for iPhone and found it to be everything you'd want from a mobile email client even though it can't send push notifications. Everyone agreed that push notifications aren't all that necessary, since you can just make the built-in Mail app offer notifications and then just view the message in Sparrow instead. On the other hand, sometimes it's nice to not be notified at all and just check your email when you want to check it. If you do want real push notifications in Sparrow, however, you can use this jailbreak tweak.
Sparrow offers proper Gmail support and plenty of features that make your inbox much more manageable. Check out our review for more information.
A great portrait involves attention to many details, including camera, framing, color, and lighting. But you can help a shooter out by doing a few photogenic things: stick your chin out a bit, squint ever so slightly, and part your hair to reveal your good side.
Peter Hurley shoots head-shots of executive, celebrities, and other people who really want to look good everywhere that photo shows up. He gives the New York Times six tips on getting better photos out of his subjects, beyond all the equipment and expertise he's obviously carrying around.
Sticking one's chin out a bit to prevent neck waddles is something I've heard recommended for web video shoots. And the tip about guessing someone's "good side" by noting which side their hair is parted on is quite handy. But the tip about having subjects squint slightly is maybe the best pick-up for beginners:
The crucial word is slightly – not a pained expression as if reading fine print. The real trick is to squint with the lower lids only – think of the expression Clint Eastwood makes when assessing Lee Van Cleef before a showdown. "In my opinion, fear and uncertainly comes from the eyes," Mr. Hurley said. "If someone wants to look confident, have them squint."
What's worked out best for you when trying to get people to look in your lens and come out looking good? Photo via ? Lee J Haywood.
o your job sucks. You could resign yourself to a life of dull (or even miserable) days in the office or you could set aside some time and get a better job. Here are ten great tips to help you put together a great application, ace the interview, and ultimately work for a company you'll love rather than hate.
Note: This week's top 10 list is more in the order of the process of getting a new job than a ranking of the best tips.
While I'm no fan of the resume—as they're often documents skimmed rather than read—they're still requested by the majority of jobs you'll come across. You don't want to reinvent the wheel, but a little creativity can set you apart and help you stand out from the pool. Online tools can be of great help when it comes to creating something a little less ordinary. Visualize.me can create an attractive infographic. Sites like Re.vu and Zerply help you create professional landing pages that can serve as digital resumes. About.me and Flavors.me can be tailored to do the same. Use the tool that suits you best and make sure your page or resume stands out. Often times it is just as simple as choosing the right font and color. It doesn't take much to make a resume look nice, so put in that little additional effort to keep yours from ending up in the generic pile.
When writing your resume, you don't want to use the sort of language that'll make you sound like everyone else. That means avoiding overused terms (e.g motivated, innovative, dynamic) and cliche phrases (e.g. detail oriented, team player, excellent communication skills). Also, terms like "references available upon request" are implied statements, waste space, and do not need to be on your resume. It helps to read your resume from bottom to top to help catch errors, and when you're done you can run it through RezScore to find out where you can still improve.
If you don't know where you want to work you're obviously going to have to search for some options., but you'll be looking for a needle in a haystack if you go to popular sites like Monster.com and Craigslist. That isn't to say they won't have a great job here and there, but you'll find yourself wading through a lot of undesirable positions just to find the ones you want. Instead of going the traditional route, try an unconventional job site like OneDayOneJob.com, which sends opportunities to your email inbox every day. SimplyHired is a seemingly standard job search, but it aggregates listings directly from company web sites and other locations so you're not just pulling directly from one big pool. TweetMyJobs will handle the searching for you. Just tell it what kind of job you want and it'll text, tweet, and email options to you as they're discovered. Even if you're several years out of college, you may also want to look at any job listings provided to alumni. Even if overqualified for the jobs being offered, you'll learn about companies that are friendly to graduates of your school. You can look on the company's site for more suitable positions and apply for those.
Alternatively, you can focus on sites that target the specific kind of job you want. For example, Dice.com is a good option for tech-related jobs and Authentic Jobs is a great option for designers and developers. Conduct a web search for the type of job you're looking for and the term "job search site" and you may find a tool that's more focused on your specific needs.
Getting a great job isn't just about doing something you enjoy, but also about working in a good environment. That means you want to seek out companies who have a reputation for treating their employees well. You don't have to apply to Google or Zappos—companies well-known for their great benefits—but just seek out companies that interest you and do a little research. All you have to do is call them up and talk to pretty much anybody. Just tell them this: "I'm thinking about applying for a job at your company but I wanted to know what it's like to work there. Would you mind telling me how you like it?" Most people will be happy to share their opinion, and if they're busy you can always schedule a call later. If the company sounds good, you've likely just made a friend who you can call back when you're ready to apply and get some additional help. It's a double win. In the event this doesn't work as planned, however, Glassdoor is an online resource that can help you learn about a specific company from people who definitely want to share.
I've never gotten a job because my previous work experience was particularly relevant, but rather because I learned how to spin my past experience to make it seem relevant. This doesn't mean I lied, but instead concentrated on tasks in previous positions that were applicable to the job I wanted to get. If your current job is much different from the one you want, think about anything and everything you've done at your current job that's out of the ordinary. Often times you'll find examples of things that relate to the job you want because you were always excited to do that kind of work if it presented itself where you are now. If not, you can always start creating relevant experience now so you can use it when you're on your interview. For example, if you work in a non-creative field but want to become a designer you would have plenty of opportunities. If you make lots of graphs and flow charts, finds ways to make them more attractive. If your company is having an outing, ask to design the flyer. When I worked in customer support, I used to create posters about inside jokes in the office or images based on funny things customers said. Sometimes I'd show these at interviews if I needed to demonstrate my Photoshop skills. As silly as that sounds, it not only demonstrated my capabilities but also showed how close I was with my team. When you put yourself into you work, you'll find that your seemingly irrelevant experience can easily be tailored to most of the jobs you'll apply for. You may have to start lower than you'd like, but if you work hard you'll work your way up pretty quickly.
(For more tips, read this.)
Dressing for the interview doesn't necessarily mean putting on crisply-ironed formalwear. Depending on the company, they may prefer you came in your everyday attire or just wore something that shows you can look nice without overdoing it. If you're not sure what you should wear to an interview, just call the company and ask to speak with the human resources department. Let them know you're coming in for an interview and that you want to know the expected dress code. In most cases, they'll be happy to help you out. If you have to go in uninformed, however, business casual is generally a good bet. While nobody really knows what business casual actually is, you'll generally be safe in a nice pair of pants and a button down shirt or sweater. Your goal is really to show that you're capable of grooming yourself and looking presentable. If your clothing fits, is well-ironed, and isn't something you'd wear around the house you're probably in good shape. For some extra assistance, the Dress Code Guide can help you figure out the proper attire.
Learning to read body language is helpful in a lot of situations, but understanding the cues you send out and reading cues from others can be immensely helpful in a job interview. It's especially important that you come of as pleasant and charming right off the bat because many decisions are made on the basis of a first impression. The most important thing is to avoid negative body language. For the most part you just want to avoid nervous ticks like touching your face and letting your leg become restless. You also don't want to slouch or sit to rigidly. Basically, your goal is to appear comfortable but professional. If you can do that, you'll be in good shape.
What's your greatest weakness? It's an obnoxious question but you'll hear it on the majority of job interviews in your life, and there are many others where it came from. (There's plenty of debate on how to answer this question. I've always found the best strategy is to pick a skill you are actually bad at that sounds relevant to the job but really isn't. Then you come across as honest but your weakness won't hurt you.) You have to answer the questions if you want to get the job, so there are two things you want to do: understand the motivation behind the questions and prepare your answers in advance. Understanding the motivation is generally as simple as putting yourself in the company's shoes. Why would they want to know your greatest weakness? Probably more to know how you respond to a question that asks you to be vulnerable than to actually find out where you can improve. They may also ask because they want to know if you can realistically gauge your abilities accurately. Once you consider the motivation behind these common questions it'll be easier to tailor the answers you want to give. You don't want to script them out and memorize them in advance, of course, but developing a list of sound bites can help you go in prepared while still being able to provide natural responses.
Congratulations, you got the job! But you might be throwing away an extra month's salary if you don't ask for a signing bonus before accepting the position. If apply for a competitive job, chances are the company will really want to hire you if you're chosen and they may be willing to pay you a little bit extra to get you on board. All you have to do is ask if they offer a bonus. You're not demanding one, but simply asking the question. Whether you're considering other options or not, asking this question will make it seem that way and they'll be more inclined to offer you that bonus if they really want you. If they can't, they'll tell you no and there's likely no harm done. It's one of those low-risk questions that can often yield a high reward.
If you hate your current job, it can be tempting to let everyone know it when you leave. As cathartic as that may seem, it'll cause you trouble down the line. You want to leave your current company on good terms. You never know when you may encounter a coworker again or need to call that company for information or a favor. Burning bridges simply isn't in your best interest. If you hate your job so much that you're afraid of saying the wrong thing, however, you can reference these sample resignation letters and read tips on how to resign gracefully. Before you quit for real, run your plan by a friend or two to gauge their reaction. It always helps to have a few outside opinions to help ensure you don't make a mistake you'll regret.
Priceline's "name your own price" feature can save you a great deal on quality hotel rooms (and other travel), but the negotiating process can be time-consuming and setting the right price confusing. Budgets Are Sexy offers a strategy that combines Hotwire and Priceline.
Instead of starting with a low price and having to raise it as necessary (putting in your credit card information each time or possibly getting your offer rejected), the simple strategy is to go to Hotwire and find out the price for the type of room you're looking for, then in Priceline enter a price that's 30% less than the Hotwire price as your offer. So, for example, if the price for a hotel room is $177 per night on Hotwire, use $123.90 when you name your price.
This strategy saved the writer around 40% off discount prices quoted for similar rooms on Travelocity. Definitely worth a try for low-cost hotel prices on Priceline.
How to Save Even More on Hotel Rooms | Budgets Are Sexy
Naturally most of us think hard-boiled eggs should be boiled, but a better way to get that perfect hard-"boiled" egg may be to actually bake it, according to Alton Brown. You can bake dozens of creamier eggs at once.
Tanya at the Greetings from the Asylum blog says that the baked eggs are also less sulfurous or smelly, and reproduces Alton Brown's recipe posted on Food.com.
Essentially, you're baking the eggs at 325 degrees for 30 minutes, with the eggs placed parallel to the bars on the racks as shown above.
This would be great to do for a large party or just if you love eating a lot of eggs.
It's no secret that thinking about money all the time leads to anxiety, but research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that when you think about your hourly wage all the time you start to consider your leisure time lost revenue. The result? Lots of trouble relaxing.
In a series of studies, participants were asked to complete several leisurely tasks both after calculating their hourly wages and not. The participants who thought about their hourly wage were impatient and struggled to relax and enjoy the activities. The problem is that people tend to think of time as money and then attribute that idea to everything they do.
If you tend to work out your hourly wage throughout the day because you're freelancing, working part time, or you're just worried about money, this is a good reminder to stop and let your mind wander away from that. Instead of thinking about watching a movie as two hours of work lost, try to enjoy it or schedule time for your media to alleviate any feeling of "lost time."
Tim, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology via BPS Research Digest
We've discussed how using passphrases as passwords can boost your security, but if you've chosen a phrase used in every-day speech, you're not doing yourself—or your data—any favors. According to a new Cambridge study, a common phrase, like, say, "outofthepark," is only marginally more secure than a dictionary word, and anyone looking to crack your password already knows to try common phrases along with common words. If you prefer passphrases, here's how to make them more secure.
The reason that many password systems won't allow you to choose dictionary words as you passwords—or at least require you to add numbers, capitals, or special characters to those words—is because the first thing a hacker will do to try and guess a password is try every word in the dictionary to see if they can get in. Even swapping out "i" for "1" or "e" for "3" often isn't enough—the fact that those tricks have been around for as long as they have means that those common substitutions are easily added to your dictionary list and included with the brute force attack. The goal of encouraging passphrases instead is to create credentials that are entirely nonsensical to a password cracking utility, but memorable to the human who needs to access a given system every day. Photo by Francis Storr.
The trouble though is that so many people, when they embrace passphrases, use common phrases from books, popular movies, memorable quotes, sports teams, or other proper nouns that are easily guessed. A group of researchers from Cambridge University recently published a study (PDF link) where they found that using a dictionary of these common phrases allowed them to crack open about 8,000 passphrases in Amazon's old PayPhrase system. They conclude that passphrases as a password system ultimately provide less then 30 bits of security, which they note is too weak to withstand most online attacks. Ars Technica explains what this means in plain terms:
The "30 bits of security" means the chances of a single guess cracking a four-word passphrase would be one in 2^30. What's more, the two-word phrases cracked in the study provided just 2^20.8 (or 20,656/0.0113) bits of security. Another way of expressing the same finding is that a dictionary of slightly less than 21,000 phrases is enough to guess the login credentials that slightly more than 1 percent of people in the real world will use.
Admittedly, 1 percent of phrases is a very small number, but it's still cause for concern, and drives home the point: any security system, even if it's well built and sufficiently complex, can easily fall prey to user-introduced patterns. In the end, the user—and their password—is almost always the weakest link.
This doesn't mean that all hope is lost for passphrases, or that you should give up on them and go back to standard strong passwords. Honestly, if you can combine the two, you should—the strength of a strong password with letters, numbers, varying case, and special characters is improved significantly when strung together as a phrase. The key is to pick a phrase that's easy for you to remember, but not, for example, your favorite sports team, or the name of your city and state strung together, or the make and model of your car. Yes, it diminishes the ease of memorization, but it vastly improves your security.
The study explicitly points out that "multi-word phrases, if chosen naively according to natural language tendencies, are not as effective at mitigated guessing attacks as alternate choices, such as choosing 2 random words or choosing a personal name at random." So, in order to boost your passphrase security, you need to pick words that matter to you, but don't matter to anyone else. For example, "NissanAltima" may not be a dictionary word, but it's a proper noun that's easily guessed. Instead, you might try "My03AltimaIsBlue."
When we discussed The XKCD passphrase generator, we pointed out another more secure method worth repeating. If you want to use your favorite lyric from a song, grab the first couple of characters from the words in your favorite line, instead of stringing the whole lyric together. We proposed that a Jackson 5 lover might extract a password from the lyrics "Oh baby give me one more chance to show you that I love you" and come up with "obgmomctsytily," which is significantly more secure.
The XKCD Password Generator itself is a robust tool to generate passwords, mostly because the words it strings together are random—they have no meaning behind them, and would be difficult to break in a dictionary attack, and even harder if you mix case and special characters. You could also take it up a notch and use the shift-to-right method for your passwords, which really makes them unintelligible.
Finally, once you've done all of this, and built a great passphrase that's difficult to crack and hard to break, do yourself a favor and plug it into a password management system like LastPass, KeePass, or 1Password, so you can use different strong passphrases for every service you use, and one memorable one to get into your password vault.
With each update, Facebook has gotten incrementally more cluttered, perplexing, and ornery—and I'm not even talking about all your annoying acquaintances flooding it with inane status updates. Yet, at the same time, it's become a tool few of us can live without. If Facebook has you on your last nerve, here's how to fix some of its biggest annoyances in a matter of minutes—and with only one new addition to your browser.
We've talked about Social Fixer before, back when it was called Better Facebook—heck, it was even our readers' favorite Facebook customizer. If you've ever installed it though, you probably got overwhelmed pretty quickly, and dropped it for something else (or just continued to deal with Facebook's ever-inflating annoyances). After sifting through all of its options though, we discovered it's actually very simple for Social Fixer to make Facebook a ton better, without turning it into a more confusing beast. Whether you want to make the font more readable, get rid of that pesky ticker, see who's unfriended you, and much more, here's how to make Facebook infinitely better with just one browser extension..
To get started, head over to Social Fixer's homepage and install it for your browser. It's available for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or as a Greasemonkey userscript. Once it's installed, open up Facebook, and you should notice a few different things right off the bat.
Social Fixer looks pretty cluttered at first glance, adding tabs to your news feed, extra columns to the side of the page, and more. These features can be pretty cool, but it's a lot to deal with at first, and a lot of these features aren't things you need, so to start out, we're going to disable everything and start with a clean slate. Then we'll walk through fixing Facebook's biggest annoyances, enabling one feature at a time as we need it. I do recommend browsing these extra features later on, but for now, we're going to keep it simple.
If you're greeted with the setup wizard after installing the extension, choose the Minimalist Installation. If you don't see the setup wizard (I personally could never get it to display), click on the new Wrench icon in Facebook's blue bar, go to Social Fixer Options, and start unchecking boxes. It's better to start off with a clean slate than with the default options, so I recommend unchecking everything and saving before continuing.
Now that you've got a minimal installation of Social Fixer, it's time to fix some of those Facebook annoyances you've come to know and hate. Again, I recommend looking through all of the options Social Fixer has to offer at some point, but to kickstart your efforts, here's a rundown of our favorite tweaks that improve Facebook's interface and functionality. We'll go through the settings in order of the tab they appear under in Social Fixer's options, so just navigate through using the tabs on the left hand side to follow along.
Disable Lightbox: This disable's Facebook's new photo viewer that overlays itself over the page you were viewing. We actually think this is a pretty great feature, but if you'd rather have the old school image viewer that displayed each image on a new page, you can check this option to get it back.
Change Font Size: Facebook made its font size smaller awhile back, and if it's still barely readable to you, this option can help. You can change the font size of posts and comments separately, to help distinguish between them. Facebook's default font size for each is 11. Note also that you can increase the readability of any page by using your browser's zoom feature (Ctrl+Plus Sign and Ctrl+Minus Sign), though this gives you a bit more control.
Force the News Feed to switch to "Recent Stories First": By default, Facebook only shows you the top stories rather than every post made by your friends. If you prefer seeing all your friends' posts, this option will make your News Feed default to Recent instead of Top Stories.
Hide the Ticker: If that new ticker annoys the crap out of you, you can turn it off with this option. You can technically hide it already with Facebook, but that will still leave the bar at the top of the page. This will remove that entire section of your home page altogether and just make it a bit cleaner.
Auto-Expand Left Panel Sections: This will automatically show the sub-sections of your Messages, Events, Photos, Apps, and more. I highly recommend auto-expanding the Messages section to avoid the whole second inbox problem—that way, no messages will ever go unnoticed.
Friend Tracker: This adds a handy little box in the right hand sidebar that lets you know who has unfriended you on Facebook. It won't show you who's unfriended you in the past, only who's unfriended you since you installed Social Fixer, but still—it's pretty handy to have there just in case.
Fix the Missing Cursor Problem and Fix the Line Wrap Problem: These are just a few tiny bugs in Facebook's interface when you make posts. If you've noticed them before, check these boxes, otherwise there's no harm in leaving them blank.
Disable Facebook's Auto-Loading of Posts: As you scroll down, Facebook automatically loads more posts for you. Some find this useful, others find it annoying. I have no problem with clicking "Show Posts" to see more, so I've checked this box to avoid unnecessary page loading.
When Clicking a Link in an Application Post, Open in a New Browser Tab/Window: Does exactly what it sounds like. This makes sure links don't lead you away from Facebook; instead, they open up in a new tab or window, whatever you have your browser set to do.
Auto-Expand "See More" Links in Posts: When people write particularly long posts, Facebook will condense it to the first few lines of text and add a "See More" box so you can expand it. It also does this with long strings of comments. This option automatically expands long posts, which I like since it doesn't make my News Feed that much longer. You can click the auto-expand collapsed comment threads on posts by pages above, but I don't recommend this, since it'll make your News Feed very, very long.
There isn't a ton here that I like to tweak, though it's worth looking through. If you have a problem with that "Please update your email address" box, you can hide it with an option here, as well as avoid that somewhat annoying popup box that shows up when you hover over a person's username.
If you can't stand Facebook's new Timeline interface, this tab provides a few options that clean it up. We've talked about this once before, so I won't go into too much detail here, but the options do exactly what they sound like they do. They wont' get rid of timeline altogether, and it won't change how other people see your profile, but it'll at least give the timeline a nicer, one-column view for you when you view it from your Social Fixer-enabled browser.
From the main Facebook interface, you can hide certain sections by clicking the "x" that appears in the upper right hand corner of the box. There doesn't seem to be a lot of sections that allow for this anymore, but you can hide Facebook's ads, which is nice if you aren't using an ad blocker already. This section of Social Fixer's options will show you which sections you've hidden, and let you un-hide them.
Whether you use Facebook Chat religiously or sparingly, this section is a good one to visit. You can:
Turn off the chat bar: This gets rid of that unsightly chat bar that shows up when the page is maximized, and brings back the chat popup at the bottom of the window.
Show all online friends in chat list: If you want to see all of your online friends, and not just the one Facebook has deemed chat-worthy, check this box.
Group friends by status: This puts available people together at the top of the list, and idle people together at the bottom, just to keep it all better organized.
Use compact chat list: This is nice if you're showing all your online friends and don't want the chat box to get unweildy.
Hide the chat dock entirely: This won't log you out of chat, but it's great if you use Facebook chat in an external IM program and don't want the chat dock cluttering up your Facebook.
This seems to be deprecated, as it doesn't load for me—but that's okay, because this tab was essentially for turning Facebook into MySpace with themes.
This is where things get really interesting. One of Facebook's biggest annoyances isn't, sadly, Facebook itself—it's all the annoying things people say. Even your closest friends occasionally stand on a soapbox that can get on your nerves. Whether your friends are too annoyingly political, overly emo, or just a little too in love with their cats, Social Fixer's filters can help you filter those posts out. Of course you could always hide those people from your news feed (or unfriend them, if you're really fed up), but sometimes you still want to hear from your friends—you just don't want to hear them rant about [insert political figure here] again.
To create a new filter, go through the 5 columns and choose the filter's characteristics. Let's start with a very simple example. I'm pretty nervous about hearing Mass Effect 3 spoilers, since I play video games pretty slowly, so I want to hide any posts containing the words "Mass Effect" or "Mass Effect 3"—no matter who they're from or what type of post they are. All you'd need to do to create this filter is head to the "Other" column, add the words "Mass Effect" (without quotes) to the text box, and then check "Hide" under the Action column. This will automatically hide any post in which someone mentions Mass Effect. For extra security, you can use regular expressions to search for multiple strings of text—for example, adding /Mass Effect|ME3/ to that box will hide posts containing either "Mass Effect" or "ME3". If you don't know regular expressions, though, you can always just create multiple filters instead. When you're done, click the "Add New Filter at the Top" buttton above the filter columns to add the filter.
Now let's try something a bit more complicated. Say you have one or two friends who get a little too political on Facebook from time to time, and like to rant about presidental candidate Abe Froman. You don't want to block all posts about Abe Froman, just ones from your uber conservative/liberal/whatever friends that like to rag on him. Select those friends from the "Author" column, using the Ctrl key to select multiple people. Leave the Type field blank to include all post types in the filter, then add "Abe Froman" (without quotes) to the Other column (alternatively, use /Abe Froman|Froman/ to include posts which mention just his last name), and check the Hide box under Action. Then, click the Add New Filter button again to finalize everything.
You can do a lot more with filters, like hide specific post types, posts from applications, or apply advanced CSS to highlight certain posts, but we won't go too deeply into that here. Check out Social Fixer's Filter Documentation for more on how to use the Filter feature. And be sure to check the regular Facebook interface before you run to Social Fixer—it can already do a lot to hide specific post types and applications all on its own. Just click the arrow that shows up when you hover over a post in the news feed.
This section mostly provides preferences for Social Fixer itself. From here, you can turn off many of Social Fixer's popups, warnings, and help messages, plus change how often it checks for updates, and more. There isn't anything here that I'd recommend turning off immediately, but if you find that Social Fixer is affecting your page in a negative way, this is the first place I'd head to troubleshoot it.
That's actually all it takes. A few checkboxes here, a few there, and you've got yourself a much better Facebook. If you use Social Fixer on multiple computers, you can head to the User Prefereces section of its options and export your options for importing on another machine, which is nice. Other than that, just keep Social Fixer installed and keep on using Facebook. The developer is pretty good about updating it when Facebook's layout changes, so you shouldn't have too many compatibility issues down the road—and he's sure to fix any new annoyances that are introduced.
If you've been a longtime user of Social Fixer and you have a favorite preference we didn't mention, share it with us in the comments.
How much of your workday is spent reacting to events that happen over the hours you spend at the office? How much is spent on planning and strategy? Finally, ask yourself how much time is spent towards real problem solving, or getting to the root problems of the issues you spent the other few hours reacting to? If you can sit down and successfully audit the amount of time you spend on a given day doing what kind of work, you'll have a better idea of where you should put your efforts, and what you can expect your average day to look like.
Over at the blog The 99 Percent, Scott Belsky explains that most of our workdays are broken into five distinct types of work: reactionary work, planning, procedural work, insecurity, and problem solving. He argues that most of us spend the bulk of our day doing reactionary things, like responding to incoming emails, addressing new priorities, and fighting fires. Insecurity, he points out, is work we do to allay our own fears about our jobs or our company—looking up statistics to make sure the company's healthy, brushing up our resumes, looking at job boards, playing office politics in case we want a transfer into a new department.
He tries not to pass judgement on any of those types of work, but instead encourages us to audit our workday and get a feel for how much time we spend on each area, and whether there's anything we can do to adjust our day so we put more effort where we want it to go. For example, a manager may want you to spend most of your day doing real problem solving and root cause analysis, but doesn't hesitate to load you up with reactionary, fire-fighting duties instead. Auditing your day will help you prepare, but also help you justify how you spend your time.
Do you audit your day, or keep track of how much time you spend doing what? Share your average workday in the comments below.
My favorite apps/extensions/technologies all make my life easier. One of the little annoyances in my browsing life is having to click on the next page (first world problems…), whether it be when I’m looking though Google search results or browsing through forums/message boards. AutoPager, a free extension available for both Chrome and Firefox, eliminates the need to click on links to see the next page of content. Instead, it automatically loads that content and extends the current page so all you have to do is keep on scrolling!
Simply scroll down to the bottom of your current page, and you’ll see a green loading bar indicating that AutoPager is working its magic. After the progress bar finishes, your new content will be ready inline. It comes built in with support for a ton of websites we all use everyday like Google, Reddit, and the New York Times. There’s also custom support for far more obscure websites – simply head to http://ap.teesoft.info/ to find AutoPager rules for your favorite sites. And like any good extension should, AutoPager includes the ability to also prompt you to enable each individual use of the plug-in. In summary, it’s free and makes browsing easier, so give it a shot!
If you know you're going to be moving from a well-lit area to the dark, you can cover one of your eyes—like a pirate with an eye patch—for a few minutes beforehand to see better in the dark.
It's long been speculated that pirates and sailors would wear eye patches so they could see better below deck. They'd keep the eye patch on in the light, then when they went into the dark, they switched the eye patch over to the other eye. The one that had been under the eye patch for awhile would be well adjusted to the dark and they'd be able to see much better.
You can use this trick in your daily life, if you know you need to enter a dark area (say, a basement with no lights in it). Just cover up one of your eyes for a few minutes beforehand (or throw on an eye patch, if you're feeling rather piratey) and head down into the dark. If you open your eye and close the other one, you should be able to see better. This tip's been floating around the internet for awhile (not to mention it was mentioned on Mythbusters), but after a reminder from Redditor VerticalZero, we thought it was worth featuring. Hit the link to see more.
Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.
Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”
See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.
Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”
If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like : "chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless" Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.
SD cards have started getting cheaper, and you can find some pretty huge cards at prices that seem worth the joy of never swapping out cards again. Here's why that could be a bad idea.
Weblog Techerator notes that, while we never expect SD cards to fail, they can do so at inopportune times, just like the hard drives in our computer. This is why we regularly back our computers up, even if we have a brand new drive—sometimes things just happen. However, we don't always have this opportunity with SD cards:
Since you can't really back up a memory card when you're out in the field shooting photos and video, how do you protect yourself against bad luck? Well, there's obviously no way to fully protect your memory card data if you can't back it up, but there's still a way to lessen the disaster level when a memory card takes the plunge.
Instead of getting just one high-capacity memory card and risk losing all of your photos, have multiple low-capacity cards. That way, if one craps out, you'll still have a majority of your photos that are safe, instead of having all of them go down the drain at once.
Instead of worrying about capacity, see if you can't get some higher speed cards instead, or ones designed to survive the worst of conditions. That way, if one fails, you haven't lost everything—you've only lost a batch or two of photos. Of course, this only really matters for you serious photographers that are taking hundreds of pictures at once, but it's something to think about if you regularly run out of space on your current card. Hit the link to read more.
Think Again Before Buying a High-Capacity Memory Card | Techerator via #tips
Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.
Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”
See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.
Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”
If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like : "chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless" Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.
If you know you're going to be moving from a well-lit area to the dark, you can cover one of your eyes—like a pirate with an eye patch—for a few minutes beforehand to see better in the dark. 
