Tag: amy

Few of us have the time or energy to declutter our entire home in one go, but in 30 minutes or less every day over a month and a half? It just might be possible. This plan can help.

Stephanie of the Keeper of the Home blog offers a 40-day challenge for whole-house decluttering, she offers practical advice for cleaning out your home and suggests an area for decluttering each day—free PDF, she offers practical advice for cleaning out your home and suggests an area for decluttering each day—from your kitchen utensils drawer to your closets.

The goal: find at least 10 items to donate, toss out, or save for a garage sale from each area. Clutter is such a mental and physical drain. Imagine how much lighter and better you’d feel with 400 or so items cleared out.

This is sort of like The FlyLady’s hand-holding/coaching for getting your house in order, but in easy checklist form.

8 Weeks to a Less Cluttered Home | Keeper of the Home

via Lifehacker
Declutter Your Entire Home with This 8-Week Plan

You can buy those ugly little plastic mosquito repellent bracelets, but why not make yourself something much more attractive that you also can reuse?

One Good Thing By Jillee brings us this interesting DIY project. The bracelet is made from paracord, so it’s durable and available in all kinds of colors and patterns. Once you get the hang of the weaving technique, you can crank a bracelet out in no time. When the bracelet’s finished, soak it in a DIY mosquito repellent made from witch hazel and the essential oils of citronella, lemongrass, lavender, and peppermint. Plus, you’ve always got a handy length of paracord with you should the need arise. Hit up the link for the full instructions on making the bracelet and mixing the repellent.

DIY Mosquito Repelling Bracelet | One Good Thing by Jillee

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Make Your Own Reusable Mosquito-Repelling Bracelet

Hard-boiled eggs may not get nearly the love that scrambled, fried, or poached eggs do, but they’re a versatile workhorse that can add a heavy dose of protein to everything from salads to sandwiches—as long as you do it right.

One reason hard-boiled eggs don’t get much affection is because far too many people overcook them. If you’ve ever opened a boiled egg to find a grainy, light-yellow center with a grayish-green ring around it, that’s how you know it’s been overcooked. With the method I’m about to show you, you’ll never need worry about this happening. I learned this technique from culinary yoda Jacques Pépin at one of his cooking demos more than five years ago, and it’s so reliable that it’s the only way I’ve boiled eggs since.

You’ll need:

• A sharp object like a thumbtack
• Any number of eggs, preferably ones that aren’t ultra-fresh
• A heavy-bottomed pot
• A pasta fork or slotted spoon
• Water and ice

To start, puncture a hole in the round end of each egg with a thumbtack. That’s where the air chamber is, and poking a hole in the egg releases pressure inside, so the shell won’t crack.

Apply gentle pressure with the tack, as you don’t want to crack the egg! The hole should look like this:

Bring water to a very gentle boil, then quickly drop eggs in one at a time. I like to do this with a pasta fork, which, with its upturned sides, is the perfect vehicle for transferring the egg into the water carefully.

Set a timer to 10 minutes. Check your stove to make sure it isn’t set too high; once it’s reached a gentle boil, I usually turn down the heat to medium. If you boil the eggs at too high a temperature, the whites will be tough and the yolks more prone to being rubbery.

As soon as the timer has gone off, turn off the heat and pour out the boiling water, leaving the eggs in the pot. Shake the pot with the eggs in it to crack their shells.

Submerge the eggs into an ice water bath for 15 minutes. (I kept the eggs in the pot and added ice and water to save myself from having to wash another dish.) The ice bath allows the eggs to cool, and also to release their stinky sulfur into the ice water.

Put the ice bath under a stream of running water, and peel away. The running water makes it easier to peel away the egg’s thin outer membrane.

The final product should look like this:

Enjoy! Preferably with a sprinkle of truffle salt to feel fancy.

Now your eggs are ready to be used in an Italian-style tuna sandwich or anything else that suits your fancy.

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via Lifehacker
How to Make the Perfect Hard-Boiled Egg

Web/iOS: A growing number of apps now are geared toward teaching kids to code because it’s a valuable skill to learn. Code Kingdoms is another such app, but it’s wrapped in a game that kids would most likely want to play anyway (programming lessons or not).

Code Kingdoms is targeted towards six- to 13-year olds and looks very much like your everyday puzzle adventure game. Choose an animal, walk around a kingdom saving animals through puzzles. The difference is most of the puzzles require kids to use code elements to solve the puzzles. At first this is through dragging-and-dropping code snippets, but as they progress, kids will be typing in code themselves.

Besides teaching actual JavaScript through play, Code Kingdoms also helps kids develop problem-solving skills and the encouragement to keep pushing on when they’re faced with a challenge in the game—much like programmers often have to push through challenging walls.

There’s a school-specific version being used in the UK and potentially coming to the US and other countries in the future. But for home use, the app is free to play on the web or to download for iOS.

Code Kingdoms

via Lifehacker
Code Kingdoms Teaches Kids JavaScript with a Puzzle Adventure Game

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. EveryDollar is one of the simplest and most straightforward I’ve seen, not to mention easy on the eyes.

Main categories are already chosen for you, and as you allocate your income, you can see how much you are left to budget. This follows the “Zero sum” (or “give every dollar a name”) philosophy. Click the arrow to the next month and your budgeted amounts are conveniently copied over.

The Baby Steps portion of the tool tracks how you’re progressing according to Ramsey’s 7 steps, from saving $1,000 for your emergency fund and using the debt snowball method to paying off the house and leaving an inheritance.

While EveryDollar is free, to get actual financial tracking for your budget and connect your financial accounts, you’ll need EveryDollar Plus, which costs $99 a year. With Plus, you can drag and drop to match transactions to your budget categories, but if you’re a Mint user, you won’t likely need this. Still, the budgeting tool is handy (and can help you create a better budget for use in other programs).

EveryDollar via TheSpectrum

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Dave Ramsey’s EveryDollar Helps Create Your Budget, Meet Money Goals

Remember Green Street Media’s no-spraypaint-necessary sidewalk advertising? To refresh your memory, the UK-based firm exploited the filthy nature of sidewalks by placing a stencil over them and blasting them with a pressure washer. With the stencil lifted, the area blasted clean spelled out their message.

Seattle-based artist Peregrine Church does something similar, but using rain rather than a pressure washer. By coating the sidewalks in an invisible superhydrophobic coating applied through a stencil, he creates messages that are only visible when it rains out.

Here’s how he does it, and it seems simple as pie:

So at this point we’ve seen hydrophobic coatings used to defeat public urinators and help get glue out of bottles. Church’s "Rainworks" project, as he’s calling it, has a more humble purpose: "To make people smile on rainy days."

You can see more of them here.

via Core77
Seattle Artist Creates Sidewalk Messages That Only Appear When It Rains

The freshest eggs have the best flavor and will last longer. Here’s an insider tip on picking the freshest carton of eggs at the grocery store: look at the three-digit code printed on the carton, not the sell-by date.

Food52 explains:

Because the sell-by date for eggs in a supermarket (with U.S.D.A. inspection) can be up to 45 days after the packing date, [The Eastman Egg Company] has a quick and easy way to check for freshness: the Julian date. Every egg carton has a code printed on its side, and the last 3 digits of this code are called the Julian date. The code uses a number from 001 to 365 to correspond to a day of the year and indicate when they were packaged. For example, 001 is January 1st and 365 is December 31st. To find the freshest eggs, select the highest number you can find (keeping in mind the numbers wrap around in January).

Who knew?

Head over to Food52 for more tips from the Eastman Egg Company, particularly when it comes to building the perfect egg sandwich.

How to Make the Best Egg Sandwich Without a Recipe | Food52

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Pick the Carton with the Freshest Eggs by Looking for This Number

In our previous article in this series on the history of depression, we saw that its origins have alternatively been chalked up to a number of theories: excess of “black bile” in the body, the sin of sloth, wrong thinking, enervating luxury, conflicts in the subconscious, and a biological imbalance in the brain. Some of those […]

via The Art of Manliness
Leashing the Black Dog: What Causes Depression?

Why do people give their kids certain names at certain points in history? It’s not always clear — but at least we can amuse ourselves with data about it. Abacaba created this strangely captivating bubble chart that contracts and swells with the popularity of U.S. girls names for every year since 1880.

Abacaba uses this 143 years of data, collected by U.S. Social Security Administration, to draw up this amorphous, info-heavy creation. Each year comes with a few interesting facts—some just charting current events but others possibly having some connection to why a certain name becomes popular, like Babe Ruth joining the MLB or certain actresses starring in popular films.

It also isn’t the first time this data set has been used to make fancy infographics. Jezebel reported on other visualizations of this same data set that focused on the correlation between geography and certain names, whereas this 5-minute video is concerned with how society and current events shape what we’re called.

One of my favorite realizations is that we’re not the only generation to stupidly name stuff after pop culture (see: Bella). Dorothy also became a popular name in the 1900s, most likely because of the book, the musical, and eventually the film The Wizard of Oz. Naming girls after pop culture heroines is a scenario that seems to repeat itself throughout decades.

As for boys, Abacaba says that another visualization is incoming. But for now, boring lists will have to do. Spoiler: there’s probably going to be a shit load of Johns. [Reddit]

via Gizmodo
Over 100 Years of Popular Girls Names in One Bubbling Visualization