Exercise. Diet. The Unclassified Laws of Etiquette. A Walkthrough and Cost Breakdown of Brewing Your Own Beer. I’ve mentioned many times on The Simple Dollar that I figured out how to brew beer at home, and just as many times, readers have requested a walkthrough of this process along with some cost analyses. Recently, I made a batch of porter and took some photographs along the way to illustrate the process. Let’s dig in! Beer Brewing Equipment If your goal is simply to brew a batch of beer and consume it in one sitting with a group of friends, all you need is a brewing bucket, a bubbler, and a siphon hose, depicted below. These supplies are available at any home brewing store. When you mix up a batch of beer, it needs to ferment for a week or two, and this bucket makes it quite easy. Most home brewers tend to want to bottle their beer for long-term storage. This equipment, all together, will cost $20 or so and are often available in kits.
When making beer, I use a few optional items: The large glass jug is called a carboy. How to Make Beer As I mentioned earlier, I planned to make a porter. Finishing. If Ever There Was a Time for Cheap Vodka. Set Up Cheap Ambient Lighting with Rope Lights. DIY: Mod a $5 flashlight into a $95 light - Lifehacker. 5 cool things to sync with Dropbox on your Mac. If you're not already familiar with file syncing service Dropbox, you should be. The easiest way to describe Dropbox is that it acts as a type of online storage that gives you access to your files wherever you go, no matter which computer you're on, what OS you're using, and where you are in the world.
No need to use a DVD, USB drive, or e-mail to transfer important files. However, Dropbox is really much more than that: you can access and work on files even when you're offline, share folders with friends and coworkers, and most importantly (for this writeup, anyway), sync settings for numerous applications without having to fork over any cash. Why is this good? If there are multiple computers in your life—like a work machine and a home machine, or a desktop and a laptop, or all of the above—you probably use many of the same programs.
Sync your 1Password database 1Password is a password manager and auto-form-filler for the Mac that has been a hit among the Ars staff and readers alike. Why I’m Quitting Social Media. The Quantified Self. A programmers secret weapon: the humble to-do list. A while ago I wrote a post how to lose traction on a personal software project, based on mistakes I have made myself in the past that have slowed down or even completely stopped progress. Today I want to share a tip that has greatly improved my time management since I’ve started doing it, and helped combat many “programmer’s block” moments I am notorious for. Coming back to work After you take a break from a coding project for a while, getting back into the groove can be difficult. Stopping for a while can be a great way to gain perspective and maybe reevaluate your goals of what the application should and shouldn’t be, but it can also be really hard starting again where you left off.
If you know you will be leaving for a while, and want to return later, you can try leaving a test failing, or some other obvious problem that needs fixing (like a syntax error), but these only keep you going in the short term. Keeping an eye on the big picture The programmers’ to-do list Defer little tasks.
Pocket Programming: Learning New Skills Anywhere. Use Your Old Coffee Grounds to Clean Dishes, Kill Fleas, and Mor. Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down. By DAVID GLENN That old study method still works, researchers say. So why don't professors preach it? The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.
If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. That's not terrible advice. Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. Don't Reread A central idea of Mr. "When you've got your chemis-try book in front of you, everything's right there on the page, it's all very familiar and fluent," says Jeffrey D. "So you could say to yourself, 'Yeah, I know this. These findings about active recall are not new or faddish or parochial. Rote learning? Mr. Mr. Old calendars never really go out of date. Wise Bread Picks This little fact was big news to me.
I was casually flicking through a magazine at work when something caught my eye; it was buried in the bottom corner of one page and stated that you can use old calendars in the years to come. And this year, there are a bunch of great old dates to choose from. As some of you may already know, there are a limited number of combinations for calendars – 14 to be exact (half account for years with 365 days, the other half for leap years). Big deal? In this day and age of personalization, tattoos, piercings and various other ways to flaunt our individuality, most of us are looking for ways to express ourselves and make our surroundings more unique. From an office cubicle to a garage or kitchen, we seek out items that say a little more about us.
They don’t make 2009 Calendars for most of those shows and movies now. For the packrats amongst you, there may already be a stack of calendars in your basement or attic that once served you well. My research process. One thing you never read about is how people do research in their mind. People do describe how to write papers, how to get an academic job, but somehow, I cannot recall anyone describing their thought process.
Mine is simple enough. It includes both theoretical and experimental work. So here it is… I usually start with a specific problem. This problem must be about something significant: a few people worldwide might want to know about the solution. Collaboration messes up this process because I no longer control the overall problem. To a large extend, my process does not rely on brilliant insights nor luck. What makes me more productive, mostly, are nice problems. Funding opportunities, networking, fame and fortune play no role in the above process. I can sometimes offload some of the conjectures to people working on my projects. Holly Shelf Unit, Batman!
10 tips to help relieve insomnia. Text 2 Mind Map - An online text to mind map converter. Rating books with Python. This Python script will read in my book collection data on standard input, extract out a list of ISBN's, and for each one will look up the average Amazon customer star rating and the number of reviews. It then sorts the data (by star rating and then by customer reviews) and prints out the results to standard output.
The script processed 2604 books. I have more books then that, but it had problems reading the ISBN numbers for some of them (see notes below). Of those 2604 books, the star ratings break down as follows: Number of stars | Number of books -------------------+------------------ 5 | 370 4.5 | 644 4 | 629 3.5 | 241 3 | 104 2.5 | 14 2 | 12 1.5 | 2 1 | 6 0 (unrated) | 582 Nice to know I haven't got too many low star rating books in my collection.
Here are the top ten entries with a 5 star rating: Here are the top ten entries with a 4.5 star rating: And here are the top ten entries with a 4.0 star rating: Note that I've already read most of these. Note that you will need to adjust: #! Turn-451-A-Month-Into-A-Million-Bucks. If you're 30 years old, you need to set aside $448 per month for next 35 years to become a millionaire -- if you earn a reasonable 8% annualized return in a retirement account. Don’t have $448 to spare -- or even $248? Maybe you do and don't realize it. Let's take a look at how you can come up with the cash. Save $219 Per Month on Taxes Here’s How: The average refund for the 2008 filing season so far is about $2,500. If you received an average refund and you are in the 25% federal tax bracket, you could be entitled to three extra exemptions worth $3,500 each.
That would boost your take-home pay by $219 a month. Save $100 Per Month on Food Here’s How: Bring your lunch and snacks to work. Save $80 Per Month on Entertainment Here’s How: We're talking about one fewer dinner-and-a-movie night every month. Save $28 Per Month on Health Care Here’s How: The typical family spends $1,321 on out-of-pocket health expenses each year, says the U.S. Save $10 Per Month on Auto Insurance $451 Saved in Total! 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library. Bringing your bookshelves back to order. By Erin Doland on Apr 15, 2008 I love, love, love books.
The wikipedia entry for bibliophilia should include a picture of me with my nose in a book. I read between 10 to 20 books a month, and I almost exclusively read non-fiction. If money were no object, I would have a home library complete with rolling ladders, comfy leather chairs, and shelves full of my favorite books. Money has not yet started to grow on the trees in my yard, so I don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated room for a home library.
Until then, I have had to accept that I cannot keep every book I’ve ever read or hope to read. Don’t keep more books than you can fit on available bookshelf space. Beyond these rules, I’ve found that books are best evaluated on a case-by-case basis. After deciding which books should go, there are many resources available to you. Good luck sorting through your books, and stay tuned for next week when I’ll discuss how to organize the books you’ve chosen to keep. 16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me in School. I am 28 now. I don’t think about the past or regret things much these days. But sometimes I wish that I had known some of things I have learned over the last few years a bit earlier. That perhaps there had been a self-improvement class in school.
And in some ways there probably was. Because some of these 16 things in this article a teacher probably spoke about in class. But I forgot about them or didn’t pay attention. Some of it would probably not have stuck in my mind anyway. But I still think that taking a few hours from all those German language classes and use them for some personal development classes would have been a good idea. So here are 16 things I wish they had taught me in school (or I just would like to have known about earlier). 1. This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time. So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think. You can just drop – or vastly decrease the time you spend on – a whole bunch of things. 2. 3.