Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

Tired of your old paint job? Moving into a previously lived-in home? You can paint over the old color quickly and easily with a few tricks. The DIY community at Stack Exchange tells you how. We are repainting a number of rooms in our home. Do we need to put primer over the existing paint? Are there any other "gotchas" that we need to prepare for before repainting the walls? See the original question.

iOS: The words “Apple” and “free” are a bit like oil and water—just ask anyone who works at the company and doesn’t get to partake in the Silicon Valley custom of free lunches and dinners for all. However, Father Cook is feeling generous this month, and Apple is offering up the excellent Obscura 2 camera app for free. Here’s how you get it (and save $5). First, pull up the Apple Store app on iOS.

Hiding your valuables is a great way to protect them. Even if someone breaks into your home, they may not get away with the goods. This clever hiding spot makes use of some old three-ring binders you probably have lying around somewhere. This video from the HouseholdHacker YouTube channel is filled with all kinds of useful tips for securing your home and protecting your valuables, including a clever use for some old three-ring binders. The more boring and uninteresting they look the better.

Running a game of Dungeons & Dragons, or any tabletop role-playing game, involves telling your players what they see. Players rely on you to give a sense of tone and ambience, but also to point out anything interesting or relevant to their quest. But they also need you to leave them room to ask and explore. A good game master learns how to describe a scene in enough, but not too much, detail.

macOS: Sure, Slack might be everyone’s go-to workplace communication app, but that doesn’t mean it’s infallible (I won’t even get started on @here). Take its bright white interface, for example. It might be great for long stretches of work from 9-5, but if you’re on the night shift, or simply getting some quick missives off before bed, all that #FFFFF can mess with your sleep cycle.

Brushless motor technology has been the rage in cordless power tools the last couple of years. Every major manufacturer now sells a brushless lineup of tools, but is it worth it for you? Brushless motors aren't new to power tools, but after Makita, DeWalt and Milwaukee launched full-blown lineups of tools with powerful battery platforms to match, the race was on. The ToolGuyd has a great primer on the structural difference between a brushed and brushless motor.

Whether you’re evacuating because of a hurricane or you’re just leaving for vacation, you’ll want to know if the power went out while you were away for any substantial amount of time. Fill a cup with water, put it in the freezer until it’s solid, then pop a coin on top. Leave it in there, and when you get back, check.

Dear Lifehacker, My laptop feels like it's going to burst into flames at any second. I hear this might be normal, though. How can I tell if it's running too hot—and if it is, what can I do about it? Thanks, Scorched Laptop User Dear Scorched, It's true, computers—laptops in particular—tend to run very hot (though cooling technology has advanced a lot in recent years). It's hard to tell simply by touch if your laptop is in the overheating danger zone or just feels that way.

There are some fun astronomical events ahead of us on the calendar, and with a little preparation you can catch them all from home. On Friday, July 27, there is going to be a blood moon, or a lunar eclipse, though not all eclipses make the moon appear red. According to Forbes, the special effect is caused by the indirect light from the sun bouncing through the Earth’s atmosphere and scattering the longer blue and violet wavelengths. All that’s left is that ominous red and orange color.

Many people credit Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” approach to personal finance for helping them get in control of their money. EveryDollar is Ramsey’s new free budgeting and financial goal tracking tool. Granted, creating a budget isn’t that difficult, and we’ve even featured Ramsey’s own free guide on the subject before. But there are more than a few approaches to budgeting and several tools you could use.

Windows, Mac: You probably have a few websites that you use all the time—perhaps a special CMS you need for work, a time-tracking site you use to track and bill hours for clients, or a web game you just can’t get enough of. If you’re tired of pulling up your browser each time you need to access it, you have an alternative: transform it into an app.

In this episode we talk to Stephen Snyder, a sex and couples therapist and the author of Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship. We’ll discuss why you should be sexually selfish, how the idea of “desire” can mess up your sex life, and why Stephen is against cuddling.

For someone who writes for a living, my Twitter feed has an embarrassing number of typos. I typically notice them the second after I hit post, and am immediately faced with the decision “Do I delete this tweet and pretend it never happened or just roll with the typo?” This week a new Chrome Extension launched that might potentially make things easier.

Crafting the perfect resume takes a lot of effort, even more so if you’ve had multiple jobs at the same company, either through promotions or department transfers. Here are the best ways to list them on your resume. If the jobs were similar in their duties, you can list them all together in chronological order with the most recent job at the top of the list.

When we last rounded up our staff’s Weekly Upgrades, our editors were buying kayaks, learning history via podcast, rediscovering the joys of community radio, and using jetlag to our advantage. This week, we’re devising more efficient ways to do housework, buying more gear to go with that kayak, shaking up our cocktail orders, and asking readers for help choosing new, time-wasting apps. What upgrades did you make this week? Let us know in the comments.