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I’ve never been a big fan of those gimmicky Disney/Pixar movies like Cars, and Planes but I have to say, this premise works well with X-Wings. I can fully endorse this funny parody from Big Bee…
via MightyMega
X-Wings: If Pixar Did Star Wars

via Darknet – The Darkside
Watcher – Passive Web Application Vulnerability Scanner

Physics and illusion tinkerer Brusspup compiled this assortment of tricks, hacks, experiments and generally fun things you can do with fire. Proceed with great caution if you decide to try any of these yourself.
via The Awesomer
10 Amazing Fire Tricks

Having a regular date night is one of the simplest ways to keep your relationship strong, but keeping those dates interesting is tough. Here’s how you can set yourself up to be able to easily plan dates that are fun and memorable.

Being committed to a weekly date night with your partner helps you two become closer and more connected. You probably know at least one couple who swears by scheduled date nights as a way to keep their relationship going. Once you have the right tools, you and your partner can use them to keep the fire burning in your own relationship.

Get Organized and Commit to Regular Dates

Before you start regular date nights, talk over a few things with your partner to make sure you’re on the same page. Set expectations around who is responsible for planning them. Taking turns is a great way for both people to get to experience the surprise of not knowing what the date will entail. If you don’t have combined finances, you should also talk about how paying will work (and prevent the “check dance”). The rule I use: whoever planned the date night should pay.

Once you start planning, put your date nights on your calendar and make them a priority. If you have demanding work commitments, this may be a challenge, but it’s important. By setting aside specific time and not letting anything else interfere, you’re showing your partner that they’re a priority and that you value them. Getting date night on your calendar also makes it more likely that you’ll establish them as part of your relationship routine.

If you have kids (or pets that get lonely), find a reliable babysitting option, along with a backup, so your plans don’t get derailed by the kids. Alternatively, save on the cost of a sitter by trading off child care services with friends.

Keep Things Fresh with Novel Activities

Adding date nights to your calendar isn’t enough, of course—you have to do more than go through the motions. To have successful date nights, you need to plan activities that make you and your partner feel excited. Focus on having a variety of activities that are new for both of you. You can use the novelty of these activities to revitalize your relationship.

Keep unique date ideas flowing by finding good sources of inspiration. Riff off of activities you both already enjoy. If you like food, make a list of restaurants you want to try or look for local gatherings of food trucks. Sign up for email lists for attractions you like to visit, local forums, and community mailing lists—they’ll give you a curated list of nearby events to pick from. You can also see if any local museums offer nightlife events, which are great for date night as they usually happen after work hours and offer food and drinks.

Services like EventBrite have tons of local events for cities all over the world and also put together calendars highlighting awesome activities for the month. Beyond that, check out sites like Thrillist (U.S. cities) and Time Out (international cities). They both feature local events and provide rankings, suggestions, and reviews of places.

If you’re really busy, try outsourcing your date ideas. There are plenty of services, sites, and apps out there that will send you ideas for dates. To start off, see if It’s Date Night, Delightful, BetterHalf, or 301 Date Ideas work for you and your partner. If you want to go a step beyond just outsourcing the date ideas, there are services (like Date Night Planners and For Love and Charmed) that will plan entire dates for you for a fee.

Go big every once in a while—not just for anniversaries or birthdays. You’ll surprise your partner, try something really new, and get to feel pampered.

Fill the Gap Between Dates with Small Gestures

Once you start going on regular date nights, you’ll see an improvement in how you and your partner feel about each other and your relationship. Keep the good feelings going with small gestures between your scheduled date nights, like flowers, candles at dinner, or doing something special for the other person. Even just making them a home cooked meal or straightening up the house can build on the positivity that date night brings to your relationship (knowing their love language helps a lot in knowing which small gestures make the biggest impact). You can also capture those feelings by documenting your date nights with photos and other keepsakes, then displaying them so you’re reminded of the awesome stuff you’ve done.

Remember What Date Night Is Really About

Keep in mind that date nights don’t always have to be super romantic in nature. Just finding something that gives you and your partner the chance to spend time together and reconnect is the most important part.

Some of the best date nights don’t have to cost anything, either Having a picnic in the park, making drinks at home then going on a stroll through the neighborhood, or an afternoon spent exploring a nearby attraction can all be wonderful dates. If you want to see what other people have done, check out Lifehacker reader suggestions for free activities in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Also, in addition to new activities, you should also work on how to have interesting conversations that go beyond normal small talk. As tempting as it may be to use this time to address “housekeeping” topics, steer the conversation towards areas that allow you to learn more about your partner. Even if you’ve been together for a long time, you can still discover new things about your partner—or see how their thoughts and opinions have changed over the years. Avoid interruptions or temptations to check your phone by both agreeing to put your phones on airplane mode. If you’re at a loss for what to talk about, plan your date around a conversation sparking activity or ask your partner about a time in their life before you knew them. You might be surprised at some of the interesting anecdotes that arise.

Relationships are tricky to keep going, but with a little preparation and work you can use awesome date nights to help.

Top image from karen roach and EMIL AZIATIK. Other images from mtnorton,
tomas_sobek, dinnerseries, and trevorturk.

via Lifehacker
How to Keep Planning Kickass Date Nights in a Long-Term Relationship

This week’s Steal of the Week is a collection of knives that offer their owners a ton of functionality at an affordable price: this is the RAT Model 1 and Model 2 series by Ontario Knife Company. The three-point-six inch… Continue Reading →
via KnifeCenter Blog
Steal of the Week: Ontario Knife Company RAT Model 1

Produced in partnership with Wal-Mart and Texas State University, the video is designed to teach employees how to deal with an active shooter situation and will be used to train over 1.5 million employees in the near future. It’s nice … Read More

The post Wal-Mart Active Shooter Training Video: “We Have A Right to Defend Ourselves” appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Wal-Mart Active Shooter Training Video: “We Have A Right to Defend Ourselves”

Food is one of our biggest expenses, but one mom, who feeds a family of 7 on just $300 a month, shows us that it’s possible to eat well without cutting coupons or relying on Ramen noodles every night.

Jen Wallwork Dominguez spends $3 per meal to feed herself, her husband, two teenagers, and three preschoolers. (We’re fans of the $4/day cookbook, but that’s $4 per person. Here, Jen is feeding 7 people for $3 a meal.)

There’s no real magic here. It’s all basically smart shopping and planning. She shops solely at ALDI, probably the cheapest grocery chain, avoids organic and processed foods, and relies on cheap food staples such as eggs and beans.

The most important part of her plan, though, is the rotation of the cheap ingredients. Ingredients do double duty instead of being used for just a single meal, which helps make those food purchases go further:

I’ve found the single, best way to save money on groceries is to use what is always least expensive and use it a lot. As such, there’s no great variety in my menus, no exotic ingredients that I buy for just one meal. We eat dinner on a two week rotation, lunch and breakfast on a weekly rotation. Yes, it can get a little boring. When that happens, I go looking for something else that uses primarily those same cheap ingredients. God bless the Internet.

If you look at her 14-day meal plan, the meals are pretty basic, but still appetizing, with dinners including a tilapia dish, lunch taco salads (made from leftover taco night ingredients), and hearty breakfasts as well.

While using meal planning to save money isn’t a new idea at all, and cooking like a peasant is a time-tested way to feed large families for cheap, it’s inspiring to see a real life example of how to carry out this strategy on a day-to-day and monthly basis.

How I Feed a Family of Seven for $300 a Month | Life in the Circus via Forbes

Photo by o5com.

via Lifehacker
Feed a Large Family on $10 a Day with a 14-Day Rotating Meal Plan

Everyone loves a good, clear, easily grasped narrative. “X leads to Y.” “A causes B.” But as we’ve seen over the course of this series, the nature of depression is simply too complex to follow a nice, neat storyline. In exploring the history of depression, we saw that the way we view melancholy today is […]

via The Art of Manliness
A Realistic, Encouraging, Compassionate, No-Nonsense, Research-Backed, Action-Oriented Guidebook to Managing Your Depression

Itchy Ninja Software is pleased to announce the release of Analyst for MySQL v1.1. Revolutionize the way you work and administrate MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, and Percona XtraDB installations.
Make More Efficient Use of Your Time
Gathering all of the metrics to diagnose a database installation is a very time consuming process, and many simply do not have the experience to know where to begin. With Analyst for MySQL, you will be able to get your hands on hundreds of metrics within moments. It really takes all of the guesswork, as well as tedious long sessions of writing queries out of managing a MySQL database server.
Cross-Platform
Not only can you run the program on Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can also generate server reports from each of those platforms as well! No need to install anything on the server at any time. All diagnostics are run from your laptop or desktop machine. The source computer (your laptop or desktop machine) can be any operating system and so can the server you are auditing.
Performance Tuning
With Analyst, you will get dozens of charts, tables, graphs, and rules concentrated on helping you resolve performance issues. You can even see CPU utilization, disk I/O, swapping / paging, network throughput, and more. For Linux systems with systat (SAR) installed, historical system metrics are also available.
Minimize Downtime
Analyst includes over 200 industry-proven rules which help identify the source of the issues as well as advice on how to resolve them. You’ll also get multiple charts, tables, and graphs that give you immediate access to the specifics of how your server is running.
Team Collaboration
Ever wish you could share all of the key server metrics with the rest of your team when there is an outage? With Analyst for MySQL we make this easy. You will be able to export all of the key data and send it to anyone you want. Have a manager who wants a report of what you have done? Analyst makes it easy to show reports from before and after your work to show improvement in scoring. Have team members who are not in the office and/or don’t have access to the server? No problem. Just send an Analyst report file to them and they will have instant access to the same data you have.
Security Hardening
With Analyst for MySQL, you will find anonymous users, users without passwords, accounts with excessive privileges, connections that are not encrypted, and much more.
Best Practices
One of the first tasks a MySQL administrator should perform when receiving a new server or setting one up is to ensure standards. We have spent countless hours drafting documentation on proper server configuration to ensure environments meet industry best practices. With Analyst for MySQL, you can benefit from all of our work.
Server Metrics
See metrics in the form of tabular data, pie graphs, line charts, and more. You will have metrics such as memory usage, InnoDB Buffer Pool usage, query cache utilization, and more at the tip of your fingers. Confused by the new Performance Schema? No worries. Analyst provides easy to understand metrics and does all of the heavy lifting for you.
For those with systat package installed on Linux, you will be able to turn back the clock and see how the server was performing throughout the day! See metrics such as CPU utilization, disk I/O, RAM consumption, network throughput, and more in gorgeous charts and graphs.
High Availability
For those with an Analyst Enterprise license, an audit of a MySQL Cluster, Percona XTRADB Cluster, MariaDB CLuster, or Galera Cluster you will give you rules, tables, graphs, and alerts giving detailed information on cluster performance. You will know immediately how the cluster is performing. Moreover, you will know whether the node you audited is the source of the problem or whether it is another node in the cluster.
Ease of Use
We created Analyst for MySQL to be easy to use. We know you don’t have time, or even want to read a complicated manual, to figure out how to use software. Want to archive your findings? Or send a report to someone? Analyst offers the ability to save your data to disk, export it into PDF, CSV, PNG, RTF, or HTML format, and of course printing.
Server Scoring
Analyst will examine key metrics in several areas including standardization, best practices, administration, high availability, performance, security, and more and assign a score to that category. You will get an overall score to see the current condition of your server. Once you start making the suggested improvements, run another analysis of the server. What could be easier?
Free To Use!
Click here to download your copy today!
via Planet MySQL
Analyst for MySQL v1.1: Database Performance, Security, & Best Practices Auditing Tool Released – Download for FREE!