Windows only: Popular iTunes-alternative MediaMonkey updates to version 3.1 today, bringing a giant list of fixes and improvements that include friendlier full-text search, iPod Shuffle 3G support, performance boosts (due in no small part to multicore processing support, says CNET), better album art rendering, and smoother syncing. In short, if you're already a MediaMonkey junkie (many of you are—and we like it, too), it’s worth a download. [MediaMonkey]
Beta web application Netalyzr is a free tool that analyzes your network for possible problems—large and small—helping you determine your overall network health.
As soon as you start the test (and agree to the security certificate), Netalyzer performs various tests on your computer’s connection. When the tests are complete, you’ll see an exhaustive rundown of all the results, including a handy “Noteworthy Events” section at the top that details the possible problem areas. Tests that pass are marked as green, minor problems are marked in yellow, and problems get the classic red. For a longer explanation of what each section is testing, just click the linked section title.
Did you give it a go? Let’s hear how your network handled the test in the comments.
Buying from a thrift store or resale shop doesn’t have to be moth-ball-scented trip down the horrible fashions of yesteryear. Maximize your dollar by choosing the right shop and the right time.
Photo by jeffk.
The nicer stuff people have to get rid of, the more likely they are to donate it for a tax break or sell it at a resale shop for some extra money. With careful shopping and an awareness of how charitable and for-profit resale shops work, you can save a bundle. Jenny Elig, writing for the Indianapolis Star, hits the streets to figure out where you should shop and when. She gives specific examples of local thrift and consignment shops, but her tips apply to nearly every resale store including large organizations like Goodwill.
Knowing how a particular store runs can yield enough savings that it’s worth asking about their stock rotation and sale days.
Cindy Graham, vice president of marketing for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, offers some helpful advice on the Goodwill rotation system, which lasts for four weeks. Items are tagged with a color code; once that color code has been in the store for four weeks, it’s offered for 50 percent off. Goodwill also offers 50 percent off sales (excluding new items featured on the ends of the aisles, such as candy or batteries); June 20 is the next 50 percent off sale day.
Aside from knowing the sales days, the real key is knowing when the loot comes in. Monday is an excellent day for hitting the Goodwill or consignment shops in upscale neighborhoods. People have spent the weekend cleaning out closets, dressers, and attics and are generally depositing their goods on either Sunday or Monday morning.
Need to find some resale shops near you? Check out The Thrift Shopper to find stores in your area. If you have your own tips or tricks for getting more for your dollar by spending it at resale shops, let’s hear about it in the comments below.
Linux: Mac4Lin, a package of skins, wallpapers, icons, and interface refinements that brings a completist Mac look to Linux with an automated installation, has reached the 1.0 stage with an impressive array of features.
Besides basic theming changes to your desktop covering login windows, window look and feel, a modified app launcher dock, and more, Mac4Lin plugs into and plays nice with a lot of third-party apps. Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, Songbird, Pidgin, Firefox 3, and others are supported and receive theme integrations, while a customized Cairo or AWN dock are rolled into your system during the installation.
It goes without saying, but there are, obviously, areas where the Linux desktop can’t replicate the Mac’s. Still, if you like the Cupertino look for your system, Mac4Lin is an easy way to get there, without an afternoon-consuming step-by-step process.
Mac4Lin 1.0 is a free download for Linux systems. Hit the link below for a list of features, standing bugs, and screenshots.
Whether you purchased your HDTV yesterday or last year, there’s a big chance you just plugged it in and fired it up. Tweak your HDTV for better viewing quality. Photo by blakespot.
While HDTV has a pretty awesome picture, and you've likely been enjoying your screen just fine how it is, your television didn't come out of the box pre-programmed for your living room. Your HDTV came out of the box preset for a showroom floor, with the settings cranked up to compete with a wall of other HDTVs to induce that certain feeling of, "Oh my God, I can't believe how HD-riffic this is!" Your living room is not the same as a showroom floor for a myriad of reasons—bright polo shirts and tube fluorescents among them—so the best viewing experience requires a few display setting switches.
For those with a factory default tube, the New York times put together a crash course in tweaking your television. Most of their advice, as you would imagine, involves cranking things down from their eye-searing in-store levels. Start by controlling the external lighting as much as possible, then start tinkering with your settings starting with the brightness:
A picture’s black level is controlled by the TV’s brightness adjustment; it needs to be set dark enough so that the screen displays rich, deep blacks. Set too low, many images will lose their detail. Set the black level too high, the picture will look muddy.
Black level is important because the truer the blacks, the greater the perceived sharpness of the TV image. A muddy picture will look less sharp than one that has true blacks.
To get the proper black level, you can use a PLUGE pattern, which typically consists of six vertical bars of varying black levels. Turn the picture level down until one of the bars disappears against the background. PLUGE patterns, and other patterns discussed here, are available on a variety of TV tuning discs.
Once you’ve got a handle on your brightness, don’t neglect the contrast and colors. But wait! Don’t run out and spend money on a calibration disc. Not only are there tons of free test patterns a Google Image search away, but there are hundreds of DVD movies that include test patterns tucked in the bonus features.
Check out the full article below for tips for your other HDTV settings.
Windows only: WinCDEmu makes it easy to quickly mount and access the contents of CD and DVD image files you’ve extracted or downloaded.
Once installed, WinCDEmu adds an entry to your right-click context menu. Anytime you right-click on a supported image format—ISO, CUE, BIN, and IMG—you'll be able to mount it with a single click. From there, you can access the disc contents with any application or by browsing to the disc itself. To unmount the image, head into My Computer and eject the drive, or right-click on the actual image file and unmount it from there.
If you’re frequently mounting and un-mounting disk images, make sure to check out Gizmo Drive, a virtual drive management tool. WinCDEmu is freeware, Windows only.
Cooking isn’t a skill you can pick up through reading alone. Watch chefs, enthusiastic home cooks, and even a surprise celebrity guest demonstrate cooking skills everyone can use in this roundup of 10 great instructional cooking videos.
A very helpful father shows you how to find the “axis” of a mango, giving you the most efficient yield of a delicious summer treat. (Original post)
There are many ways to extract egg whites, yolks, and shells separately, as WikiHow details, but the easiest method involves the tools you’ve got built into the ends of your arms. Bay-area video blogger Hilarie shows us how to use your hands and three bowls to separate eggs into elements for baking, health-conscious recipes, or those who just like to keep things orderly. (Original post)
Italian chef extraordinaire and lover of food talk Mario Batali explains to the Serious Eats film crew the way to sauce pasta—which, for most people, means less of the red stuff. "What you want to eat when you eat a bowl of pasta … is pasta." (Original post)
If the idea of smooth, almost creamy eggs makes you cry foul, you won’t dig Hell’s Kitchen star and renowned British chef Gordon Ramsay whips up what he calls the “perfect scrambled egg,” with crème fraîche (or sour cream or yogurt as a fill-in) and absolutely no overcooking. Otherwise, looking at the results, you might join with your Lifehacker editors in hoping for a free weekend morning to try this out and make “the missus” or mister very happy indeed. (Original post)
Rochester chef Art Rogers demonstrates for Lifehacker how to get consistent slices using the “knuckle guide” technique, and then neat, consistent, less-messy diced onion with horizontal and vertical cuts. Yeah, the video’s a little shaky and has its brief out-of-focus moments, but the knife skills are front and center. (Original post)
Gina shows off her California livin’ skills by showing the easy way to pit a ripe avocado and not lose any of that precious precursor to guacamole. (Original post)
Rouxbe, a high-resolution, seriously detailed food tutorial site, is sponsored by the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, and it shows in the step-by-step nature of their videos. Their “Drill-down” on mincing and crushing garlic offers a great close-up view of what a knife should be doing when the recipe calls for either of those things. To be honest, one editor learned that “crushed” doesn’t just involve smacking a whole garlic clove with the flat of a knife, so a few other of Rouxbe’s free sample videos (full access requires a subscription) might get a viewing later this weekend. (Original post)
This video, pulled from VideoJug’s well-organized Food & Drink section, demonstrates perhaps the most crucial and time-consuming task of sushi making—getting the rice right. Cooking just long enough and using a fan properly are elegantly demonstrated, and by the end, you'll know enough to buy some seaweed wraps and ingredients and try out your first few rolls.
Whether you’re eating healthier, accomodating a food safety fan, or cooking for the little guys, sometimes you’ve got to grill your hamburgers all the way through. America’s Test Kitchen, the PBS cooking show from the creators of Cook’s Illustrated, demonstrates the best way to cook a well-done hamburger. Like their magazine recipes and tips, this comes by way of lots and lots of trials and tests, and it’s a pretty ingenious work-around: 80 percent beef that seems fatty, but mostly cooks off; a mixture of bread, milk, seasoning, and A1 steak sauce tossed into the beef; and a small divot pressed into each burger’s top to make cooking more consistent. Be sure to click the video for the larger view.
We are not made of stone, and we could not resist including a clip of America’s most surreal superstar, humbly demonstrating in his own kitchen how he makes roasted chicken with pears. More important than the crazy vocal cadence or his recipe, though, is the technique, sometimes referred to as beer can chicken or “chicken on a throne,” though technically known as indirect grilling. By resting a bird on a moisturized stand (a flap of fat in Walken’s case, and a can of soda, beer, or water in most others) and keeping it hoisted, you get juicy interior meat, crispy skin, and a kind of freakishly fun sight to show guests while the meal’s cooking.
Earlier this week, we showed you how to purée your fruit for a quick berry lemonade. If you want to save your fruit for the long-haul, weblog TipNut’s extensive guide to preparing 19 various fruits for freezing is worth a look.
In order to pack a particular fruit, you must first know its intended use. This will determine the type of packaging required: dry, sugar, or syrup pack. The dry pack method, for example, is used on fruits that can be frozen without any prep time (apart from your basic washing and draining). Blueberries, cranberries, and currants fall into this category.
The full post also offers advice on how to prevent fruit discoloration and includes the above chart that breaks down a total of 19 fruits according to their preparation requirements and preferred packing methods.
Once you master the art of fruit freezing, take a look at our complete guide to freezing food to further expand your culinary (freezing) skills.
Buying a fish whole almost always means a cheaper, fresher meal, but how do you turn it into dinner? We asked a chef to show us how to filet a fish, and we filmed it for good measure.
Art Rogers, chef-owner of Lento restaurant in Rochester, NY, would move a bit quicker with his fish if he was on the dinner line, but since we met up during relative down time (you can tell from the kitchen crew singing!), he’s slowly demonstrating how to get your knife into your fish and right next to the bone, and how to remove the straggler bones and tendons from your filets.
As with Rogers’ demonstration of how to slice and dice an onion like a pro, you’ll want a strong, sharp knife. Rogers suggests that, even if you get your fish cleaned and scaled, ask to have the head left on, as you’ll have more leverage when you’re cutting. If you’ve got a strong enough knife, it’s really just a matter of keeping as close to the main lateral bone as possible, and then cutting up and out to release a filet. Pan cooking a thin filet like this little red snapper is the way to go, and there are a few cooking suggestions near the end.
Also similar to our previous chef video: the occasionally shaky camera work and bad try-outs (digital zoom, “macro mode”) of our brand-new Kodak Zi6. We apologize for the unsteady framing, but the guts of this exercise (pun intended) are pretty visible.
Thanks again to Art Rogers and the occasionally tuneful kitchen crew at Lento for letting us film and learn in their kitchen.
Can you spare five minutes each day? That’s all you’ll need to make fresh-baked bread with this recipe and method.
We’ve shown you that homemade bread can be cheap, delicious, and easy to make, especially if you’re using a no-knead recipe. Now, thanks to Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, you can have fresh-baked bread with only five minutes of actual effort each time:
A one or two-week supply of dough is made in advance and refrigerated. Mixing it takes less than 15 minutes. Every day, cut off a hunk of dough and quickly shape it without kneading. Allow it to rest briefly on the counter and then toss it in the oven. We don’t count the rest time or baking time (usually about 30 minutes to an hour each) in our calculation, because you can do something else while that’s happening. If you bake after dinner, the bread will still be fresh the next day (higher moisture breads stay fresh longer), but the method is so convenient that you’ll probably find you can cut off some dough and bake a loaf every morning before your day starts. If you want to have one thing you do every day that is simply perfect, this is it!
Hertzberg and François even make remembering the recipe simple by explaining the "6-3-3-13" rule:
To store enough for eight loaves, remember 6-3-3-13. It’s 6 cups water, 3 tablespoons salt, 3 tablespoons yeast, and then add 13 cups of flour. It’ll amaze your friends when you do this in their homes without a recipe!
Using this rule, you can easily cut the recipe into half or double it in your head if needed, just maintain the same ratios. Follow the link below for the details on the recipe and several variations or tell us about your favorite bread recipe in the comments.
