Chrome only: Google’s Similar Pages for Chrome extension adds a button to the toolbar that uses Google’s search algorithms to find other web sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.
Once you've installed the extension, you can simply click the new button in the toolbar to see a list of related pages, complete with thumbnail previews, descriptions, and a link. The related sites are usually fairly accurate, but where it seems to work best is when browsing more permanent articles on a specific subject—for example, using the similar pages button on the Wikipedia article on Shadow Copy brought back a list of useful related pages, but if you are on the home page of a site, the results will be more general.
If you need to do a lot of research and can’t always think of the right query to use on Google, this extension could come in handy. Google Similar Pages is a free download, works wherever Chrome extensions do.
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Most people use six or more quarts of water to boil pasta “because that’s how it’s always been done.” What if you could get by with a lot less water and still have great noodles? Here’s how.
Photo by Jakob Montrasio.
Grandma was a smart cookie, but she might not have given you the best advice when it comes to cooking pasta. Turns out it’s not really necessary to use enough water to fill a bathtub just to make a couple servings of spaghetti.
Food science wizard Harold McGee did some experimenting and discovered a pound of spaghetti cooks in as little as 1 1/2 quarts of water, as long as you start with cold water and stir the pot more often. He also has a theory on why this works:
Because the noodles absorb water only very slowly at temperatures much below the boil, so little happens to them in the few minutes it takes for the water to heat up. And no matter how starchy the cooking water is, the solid noodle surfaces themselves are starchier, and will be sticky until they’re lubricated by sauce or oil.
Standard spaghetti noodles take 18 minutes to cook using McGee's methods, but noodles of a different thickness—angel hair pasta, for instance—will take less time, so you'll need to tinker a little bit to figure out what cooking times work for your favorite pasta. Once you get it right, you'll save some time and dimes not boiling up a huge pot of water that just gets dumped down the drain.
Bucking the system to make noodles in only a few inches of water is pretty heady stuff, but that’s not the only kitchen trend that’s not really a hard and fast rule (did you know you don’t have to refrigerate ketchup?). What rebellious kitchen habits do you have? Talk about them in the comments.
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Chrome only: Notifier extension One Number checks for unread messages in Gmail, Wave, Voice, and Google Reader and displays the unread count right on the Google Chrome toolbar.
Once you’ve installed the extension, you’ll immediately see the button added to the toolbar, where you can see the previews for each service, and access the settings page. You can enable or disable services that you don’t use, and customize the colors or how often the extension checks for new unread messages. It’s a simple extension, but if you’ve been looking for an unread message notifier, One Number might be worth a try. One Number is a free download, works wherever Chrome does.
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Why should trip planning be any more complicated than opening your browser and entering the name of your favourite city? Six months ago we launched City Tours on Google Labs with the goal of making vacation planning as easy as searching the web. After all, Google knows the top sights in many cities around the world and we’ve been providing directions on Google Maps for years, so Google Labs seemed to be the perfect way to test out a combination of these two capabilities, with our computing power thrown in to sift through the thousands of possibilities.
Though City Tours is still in Google Labs, the purpose was clear and the demo was popular, so we’ve continued to work on it over the past few months to take into account the hundreds of suggestions from users all across the globe. Now you’ll find several handy additions:
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Show complete walking directions. Until now, we’ve simply estimated the travel time between destinations based on the distance between them. Today, we start providing complete pedestrian routing information for every step of your tour, taking road types, bridges and bodies of water into account just like a regular Google Maps walking directions search. We still try to minimise the time you spend walking and we still won’t recommend a visit to an attraction when we think it’s closed but, now, the suggested tours are a whole lot closer to reality.
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Import a My Map as a tour – because we can’t always guess what you want to see! Maybe last time before you went on holiday you created a My Map of all the things you wanted to see when you got there. Now, next time you’re planning a trip, you can import that My Map into City Tours: we’ll try to schedule a visit to every feature in your map, just as if you had entered the city name into City Tours’ search box.
Alternatively, maybe the last time you came home after holiday you created a My Map of the best attractions you saw. If you’ve made your My Map public and listed, once a user has found it they can import it into City Tours with its link and re-live your tour, customised – of course – for the dates on which they’re visiting. In the mood for literature in the Big Apple? You’ll want to try out this walking tour of New York bookshops.
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Finally, we’ve made a whole bunch of small user interface improvements both to help usability and make City Tours behave just a little more like the Google Maps site you’re used to.
We’re confident that these additions will make City Tours a whole lot more useful to a whole lot more people, although it should be noted that City Tours remains a Google Labs product and is still far from complete. We hope to continue tweaking and improving it over the coming months, continuing our goal of making planning a trip as easy as doing a Google search.
Posted by Trevor Johnston, Software Engineer, Google Zurich
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Nobody wants to lose their favorite new electronic gadget to a dunk in the drink. One Lifehacker reader saved his phone after an astounding 30 minute soak by sending in to the dry-rice spa.
Two years ago we shared a handy trick for saving your gadgets after an unfortunate run in with water—using rice to soak up the moisture. Lifehacker reader Dietrich recently put that tip to use with impressive results:
For the last 2 days it has been a monsoon in my city. Today, during a rushed last minute shopping spree, I dropped my phone in a puddle. I didn’t realize I had dropped it until I got back to my car 30 minutes later.
I remembered articles on Lifehacker about what to do so I immediately popped the battery out and dried the phone. When I got home I put my Palm Pre in a bag of rice for 10 hours. Adding insult to injury, I forgot to take the phone battery out of my pocket and put it through the washing machine. 10 hours later I’m typing this on my Pre. Good job Palm on making an excellent phone.
Revival after 30 minutes is a really impressive feat. Our own Lisa Hoover saved her son’s phone from a water-logged fate after it took a dunk in a swimming pool by using a container of rice, but it definitely wasn’t at the bottom of the pool for a half hour. Check out the original article for the how-to on using rice to dry out your electronics and if you’ve used the trick yourself, successful or not, let’s hear about it in the comments.
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Chrome only: Google’s Similar Pages for Chrome extension adds a button to the toolbar that uses Google’s search algorithms to find other web sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.
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