No matter where you travel, you want your hotel room to be a place you can take a load off and relax. It’s hard to do that, however, if you don’t feel comfortable and safe. This hotel safety checklist from a former CIA operative can help.
Drew Dwyer, a Marine veteran and former CIA operative, has seen his fair share of travel around the world—including some not-so-safe places for travelers. If you plan on seeing all of the world and want to stay safe, Dwyer shares his personal hotel safety checklist at SOFREP.com:
Acquire or make a copy of the fire escape plan on the back of your door. Most of these just slide out.
Do not stay on the ground or the top floor. The ground floor is readily accessible to intruders and the top floor does not allow any room to maneuver. The first or second (European) floors allow access for most third world country emergency vehicles.
Keep the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, even when you are not there.
Always assume the room is bugged. Keep the radio or TV turned on with the volume on low at all times — even when you are not in the room.
Keep the drapes/blinds pulled at all times, even when unoccupied.
Keep a light on in the room when unoccupied.
Keep a small “bug-out bag” packed with must-have items (money, ID, passport, etc.) in the event of an emergency departure.
Carry a motion alarm that can be placed over the doorknob. They are about $20 and can be found in most electronics stores.
Keep a flashlight next to the bed and within arm’s reach.
Some of this might seem like overkill for most travelers (especially the bugging bit), but it’s good information to know just in case. You can find more great world travel safety tips at the link below.
Netflix had some 75 million paying subscribers around the world—but how many of those people are getting the most out of their subscription? You can supercharge your viewing experience with these browser extensions and online apps that will take your Netflix game to a whole new level.
Extensions
Flix Plus by Lifehacker: a Chrome extension packed with tweaks from our good friends at Lifehacker, offering random episodes, customized lists, blocks for potential episode spoilers, fades for titles you’ve already seen, extended search and lots of other cool stuff.
Netflix Party: This Chrome extension enables you to watch Netflix remotely with friends. It introduces a group chat window down the right of the interface and keeps playback in sync between machines so you’re all watching the same scenes together.
NEnhancer: This Chrome extension adds a few bells and whistles on top of the core Netflix experience, including pop-up ratings, links to trailers, the option to show or hide categories on the front screen, and a random episode button (previously on Field Guide).
OttoPlay: A very handy (and free) Chrome extension that lets you watch Netflix like it’s running on an old-school cable (essentially adding the illusion of channel-surfing capabilities on top of the platform). It’s one of our favorite plug-ins for Netflix.
Super Browse: Did you hear Netflix has a ton of hidden category codes? Super Browse is a simple browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that unhides them and saves you having to guess the numerical code for each subcategory that you’re interested in exploring.
Super Netflix: Extra tools during playback are focus of this Chrome extension. It lets you adjust video quality on the fly, introduce custom subtitles, and get on-screen diagnostics with a click. It’s smooth and simple and feels very much like a native set of features.
Websites and online apps
FlickSurfer: if you’re stuck for something to watch, and you’re getting no joy out of Netflix’s recommendation algorithms, try FlickSurfer (a site we’ve covered in the past). Movies and shows can be filtered by actor, genre, rating, awards and more besides.
Flixed: As you’re probably aware, Netflix content differs wildly from country to country. Flixed lets you search by region with one click of the mouse, so you can check up on what you’re missing out on—or see the shows and movies you can watch on your next holiday.
JustWatch: This site and app covers pretty much every video-on-demand service currently out there—Not just Netflix. It’s a helpful tool for seeing exactly what’s available (use the ratings slider to make sure you’re just seeing the good stuff). This is another one of our favorites.
Leanflix:Leanflix isn’t a tool built exclusively for Netflix, but it can help you narrow down your streaming viewing choices based on critic scores, IMDB ratings, year of release, genre, MPAA rating and more besides.
Netflix Roulette: As you might expect, Netflix Roulette chooses something random for you to watch on the streaming service. You can filter by rating, director, actor, keyword, and type of content (movie or show) if you don’t want something completely random.
New On Netflix: This is another listings site, but one that’s more comprehensive than the others. The real strength of New On Netflix is its catalog of what’s old on Netflix—it has an up-to-date list of everything that’s leaving the platform in the coming days so you can watch it before it’s gone.
What Is My Movie?: The experimental What Is My Movie? isn’t specifically tailored for Netflix, but it can work out what film you’re talking about based on a natural language description (like “Tom Hanks is young”). Give it a try and be hugely impressed by its accuracy.
What Is On Netflix?: The What Is On Netflix? site looks similar to a lot of other streaming directories, but it has two important features in its favor—it lets you see all the new stuff with a couple of clicks and comes with apps for Android and iOS you can use on your mobile devices.
As we’ve often said, dull knives are dangerous knives, not to mention a pain to use when it’s time to cook. Keeping them sharp is surprisingly easy, and this guide from the folks at KnifePlanet is detailed and rich, but boils down to three simple steps: maintenance, honing, and eventually, sharpening.
The guide walks you through the details of each step in fantastic detail—the kind you’ll need to bookmark and come back to instead of trying to power through the whole thing at once. The guide starts with a spirited defense of sharpening, something you probably don’t really need, but there are definitely people out there who think sharpening a knife is going to cause more damage than it’s worth. Oversharpening maybe, or doing it too often, but in general? Not so much.
From there we get into some solid knife maintenance tips, like learning how to keep a knife in good condition just by honing it, so you don’t run the risk of oversharpening. We’ve shown you how to hone a knife in the past, but there’s a video in the guide below to help you get started, or how to use a honing steel properly, especially if you’re not totally sure how to find a good angle and how to hold a honing steel (or ceramic rod, whichever you’re using.) The guide also shows you how to hone a knife with a fine grit water stone.
The second step is a simple one—learning how to tell when your knife doesn’t just need honing, but actual sharpening. It’s more difficult than you might think, but boils down to what Peter Nowlan calls the “Tomato Test:”
If your knife can still slice a tomato without the tomato bending, if it still easily breaks through that skin and glides through the tomato you are good, nice work. Now if it doesn’t, try taking out your hone again and steel the knife. DO NOT use more pressure than you are used to using, that is not going to make a difference, just use the same technique and then see how the knife feels on that tomato. When I slice a tomato I start at the heel of the knife and pull the blade toward the tip and by the time the knife has moved an inch it is in through the skin of the tomato.
The third step, of course, is actually sharpening your knife, either by finding someone to sharpen it professionally for you, or by learning to sharpen it yourself, ideally with a water stone.
If you decide to take it to a sharpener, Nowlan has a few suggestions to help you get to know your sharpener first so you can trust your knives are in good hands. Hit the link below to read everything.
Kylo Ren has a lot of… anger issues in The Force Awakens. But even then, his path to the Dark Side in the movie was tinged with the hope that he could resolve the conflict within him. But apparently, it seems like Kylo was much further along that path than anyone realized. Spoilers ahead, if you’ve yet to watch The Force Awakens.
As part of ongoing coverage of The Force Awakens’ home release in the U.S. today, Entertainment Weekly has sat down with J.J. Abrams to uncover even more little details and tidbits about the film. Today, they discussed the scene where Kylo Ren slams his helmet down into a pool of ashes collected on a table in the interrogation room on Starkiller Base… and Abrams revealed what those ashes actually were:
The backstory is, that that table has the ashes of the enemies he’s killed. That moment was actually shot for, and meant to be used in, the scene where he was talking to the Vader mask.
I don’t know why, I’d always assumed that in a fit of rage over Rey, Kylo Ren had simply smashed the ashen husk of Darth Vader’s helmet to bits with his own headgear. But instead he just a pile of ashes from the burned bodies of people he’s killed? Kylo Ren should probably be appearing on whatever the Galaxy Far Far Away’s version of Hoarders is.
I mean, at least his grandfather had the class to get other people to dispose of the people he killed. He didn’t keep them around in dusty little pieces the Star Wars equivalent of a big bin in his quarters. Ben Solo, dude, that’s messed up.
The garage door opener is one of those forgotten devices in your home that’s only ever noticed when it breaks. But Ryobi wants it to be the focal point of your garage workshop with modular upgrades that vastly expand its limited functionality.
As far as garage door openers go, Ryobi has ensured that it has all of the basic features consumers expect these days, like multiple remotes and control panels with passcode functionality, obstacle detection, a belt drive system that’s 20 percent quieter than the competition, and even connectivity to a smartphone app so you can open or close the door while away from home.
There’s even the option of attaching a Ryobi rechargeable battery, the same type you’d connect to a power tool, to keep the garage door opener running—for about 100 open and close cycles—during a power outage.
Where Ryobi’s garage door opener gets really interesting is the series of add-on modules—starting at $44—the company has created that add varying degrees of useful functionality to the overhead device.
Like the garage door opener itself, the adjustable fan and carbon monoxide detector modules provide passive functionality. They’re both useful, but equally forgettable. The attachable Bluetooth speaker might be handy if you find yourself spending a lot of time hanging out or working in your garage, and the 30-foot long retractable cord reel will let you power tools without extension cords lying all over the place.
But the most useful module—and the most compelling reason to upgrade your garage door opener to Ryobi’s new $248 option—is the Park Assist Module which uses a pair of ultra-bright lasers to make it easier to know when you’ve parked as close as you can to the wall of storage boxes in your garage without crushing them.
The one module that Ryobi forgot was a mini fridge add-on that lets you keep a few chilled drinks on hand for when you need to hide out in the garage, but there’s always time for the company to keep expanding the available modules.
The ability to use tags to easily search your bookmarks in Firefox has been available for a couple of years, though many people still do not take advantage of the feature. Tagging your bookmarks not only makes searching faster, but there are additional benefits to using them. Here are a few of great reasons to try tagging your bookmarks, along with how to set bookmark tags up and helpful tips for using them. Three Reasons to Use Bookmark Tags You may already have found a creative way to organize your bookmarks, making them easy to find when you need them. However, there are…