Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

If you’re thinking of donating to your local food bank, the best way isn’t to dig in your pantry for unwanted cans, or even to head to the grocery store with some coupons. What food banks and soup kitchens need most is your cold, hard cash. Feeding America notes that they can stretch each donated dollar to cover 10 meals. Food banks get donations and discounts from food producers, and they can buy food in bulk from wholesale suppliers.

Deep fried turkey is wonderful any time of year, whether it's Thanksgiving or the middle of the grilling season. In this video, Alton Brown shows us how to build a "Derrick," or his original turkey fryer—the one you've probably seen on his safe turkey frying episode of Good Eats. It doesn't take much looking around the internet to find videos of terrible turkey frying fails, some of which lead to catastrophic fires and potential injuries.

On this week’s episode of The Upgrade, we’re talking about how to tell the truth—and how to know when the people around you are being less than truthful. We’ll be hearing from MSNBC host and author Lawrence O’Donnell with the story behind his book, Deadly Force—the murder of an unarmed black man and the police cover up that followed.

Most communities, online or offline, come with some hard boundaries: no hate speech, no threats, no harassment. But a good community recognizes some more borderline behavior—stuff that isn’t as obviously terrible but can still slowly eat away at discussion, scaring away (or annoying away) good members until only jerks are left. And it can ruin any social group, from a book club or group text to, say, Reddit.

A mind flayer just ate you—or your party—and you’re looking to get back into the action with a brand-new Dungeons & Dragons character. That, or you have a fresh new game coming up, and you need a little inspiration for your next character’s background and personality. Instead of spending an hour staring a blank character sheet, save a little time with the iOS Shortcut “WTF Is My DnD Character.

You know how the exact moment Thanksgiving is over you find yourself wandering the aisles of CVS while “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” blasts over the PA and you’re filled with overwhelming dread, another year come and gone and what have you done with your life? Of course you do. Well, this year is different. This year, you are going to get excited for the hustle and bustle of the holiday season because you are invited to the best party in town.

Wood Pellets are a byproduct of the timber industry; you can get a 40lb sack of them for around $4-6 in the US. They are commonly used as fuel for stoves or as livestock bedding. Many people these days are using them as inexpensive environmentally-friendly cat litter.

Bias lighting can help reduce the eye strain caused by long exposures to TV screens and monitors in dark rooms, but it can also help make the grays and blacks on your screen seem richer. Bias lighting is placed behind a TV to increase the ambient light around the screen without shining more light in the viewer’s eyes.

So you're in the market for a new HDTV, but don't know what size screen to buy. You could go with the "bigger is better" adage, or you can precisely calculate a more suitable size by applying the following formula. Gadgetwise blogger J.D. Biersdorfer and NYT personal tech editor Sam Grobart demonstrate how to determine the right television size using one simple formula.

If you're interested in learning to make concept art—or simply taking your recreational painting into the digital sphere—concept artist Matt Kohr spent a week teaching us the basics. Here's the complete 101 course for your edification. Lesson 1: Get Started Painting on Your Computer Painting digitally is significantly different from painting with brushes.

You can find just about anything on Reddit, for better or worse. It’s one of the reasons why the site remains so universally popular, as it’s an easy way for newbies to have near-unlimited access to everything that used to be a little harder to find: day-of downloads for new movies, streams of their favorite sporting events, free or modified games and applications, et cetera.

Drawing is hard. Even after a lesson with a New Yorker cartoonist, I get spooked by the simplest drawing exercises. If you’re also easily scared off, but you want to get better, try these basic drawing exercises at Envato. They address issues like “I can’t draw a circle” or “my proportions are all off.” These are exercises you can do while watching TV or sitting in a meeting or waiting room. They’re doodles.

Google definitely got the message that users weren’t happy about the auto-sign in/out link implemented in the previous version of Chrome. The company has launched an updated version of the browser (version 70) that makes it a lot easier to disable this annoying feature—among other changes. Back in Chrome 69, the browser automatically signed users in or out of Chrome when they logged in or out of Google’s web services—Gmail, YouTube, et cetera.

Every time I go to write an email, I get distracted by my inbox. I check all my new mail, and I put off the actual task I opened Gmail for. None of that new email was urgent, but I couldn’t ignore all those bold lines. So now I hide my inbox with Inbox When Ready. I’d tried other methods, like closing my Gmail tab most of the time. This helped me not idly check my inbox every time a message arrived. But as soon as I needed to complete any email task, I got waylaid by my inbox.

Pollution is killing oysters in Oregon. So much of New Jersey is paved that its storm water has nowhere to go. And in Nevada, the federal government wants to turn a mountain into a storage site for nuclear waste. You should know your state’s most pressing environmental issues before you head to the polls, and Popular Science has a guide to help you brush up.