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Many of us firmly believe McDonald’s french fries are the best french fries. You don’t have to head to the fast food joint for a nearly identical version you can make at home.

PopSugar takes the ingredients and process McDonald’s uses to reverse engineer their fries. Like Serious Eats’ copycat recipe, which we’ve salivated over before, PopSugar’s take uses peanut oil instead of the mix of oils McDonald’s uses (but omits the vinegar in Serious Eats’ version). This version also adds corn syrup in place of McDonald’s use of dextrose, to help the fries caramelize, and adds beef fat to replicate McDonald’s beefy flavor bath. As with making extra extra crispy fried chicken, you’ll give the potatoes a second fry for super crispiness.

Check out the very enthusiastic video above for the whole process or the link below for the text version. Or head here for more McDonald’s copycat recipes and tips.

The Homemade Secret to McDonald’s French Fries | PopSugar

via Lifehacker
This Video Shows How to Make McDonald’s-Like French Fries at Home

Re-create the incendiary reaction that welded the world’s modern railways.

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The post Make Thermite — the Invention that Welded the World’s Modern Railways appeared first on Make:.

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New Project: Make Thermite — the Invention that Welded the World’s Modern Railways

(Gore) Get thee to the chariot! A band of Templars and an unlikely ally are asked to hunt a strange and heartless creature through a foggy forest. Fools. Starring Joel from The Last of Us and Mr. Common Sense.
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Predator: Dark Ages

As I said in my Ultimate 10/22 Shootout, “..and then the Magnum Research rifle shows up at about half the price of any of the rifles here. Kinda like the guy in the tweaked Nissan 300Z who can keep up and occasionally beat the guys in $1 Million sports cars.”  The Magnum Research lineup of[…..]
via AllOutdoor.com
Review: Magnum Research MLR22BW Barracuda American Black Walnut .22LR Rifle

The problem is simple enough. You’ve got a raw egg, and it’s going to be dropped from a high place. You have to build a contraption so that it doesn’t break when it hits. Easy? Maybe. But how do you make it as light as possible? Or as small as possible?

These questions have had high school physics students pulling all-nighters for decades. Luckily for the generations to come, our good friend former NASA engineer Mark Rober is here to enlighten you. Just like with his Pinewood Derby video, he not only shows you some of the best systems for winning (depending on what the rules of your particular contest consist of), but it breaks down the science of exactly how each one works. Not only will this help you sound smart when your teacher asks you how you came up with it, but hopefully it will inspire you to try something original that’s based on these principles.

Personally, I don’t have any kids in high school, nor am I likely to be entering an egg drop contest anytime soon, and yet I was absolutely glued to this video. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this knowledge, but it’s probably going to be something fun. And I trust that these solutions will work. If he can safely land a rover on Mars then he can safely land an egg on the ground, okay? [Mark Rober]

via Gizmodo
How to Win Your Physics Class Egg Drop Competition

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Dilbert 2015-05-27

Very high doses of vitamin D may help critically ill patients with respiratory failure leave the hospital sooner, a small study suggests. Vitamin … Continued

The post Can a super-dose of vitamin D cut hospital stays? appeared first on Futurity.

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Can a super-dose of vitamin D cut hospital stays?

No one understands the value of a properly wound cable more than concert roadies and TV crew professionals, who wrap and unwrap hundreds of feet of cord on a daily basis. Here’s the method they use to keep their shows running on time.

The over-under technique shown above and below is best suited for long cables and as an alternative to wrapping the cord around your elbow and hand. Coil the cord with thumbs facing the same direction then alternate and end the coil with the thumb of your bottom hand facing towards you.

This method eliminates unnecessary twists in the cord and allows the cord to coil in it’s natural state (like it was wrapped from the factory). It also allows the cord or cable to be quickly straightened by either throwing the coil away from your or just pulling on one end.

This Old House also approves of the over-under method and they’ve added a great tip to keep the cord tied together. Wrap a long string around one end of the extension cord near the plug, and after the coiling the cord, tie a bow knot around the entire coil.

They also suggest storing your wound cords in a 5 gallon bucket which will keep them from unraveling. You can also dispense the coil straight from the bucket but cutting a hole on the side of the bucket near the bottom, and pulling the male end of the plug through the hole to plug into the wall. Then pull the length of cord needed straight out of the bucket.

The chain link method is another effective coiling technique and eliminates knots, but it adds more twists and bends to your cord and is not very compact for storage. Check out our advice for wrapping smaller cables while you’re at it.

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Workshop is a new blog from Lifehacker all about DIY tips, techniques, and projects. Follow us on Twitter here.

via Lifehacker
Coil Your Extension Cords Like a Roadie with the Over-Under Method

Even if you don’t care about the privacy implications of tracking cookies and other technologies sites use to identify us online, you might want to turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox anyway for a potential big speed boost.

Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis took a look at the top 200 news sites (according to Alexa) and found a median 44% reduction in page load time, as well as a 39% reduction in data usage.

Tracking Protection actively blocks domains known to track users. You might not see huge performance benefits for all sites, depending on how much each site relies on third-party content and similar extras from tracking domains. Still, with a range of between 20% and 90% decreased page load times according to the study—and better privacy control—it’s worth a shot.

To turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox:

1. Type in about:config in the location bar and hit enter.
2. You’ll see a warning about possibly voiding your warranty. Hit “I’ll be careful, I promise!” to continue.
3. Search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled.
4. Double-click that to toggle the value to true.

You can read the researchers’ paper (PDF) here.

Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015 | Monica at Mozilla via Venture Beat and Boing Boing

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Turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox to Make Pages Load 44% Faster