Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

Leave your book out in the rain? Drop it in the tub? Don’t worry, you can fix it if you act fast. This video, from the preservation experts at the Syracuse University Libraries, shows you how to get that sopping hardcover back into reading shape. To get started you’ll need a lot of paper towels, a fan, flat boards, something very heavy, and some patience. Start by laying down a couple paper towels, placing the book on top, then placing some more paper towels over the cover.

The weekend I moved to San Francisco, I decided to celebrate finally moving all my stuff with a last-minute drive up to Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa. The brewery makes one of my favorite IPAs, which is hard to find outside of the brewery, and so I wanted to go grab some provisions for my new home. It was a great idea. That is until I approached a toll booth and realized I didn’t have any cash and needed to turn around. Toll roads suck.

I’ve been using Samsung’s Note 8 for about a month now. I love the display on the phone and the camera, but I’m pretty much constantly annoyed by the phone’s Bixby button. The dedicated button on the left side of the phone is designed to give you quick access to to the personal assistant. That’s great if you want to use it often.

Over the past two years, two of my close friends have gone on three one to two-week vacations to Italy. At first glance, their multiple European vacations made it look like they must have suddenly come into piles cash. As it turns out, the key was when they were traveling: during the off-season. While trips to Florence and Rome could potentially run into the thousands, they had started booking package travel deals on Expedia that took the price of those trips to just a few hundred.

When you’re tasting whisky, nosing, the act of bringing your whisky to your nose and taking a sniff, is a step that a lot of people skip, but they shouldn’t. Smelling your booze can help you pick out flavors and aromas that you won’t be able to detect through sipping alone. It’s an important part of the process. I recently chatted with Macallan Brand Ambassador Charlie Whitfield about the spirit, and how people should be tasting their whisky.

If you’ve always wanted to own some cryptocurrency, a new app might be a good way to get your hands on some. Called Coinflash, the app takes the spare change left over from your purchases during the week and uses that cash to invest in the cryptocurrency of your choice through a Coinbase account. The app itself doesn’t actually take any money from you.

When you’re waiting for a pan to finish washing so you can make dinner, the dry cycle on your dishwasher can seem like it lasts an eternity. The smart man move is to just crack open the door and grab your pan and just manually dry it off with a towel, but CNET notes this week that opening your dishwasher door can actually dry your dishes faster than that whole dry cycle and save you some time and some electricity. The way it works is pretty simple.

There’s no question that batteries power our lives. Chances are, every room in your home is host to at least a handful of battery-operated devices. And chances are, you’ve probably needed batteries in a pinch — say, when the remote unexpectedly dies while you’re binge-watching your favorite show, or the dreaded “batteries not included” disclaimer went unnoticed in the fine print of a new purchase, causing a gifting disaster.

If you, like myself, have a habit of stuffing extraneous items in your bag, you know how hard it can be to find that one essential you need amidst all the detritus. That’s why Alf Altendorf, Managing Director of Austria’s Radiofabrik, packs pretty light when he’s out and about in locales such as Venice to Seychelles. You won’t find a laptop for work or even a tablet for the occasional bit of play—just the essentials for a relaxing day of wandering.

Back in the 50s and 60s, your home wasn’t complete if you didn’t have your own fallout shelter. This classic educational video shows you how to build your own. Welcome to Retro Week, where we’ll be firing up the flux capacitor and bringing you 1950s know-how on everything from casserole-making to fallout-shelter-building to the joys of letting kids relax and play with trash.

When you give your Uber driver fewer than 5 stars, the app always asks you what went wrong. Anonymous feedback is sent to drivers all the time, letting them know where they screwed up, and why they might be having trouble maintaining that perfect 5-star rating. Now drivers will be able to do the same thing to passengers. Starting today, Uber is allowing drivers to offer reasons why they decided to give a passenger fewer than 5 stars.

Having some trouble sending an office email on your iPhone? You downloaded iOS 11, didn’t you. Sure, it’s got some dope upgrades inside, but it’s also the first version of the new operating system, and that means bugs. True to form, a software issue in iOS 11 is preventing Exchange email servers from sending and receiving messages, affecting Outlook, Office 365, and Exchange Server 2016 users. The good news is that Apple’s latest iOS update, 11.

Twitter has always been defined by its brevity: the 140 character restriction was originally mandated by SMS data limits. But Twitter users have also always found ways around that limit, from threaded “tweetstorms” to tweets sharing larger chunks of text as a screenshot. Now, the social network is finally giving into popular demand and doubling its character limit to 280 characters.

Ever seen a pair of shoes on the road and wondered how in the heck they got there? No, it’s not the remnants of some horrible accident. There are actually some pretty simple explanations. Don’t worry, fellow curious minds.

Chances are you’ve owned a pair of Nike sneakers at some point in your life. The iconic swoosh has been around since the 70s, the company itself even longer. But even the most brand-loyal consumers might find their sneaks are falling apart a little earlier than expected, and if that’s the case, you may be able to save them (or at least get some store credit) thanks to Nike’s fairly generous return policy.