Method foaming soap dispensers are inexpensive, reliable, and refillable. The soaps are widely available from retailers like Target. Method's 300ml reservoir has a stable base and is larger than most foamers. The reservoir is transparent: if you have multiple dispensers, you can use the color of the soaps to tell them apart. I've used the Method foamers for over five years. I use them for hand soap, in the shower (soap and shampoo) and for hand-washing dishes. Foam soap cleans eyeglasses astonishingly well.
Foaming soap dispensers work by extruding the foam through the precisely-aligned pump mechanism. The foamers can be refilled; the trick is to dilute the soap the right amount. If the soap is too dilute, the foam will be wet and runny. If the soap is over-concentrated, the pump will be difficult to press. Foaming soap is white because the soap's surfactant has no color. If you see color in the foam some soap is getting pushed through the extruder without foaming. This damages the foaming mechanism รข€" use less soap! The foamers will eventually wear out but well-treated ones will work for at least a couple of years.
Lotions will not foam. The wonderful soaps from Burt's Bees will not foam (I'm not quite sure why). Other than that, virtually any liquid soap or shampoo will foam. Method's soaps use sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) as their surfactant. I'm not fond of SLS; I prefer soaps made with saponified natural oils.
Foaming soap is a simple and effective green technology. The foam provides an optimal ratio of soap and water for cleaning. You can completely wash before turning on the tap for rinsing. It's good for sponge baths or camping when you have limited access to water. Foam uses the soap far more efficiently: you will be using a fraction of the soap from your pre-foam days. Less soap also means fewer chemicals for the wastewater treatment facility to remove.
-- Phil EarnhardtMethod Foaming Hand Wash-
10 oz bottle
$2.99
Available from Target
Method Foaming Hand Soap
6-pack of 10 oz bottles
$22
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by method
What K-9 Mail does is not all that exciting to describe, unless you've used, or tried to use, Android's Mail app and found it entirely not up to the task. With K-9 Mail, the methods for filing messages, creating email signatures, keeping your mail pushed across all folders, and emptying the trash, for goodness' sake, are all available and just better. You can save attachments to your SD card, too, and support for IMAP and Exchange servers is much improved.
K-9 Mail states on its homepage that its mission is to be incorporated into Android's default Mail app. Here's hoping that happens. In the meantime, it's a free download for Android systems only.
To get started, you're going to need two things: a basic understanding of design and Adobe Photoshop. Of course, not everyone wants to drop hundreds of dollars on Photoshop (or the entire Adobe Creative Suite), so check out these alternatives (or these) if Photoshop is too expensive for your taste. As for the knowledge portion, here are the main things you want to learn:
Be sure you know how to use the software you've chosen as well. If it's Photoshop, there are excellent classes on lynda.com. If you'd rather go the free route, you can find plenty of stuff online. These tutorials provide plenty of good exercises to try so you can get acquainted with your toolset. You Suck at Photoshop is probably the most entertaining way to learn. We also post a few Photoshop tutorials here and there as well. If you want to learn specific, undoubtedly there is someone online who has posted some kind of help (likely in video form) which you can find with a quick web search.
Inspiration is what's going to help you find your style. Understanding how things work and what has worked in the past is important in most fields, but it's very important when it comes to design. That's not to say you should learn the rules and follow them with rigidly, but that it's extremely useful to know 1) what you like, 2) why you like it, and 3) how to create the designs you find most compelling. Once you've got those three things down, experimentation will come naturally.
So where do you find inspiration? One option is the design blog Web Design Ledger (WDL). They post tons of great examples of design elements to help you keep an eye on what's working and giving you a source of inspiration. Here are a few good posts to get you started:
Another great option is the design community Forrst. While the community is member-only, anyone can apply. It's a wonderful place to find other good design work and get feedback on your own to help you progress. A less-exclusive option is Ember, which is a similar type of site but was designed to work with some specific apps meant for clipping.
Once you start to find people you like, however, keep and eye on what they're doing and who they like so you can explore more points of inspiration. For example, Tina Roth Eisenberg (a.k.a. Swissmiss, designer of TeuxDeux) plays a very active role in promoting design she likes and sharing relevant designs resources on her blog.
No designer is without his or her fonts, and there are numerous free options to choose from. Font Park will start you off with over 70,000 to choose from. Da Font is a smaller, more curated collection with tons of great options. There are plenty of other free font tools and resources, but it's more important to first understand typography. WDL offers up seven free typography ebooks to get you started. If you want additional portability, you can download the Typography Manual iPhone app. One you've got a basic understanding of typography, take a look at mastering font combinations. Rarely will you stick with a single typeface in a design, so understanding the principles of combining fonts can save you a lot of frustration.
What's the font in all the images? If you don't recognize it, head on over to the League of Movable type to download their wonderful font League Gothic.
If you're looking to learn design, chances are you're planning on doing it for the web. Even if you're not going to learn how to code as well, you're still going to need to pass yourself off as a developer from time to time. Here are a few great resources to help cut development corners and get some really stunning functionality into your web designs without a ton of work:
Got any other great design resources you like? Share 'em in the comments!
Don't get the wrong idea: it's not that everything you bake needs to be at room temperature, or slightly chilled, or soft and partly melted. Different temperatures allow for different interactions between your sugar, butter, flour, and water. There's a time for your butter to be cold (flaky pie crusts), and for your eggs to be slightly warm (whips and creams). But for light, tender cookies and cake, get everything to room temperature:
If you look at sugar under a microscope you see why they are called sugar crystals. They have jagged edges, and when you mix sugar into room temperature butter, these edges act as an army of little workers with shovels carving out miniscule air pockets within the butter. If your butter is too cold, the sugar-try as it might-can't dig its way through the hard chilled butter; if the butter is too warm, the sugar merely sloshes around, not really being effective at all.
... Once you've created a multitude of air pockets, the baking powder or soda you add to the cake/cookie later on expands these air pockets and you end up with a light, tender, fluffy pastry. And all because you started with room temperature butter!
Chang's whole post is a great read, and provides you with a little background to help skip over some of those errors in your baking trials.
Whether you watch your shows live, online, or off your TiVo, TV Show Favs will keep you on top of your favorite shows with a slew of tracking tools. TV Show Favs tracks your favorite shows, displays how many episodes you've seen and upcoming episodes (as well as detailed information about each episode), and offers customizable alerts for upcoming episodes.
The app also includes show discovery (you can view the most popular shows among other TV Show Fav users). All your viewing information is synced to the TV Show Favs server for easy backup and use across multiple Android devices.
Priceline.com can be a really good way to save some money, especially on hotel costs, but it can take a lot of time to figure out a strategy to get you the best price. The Biddle Traveler is a free service that does most of the work for you and walks you through the steps you have to handle on your own.
On the main page (pictured above) you enter in your destination, the length of the trip, and the number of people in your party. From there, The Bidding Traveler will offer you hotel options in your location of choice. You choose the ones you want, select a hotel rating, and then fill out a bidding strategy. The bidding strategy consists of the highest and lowest amount you're willing to pay, and The Bidding Traveler will suggest bids that are too low and bids that have been accepted in the past to help you make your decision:
(Click image to enlarge.)
Once you've entered all this information, The Bidding Traveler will provide you with a bidding strategy that it believes will help you get the best deal on one of the hotels you previously selected. Accept it and The Bidding Traveler will walk you through the necessary steps to start bidding (and hopefully winning a low price) on Priceline.com:
(Click image to enlarge.)
Alternatively, it can even run your bidding strategy for you so all you have to do is sit back and wait. That's all there is to it!
You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
While we've mentioned several methods for exporting and importing your Delicious bookmarks into other services like Evernote or your favorite browser, there wasn't yet a way to import them, online, into Google Bookmarks.
Instead of relying on an extra Firefox or IE toolbar to export/import bookmarks, developer Mihai Parparita has created a new open source tool that makes importing your Delicious bookmarks a one step process. All you need is a registered Yahoo account, or direct Delicious account, and you can simply allow access to your Delicious account by signing in through the open source site. All bookmarks will be imported as private with all the tags intact on their Google Bookmarks page.
Less than 30 seconds, actually, may be enough, and your pepperoni will still cook and crisp along with your pizza. That tip comes from a recipe at Cook's Country, a web arm of recipe testers Cook's Illustrated, which also provides a great recipe for at-home, Chicago-style personal pan pizza.
