If one of your favorite parts about staying in a hotel is loading up on all the free towels, you may want to take a pause before stuffing your suitcase next time. A few hotels, which don’t want to be named, have started to use a new washable RFID chip that can be sewn into towels, robes and bedsheets. [More]
BLOGS
McDonald's Canada Accepts Monopoly Money
By 4.14.11
Paying “in Monopoly money” may cease to be a pejorative after McDonald’s Canada started selling fast food in exchange for bills from the classic board game. [More]
Make A Grilled Cheese Sandwich In A Toaster
By 4.14.11
It is possible to make a grilled cheese sandwich using just a toaster and not fill it with cheese goo. All you have to do, says the kitchn, is just put the toaster on its side. Place the cheese on top of the bread, slide it in, and the force of gravity keeps it on the bread. Paradigm shift! [More]
The Magical Chinese Hard Drive
By 4.8.11
A customer walked into a Russian hard-drive repair center complaining about his broken 500Gb USB-drive. He had bought it dirt cheap in China but it had a problem. If you saved a movie to it, it would only play the last five minutes. They opened up the case and found inside a 128-MB flash drive working in looped mode. It displays the correct capacity when you plug it in but when you write to it and run out of space, it just overwrites the old data. Two nuts make it feel like it has the right heft. Crafty, crafty counterfeiters! Caveat emptor, if the price is “too good to be true,” it is. [More]
Where To Donate Your Old Heels And Video Game Consoles
By 4.7.11
So you have some stuff to get rid of around the house and you want to donate it, but you want to make sure it goes to a place where it gets the best use. Good thing the Miss Minimalist blog has a list of 101 worthy places to send your clutter to that can help out. Women’s shoes? Send them to Dress For Success, which helps low-income women get the garb they need for job interviews. Old Nintendo GameCube? How about the Get-Well Gamers Foundation which brings video games to children’s hospitals. For 99 more suggests, check out the list on Miss Minimalist. Got a charity she left off? Tout it in the comments. [More]
Man IDs, And Shames, Alleged Laptop Thief With Dance Video
By 3.28.11
A man says he has his stolen laptop back after he posted a video of the guy who snatched his laptop took of himself dancing, using the camera on the laptop. [More]
Why Is Abercrombie Selling Push-Up Bikinis To 7-Year Old Girls?
By 3.25.11
The Sociological Images blog has sparked an online furor over Abercrombie Kids, which markets its products to children ages 7-14, selling a line of push-up bikinis. Is this an age-appropriately targeted product, harmless dress up, or just the latest in the race to capitalize on the gross and premature sexualization of our youth? [More]
iPhone 4 Falls 1,000 Feet And Lives
By 3.24.11
An iPhone 4 fell from of the pocket of a U.S. Air Force Jump Master when he was looking out the plane and plummeted 1,000 feet to the ground, and was completely unharmed, reports iLounge. [More]
Store Bulk Grain With Free Frosting Buckets From Your Grocery Bakery
By 3.21.11
So you’re a savvy shopper and you’re saving by buying food in bulk and cooking a lot of your own meals. But how do you store all that food, especially grain? Your wallet isn’t the only one who likes a big stash of wheat, so do mice and other critters. To solve this problem, Laura over at the Heavenly Homemakers blog likes to hit up the bakery department of her local groceries and ask for their empty 5-gallon buckets of frosting. [More]
The Nastiest Hotel Of All Time
By 3.14.11
When you’re touring with an indie band, you don’t have the cash to stay in the Four Seasons every night. But if you think you’ve stayed in some nasty places, try the one Lecee Abee stayed in, with a pool where they store box mattresses and broken tvs, a room covered in stains and grime, and blood spattered bedsheets. [More]
Europeans Guillotine Credit Card Magnetic Strips
By 3.14.11
The credit card magnetic strip might be on the path to becoming the 8-track of our times, and this time, it’s all the Europeans fault. The European Payments Council recently passed a resolution that declares that magnetic strips should only be allowed in “exceptional cases” and lets banks refuse magnetic strips if they feel like it. [More]
Stop Yourself From Overusing Credit Cards By Demagnetizing Them
By 3.10.11
People who have a hard time exercising willpower over their credit card use sometimes find it necessary/helpful to take some extreme steps. Besides cutting them up or freezing them, Lifehacker points out that serial impulse-swipers can help limit their spending by demagnetizing their cards. Just rub a high-strength magnet, like the kind found in a hard-drive, over the strip. It will be harder to go for a spree at the mall because the card number would have to be punched in by hand, but you will be able to make purchases online for airline tickets and such. If the primary way that you overspend is through a real-world shopping romp, this could be one way to curb your bad habit. [More]
For Better Customer Service, Carry A Camera
By 3.4.11
Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott says that sporting one small accessory can help you get better customer service: a camera! Why? [More]
Who Sucks The Most, AT&T Or Verizon? Vote With Your Gum
By 2.28.11
Instead of spitting their gum on the sidewalk like usual, people are using it to vote whether AT&T or Verizon sucks more. “Gum Election” is a project where people download a free poster off this site, post it out on the street, and people stick their gum on the entity that “sucks the most.” Early results based off a poster hung up on Lafayette Street in New York favor AT&T. [More]
Color-Coded Plastic Ties Tell You Day Your Bread Was Baked
By 2.28.11
Turns out that the plastic tags and twists on loafs of bread aren’t just for looking pretty, they are coded to indicate what day the bread was baked on, writes Wise Bread. The most commonly-used code for 5-day a week delivery is is blue for Monday, green for Tuesday, red for Thursday, white for Friday, and yellow for Saturday. It’s a nifty “and now you know” factoid, though it probably won’t save you from getting a stale loaf, because the shelf stockers for whom the code was designed are already doing that for you. [More]
Ignore People On Craigslist Asking You To Halve Your Prices
By 2.17.11
One of the first annoying things you figure out when you try to sell a few things on Craigslist is that there’s these people who just seem to go around asking you to halve your price. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling or what the price is, invariably someone pops up and says “How about half? I’ll pick it up tonight.” Over at Blogging Away Debt she talks about how she said no to one of these price choppers, even though her husband got angry. Then she ended up relisting at a higher price and selling it. Win! [More]
Understand Common Contract Terms So You Don't Get Screwed
By 2.17.11
There’s a bunch of terms and provisions that keep showing up in the contracts you sign throughout life, but do you know what they mean? Who exactly are these “Heirs, Successors, and Assigns” coming over for the contract party? Do they have dietary restrictions? What is “separability?” Will it hurt? Well, we’ll tell ya! [More]
10 Meals You Can Make In A Coffeemaker
By 2.14.11
As this winter has taught us, the snowpocalypse can hit at any moment, potentially leaving you snowed in at the office, stranded in a coffee break room without access to vital food heating appliances. But armed with a coffee maker, you can make several different delicious dishes to keep you going until help arrives, or at least make being attacked by the snow zombies less painful. Because nothing sucks more than getting mauled by a snow zombie on an empty stomach. Of course, ramen is a no-brainer and so are rice and soft-boiled eggs, but how about lemon pepper chicken? [More]
