Month: November 2012

By Alan Henry, Lifehacker – November 25, 2012 at 11:00AM

The holiday shopping season is revving up, which means it’s time to search for some bargains so you don’t go broke buying gifts for the people on your list. There are dozens of deal sites out there, but not all of them are useful when it’s time to actually find discounts on things you actually want to buy. We asked you which sites you used, and this week we’re taking a look at the top five, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week we asked you which deal sites you used to save money. You offered up plenty of options, and we tallied up your votes, but sadly we only have room for the top five.

Slickdeals

Slickdeals is so popular and well known that at my last job, most of my colleagues in our IT group (and out of it, honestly) had Slickdeals as our browser homepages. We never wanted to miss a deal, and new ones were breaking and expiring all day. Slickdeals is largely community powered, with members floating up coupon codes and sales available at retailers all over the web for the community to see and take advantage of, and it’s not just on technology and electronics: apparel, local deals at nearby shops, travel and vacation packages, it’s all there. Or you can hop right to your favorite online retailer and see what they have to offer before you click purchase. The forums are active and lively, and the deals never stop.

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Dealnews

The Dealnews network of sites, including DealMac and the old DealRAM and DealCam (which have now been absorbed into Dealnews) offer daily, regularly updating deals from around the web on computer equipment, home electronics, apparel, and much much more. Almost nothing escapes Dealnews’s eye: monitors and displays, TVs and home entertainment gear, headphones and audio equipment, GPS systems, even sunglasses and clothing are all available. The backlog of deals is huge, and you just have to search for the product you’re interested in to see what deals are active in that area and which ones have recently expired. They also get a ton of exclusive deals you’ll only find at Dealnews, and an excellent collection of holiday and Black Friday bargains. I’m pretty sure half my gear I got thanks to Dealnews, and they’re always worth a check for bargains before you start shopping.

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Woot!

Woot started off as the original daily deal site, and since being purchased by Amazon back in 2010, has expanded its empire to not just daily technology deals, but deals on wine, kids clothing and toys, technology and home electronics, independently designed t-shirts and apparel, and more. They’ve also launched Deals.Woot, a community powered site full of bargains on virtually any item you can think of, from lingerie to computer components, all upvoted or downvoted by the community so you only see the deals that actually save you money. The other Woot sites also go out of their way to offer more than just one deal a day, with many offering exclusive bargains and super-deep discounts for limited times, most notably their repeated and regular discounts on Gunnar glasses.

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Fatwallet

Fatwallet is another deal site that’s been around for a long time, but they’re worth a check before you go shopping online to make sure you’re not missing a coupon code or a retailer that has the item you want on sale. Fatwallet covers major retailers and niche ones, in categories that are largely electronics and computer gear, but also include apparel, cosmetics, jewelry, and local deals in your community. Fatwallet’s biggest resource is its community though: its active forums are full of regularly churning deals that appear, make it big all over the web, and then vanish when the coupon code has been used up or every other deal site on the web links to their forum threads. The site boasts millions of members, and the while the front page is great, the forums are where the magic happens.

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BradsDeals

While many deal sites focus on technology deals and electronics discounts, BradsDeals offers up discounts, price alerts, and coupon codes on other items we all buy: clothing, apparel, toiletries and small electronics (shavers, razors, etc), and jewelry. The site has a wealth of coupon codes for popular retailers and big box stores with names you’d recognize, and even offers printable coupons as well so you can run to a brick-and-mortar store when you don’t want to wait for shipping. If you’ve felt that other deal sites are huge electronics stores with tiny household sections and other departments, BradsDeals will fix that for you—think of more like a traditional department store, just only stocked with discounts and coupons you can use anywhere you want to shop.

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Now that you’ve seen the top five, it’s time to put them all to a vote to decide the winner.

What’s The Best Deal Site?

Honorable mentions this week go out to RetailMeNot, which does host plenty of deals and bargains in addition to the coupon codes for sites around the web that made it famous. If you don’t already check RetailMeNot to see if there’s a coupon for the site you’re shopping on before you click purchase, you really should, even if you wind up being disappointed when there aren’t any. A little love goes out to Passwird, another deal site run by one person, and while it doesn’t have the broadest list of deals, the ones it does have are hand picked and frequently updated. That site hasn’t changed in years, but it’s still worth a bookmark.

Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn’t included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Make your case for your favorite—or alternative—in the discussions below.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it’s not because we hate it—it’s because it didn’t get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it’s a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

By Lambert V., The Awesomer – November 23, 2012 at 09:30AM

Neil Cicierega’s blog Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks will not help you run the obsolete OS. But it will help you to not sleep tonight. We never want to be alone with our computer again.

• Hat Tip
• Link

More Awesome Stuff for You to Click On:

Teardrop Windows
Gladwell Book Generator
Project Glass: Windows Version
Inside Windows 7
Movie Title Mix-Up

By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – November 21, 2012 at 03:18PM

The Onion’s TED parody series rolls on, with what may be the best—and most scathing—round yet. The target this time? Social media, a joyous place where ideas are a waste of time, and talent is irrelevant. More »

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – November 21, 2012 at 01:00AM

By Brad Hill, Engadget – November 20, 2012 at 04:34PM

Something startling happened over the weekend. It came and went in a flash, but the repercussions could, and should, be lasting. An unexpected and most unusual policy brief from the Republican Study Committee was released. (The RSC is a 165-member congressional policy review group.) Entitled Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It, the eight-page document is an astonishing declaration of revisionism, bristling with policy arguments that align with the most excitable rants of P2P advocates over the last 10 years. It is a devastating indictment of American copyright law.

Then, in less than 24 hours, the paper was rescinded. The committee’s Executive Director, Paul S. Teller, offered an obscure apology with no explanation. Of course the thing is easily available, and its message remains a permanent part of the conversational record, deletion be damned.

By arguing that the current iteration of American copyright law is broken in several respects, and by proposing extreme solutions, the rogue document debilitates the talking points of institutional copyright holders and their agencies such as the RIAA. Anyone who has been following the hardened rhetoric over what copyright should be in a copy-share digital world will be startled by the accusatory language and sharply reformist intent of this document.

Continue reading Editorial: Vanishing ‘copywrong’ document blasts RIAA, suggests radical reform, and should be taken seriously

Filed under: Internet

Comments

By A Manly Guest Contributor, The Art of Manliness – November 20, 2012 at 03:33PM

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Tim Ferriss‘ new book, The Four Hour Chef. 

An Introduction to Dehydrating Food

Dehydration is all about removing water from food. Doing this helps to preserve the food (bacteria need water) and concentrate flavor. It’s a common misconception that you need heat to dehydrate food. But low humidity, not heat, is the driving force behind dehydration. Warming the air surrounding the food helps keep it dry, but if the air doesn’t move, the food will stay wet. So when dehydrating food in the kitchen, make certain that air can freely circulate around it.

Sidenote: You can achieve the same preservation of dehydration by leaving the water in food but making it unavailable to bacteria. Just add substances like sugar and salt, which bind to water molecules and lock them away. Lox (salt-cured salmon) and salted butter are safe to keep at room temperature for this reason—but unsalted butter is not!

The Best Jerky in the World

Sometimes a survival skill isn’t just about preparing for hard times. Six-time New York Times best-selling author Neil Strauss learned this while writing about apocalypse-proofing your life in his book Emergency. Yes, learning to preserve meat was useful. But learning to flavor meat was an art.

In search of the perfect marinade, he polled everyone: hard-core survivalists, friends’ grandfathers, chefs, and beyond. Then he split-tested the best and simplest recipes that didn’t require a smoker or a food dehydrator. He submerged near-identical meat slices into 2–5 containers of marinade at a time. Sometimes he tested a different brand or amount of teriyaki sauce, and other times he added a random ingredient like truffle oil or mustard. It became something of an obsession.

The following recipe is what won all the taste tests.

This recipe is intended for home cooking, not for the wilderness, but it can be adapted for the wild.

Hands-on Time

15 minutes

Total Time

15 minutes plus 24 hours for marinating and up to 24 hours for drying and cooling

Gear

• Knife
• Large container with lid
• Aluminum foil
• Wooden or plastic serving spoon

Ingredients (to make 2.3kg (5lb))

• 2 kg (5 lb) lean brisket
• 470 ml (2 c) Kikkoman soy sauce
• 470 ml (2 c) Worcestershire sauce (Neil likes Lea & Perrins)
• 470 ml (2 c) thick, flavorful teriyaki sauce (Kikkoman Takumi Garlic & Green Onion or, Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki)
• 240 ml (1 c) liquid smoke (it’s not always easy to find, so any brand will do)
• 120 ml (1/2 c) Karo dark corn syrup (you can also try blackstrap molasses)
• 3T garlic powder
• 3T onion powder
• 3T sesame seeds
• 3T brown sugar
• 1t cayenne pepper

PREP

00
Put the meat in the freezer for an hour to make slicing easier. Slice meat with the grain as thin as possible (less than 0.6 cm or 1⁄4″). If you’re lazy or not great with the knife, call the butcher ahead of time and ask him to slice 2 kg (5 lb) of lean brisket at this thickness. The leaner the meat, the better and longer-lasting the jerky.

PICKUP

00
In a large container, mix the 470 ml (2 c) soy sauce, 470 ml (2 c) Worcestershire sauce, 470 ml (2 c) teriyaki sauce, 240 ml (1 c) liquid smoke, and 120 ml (1/2 c) dark corn syrup.

01
Add the 3 T garlic powder, 3 T onion powder, 3 T sesame seeds, and 3 T brown sugar. Throw in 1 t of cayenne pepper. Add more if you like it spicy, but a little goes a long way. Note: cayenne pepper is also great for putting on a cut to stop bleeding, and it doesn’t sting.

02
Stir well, then drop your meat into the marinade. Your meat should be fully submerged.

03
Optional: Sometimes I’ll take a smaller container and play with a slightly different marinade, adding in different oils, spices, and notes (even soda, wine, or beer) to the same base marinade. I’ll add in a little of the sliced meat for a batch of experimental jerky.

04
Close or cover the container(s), then leave in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours.

05
Once the meat is well marinated, it’s time to dry it: Cover the bottom of your oven with aluminum foil. Things will get mess

06
Place the meat on the racks of your oven, one next to the other (see pic above). The higher the racks are placed in the oven, the better. If you like, you can put the meat on aluminum foil or hardware cloth.

07
Set your oven temperature to 70°C (160°F), or 80°C (180°F) if you’re in a rush. Crack open the oven door by sticking a wooden or plastic serving spoon in the top of the door. Steve Rinella uses a crunched beer can. The goal is to dry the meat but avoid cooking it.

08
Let it dry for 3 hours, then turn over the jerky. After another 3 hours, it should be done. The total time, however, is dependent on the thickness of the meat and the temperature of the oven. The jerky is done when it’s dry enough that you can rip off a piece easily, but before it snaps when you bend it.

09
Leave meat out in the air to cool. It is now ready to eat. The longer you leave it out to cool, the drier it will get. After no longer than 24 hours, store it in sealed Ziploc bags. Without refrigeration, it will be good for 4–6 months.

Have any other jerky-making tips? Share them with us in the comments!

__________________

Available now, The Four Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss isn’t just a cookbook (though, you’ll find plenty of recipes in it like this one for beef jerky). It’s a guide on how to learn anything (like cooking) as quickly as possible using a simple system Ferriss has designed to master a wide range of skills.

Related posts:

1. Take Her Around the World for Valentine’s Day…Without Ever Leaving the Kitchen
2. Cooking With Wild Game
3. 5 Delicious Ways to Use a Store-Bought Rotisserie Chicken
4. How to Open a Stuck Jar Lid
5. 1 Pot, 1 Pan, 5 Ingredients: 5 Minimalist Meals

By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – November 20, 2012 at 08:00PM

So you’ve contracted a virus that’s taken over your computer, and you can’t even boot up to try and troubleshoot the problem. The solution: Create a rescue CD, boot into a safe environment, and rid your PC of any nefarious software while it sleeps. Here’s how to do it with minimal effort.

This year, a new product called the FixMeStick came out that makes virus eradication dead simple. With just a couple of clicks, you can boot using your FixMeStick so that it can attack the viruses while they’re inactive, leaving them defenseless. The only problem: the FixMeStick costs $59.99, which is more than most people are willing to spend.

Luckily, you can easily create your own FixMeStick-like rescue disc with just a blank CD and one of many free programs. Here, we’ll show you how to put one together and use it to eradicate any viruses on your system.

Note: This is meant to be a beginner’s guide to system rescue. If you’re an experienced user, you may prefer to use something like Hiren’s BootCD, which contains a ton of other diagnostic tools you can use to figure out what’s wrong with your computer and retrieve important data. For the purposes of this guide, though, we’re trying to make it as simple as possible, so anyone can get the job done with minimal effort. If you’re already familiar with the process, be sure to send it to your friends and family so they can be too!

How to Create Your Rescue Disc

If you can’t boot into your computer, you’ll need to borrow one from a friend to burn your rescue disc, but other than that, all you really need is a blank CD. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Avira Rescue System and save it on your spare computer. Avira is one of our favorite antivirus programs, and it makes creating a rescue disc very easy—though if you prefer, you can download similar discs from Kaspersky, AVG, and other antivirus makers.
2. Insert a blank CD or DVD into your computer, and double-click on the Rescue System installer that you downloaded. Pick your disc drive from the list, and it will install the rescue disc for you. Note: If you don’t have a CD drive, you can download this Avira Rescue ISO from this page instead, and use Unetbootin to create a bootable flash drive instead. It takes a bit more work, but it’ll work on computers that don’t have a disc drive.
3. Once your disc has finished burning, insert it into the affected computer and press the power button. If it boots into the Avira Rescue System interface, skip to the next section.

If your computer doesn’t boot into the Avira Rescue System interface, you’ll need to tweak a setting in your system’s BIOS. To do so, reboot your computer. When it first boots up, you should see a screen that says something like “Press DEL to enter setup.” Press and hold the key it requires to enter setup. Everyone’s computer is different, but somewhere in those menus you should find an option that says something like “Boot Order.” Change that setting so that your CD drive is number one on the list, save your settings, and exit. When you reboot, you should find yourself in the Avira Rescue System.

How to Scan Your Computer with Your Rescue Disc

Now that you’ve successfully created your rescue disc, it’s time to clean out that infection. Once you’ve booted into the Rescue System, here’s what you need to do:

1. When you first boot up, Avira will ask you if you want to boot into the AntiVir Rescue System. To do so, type 1 and press Enter. It will then go through the process of booting.
2. When it’s done, you should be greeted with the screen at the right. You can browse around the Configuration if you want, but you should be fine with the default settings. Just go to the “Virus Scanner” tab and click “Start Scanner” in the bottom left-hand corner.
3. As the scanner runs, it should repair any infected files it finds. When it’s done, reboot your system and see if you can boot back into Windows. With any luck, Avira should have done its job and you’ll at least be able to get back into your system.

If you’re still having problems after running your rescue CD, you may need to take more drastic measures. However, if your rescue CD worked and you can boot your computer up correctly, you’re almost home free. You should probably run your regular antivirus program to see if there’s anything else left on your system, and clean up any malicious files it finds.

Once you get everything running properly, it’s time to think about long term protection. After all, you don’t want to have to do this again. Make sure you have a good antivirus program running at all times. You don’t have to pay money for one, either—Microsoft Security Essentials is more than good enough. While you’re at it, you should set up a simple backup system so you never lose your important files to a virus or other disaster again.

Emailable Tech Support is a series of easy-to-share guides for the less tech savvy people in your life. Got a beginner tech support question you constantly answer? Let us know at tips@lifehacker.com. Remember, when you’re just starting out computing, there’s very little that’s too basic to learn.

Photo remixed from natu (Shutterstock).

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – November 19, 2012 at 11:46AM

While there’s been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn’t directly to RSC, for the most part, but to “friendly” members asking them to express their “displeasure” with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn’t let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant — perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.

Some people have set up a petition at Change.org asking the RSC to republish and stand behind the policy brief. Others are saying you should contact your own Representatives directly and ask them to support the report. For example, Dave Weinberger wrote a wonderful letter to his own Representative, telling him that he should take a look at the report, and that he should use it as a starting point “for a conversation this country very much needs.”

It seems unlikely that the RSC will bring it back, despite the quality of the report. But one hopes that the massive outpouring of support (seriously, just check Twitter) will lead politicians from both parties to recognize that sensible and smart copyright reform is a topic that gets people excited — and one thing they’re sick of is decades of both parties simply falling all over themselves to distort copyright to favor a few dominant Hollywood players.

Because the GOP has chickened out, we’re going to try to do a series of posts analyzing the various aspects of the report, starting with the three myths about copyright it debunks, followed by four policy recommendations, to see if we can further the discussion. Look for those posts in the coming days and weeks.

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By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – November 18, 2012 at 01:00AM