Create a Contract Even When You're Working for Free [Freelancing]
There's nothing more frustrating than volunteering on a project to help out a friend or a worthy cause only to end up resenting the organization when it bleeds into your paying work. In a guest post for the Shifting Careers blog, longtime freelancer Michelle Goodman offers a number of tips on when to and when not to give away the milk if you're a self-employed cow. For instance, a simple contract can help reinforce boundariess when volunteering:
Although you're doing the job gratis, send the client a short, informal contract clearly stating what you will and won't do, and when.
The designers over at No Spec draw a hard line when it comes to delivering work which may not be renumerated, but I've been known to give away my labor in exchange for another byline to add to my CV. What might convince you solo entrepreneurs out there to put the "free" in "freelancing?" Let us know in the comments.
Google Reader Now Translating Feeds Automatically [RSS]
Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.
Microwave an Instant Chocolate Cake in a Coffee Mug [Food Hacks]
Sate your afternoon sugar cravings with a dead-easy chocolate cake recipe that only requires hot chocolate mix, flour, an egg, cooking spray, and oil (all stuff you've got in your pantry anyway). Grab the biggest microwavable coffee mug you've got in your cupboard, and cover the inside with cooking spray. Mix up four tablespoons of flour and nine tablespoons of hot chocolate mix, then throw in three tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and one egg. Once it's thoroughly mixed into an even batter, microwave the whole shebang for three minutes on high. Watch how high it rises from the cup in the video below:
When you hear that BEEEP of completion, you'll have yourself a piping hot, single-serving cake in a cup. In the name of research (ahem), I gave this a try myself this afternoon, and the result was—well, not the best cake I've ever had.
Actually, it was kind of gross. The texture much less cake-y than one would expect and much more gummy than you'd ever want. I also made the mistake of using some fancy-pants hot chocolate mix from Jacques Torres back in Brooklyn that clearly wasn't meant to be microwaved with an egg. That said, I'm going to give this a try once I get ahold of some plain old Swiss Miss and see what happens—the result was indeed instant, hot, chocolate cake, and even the worst chocolate cake is better than no chocolate cake. See also no-knead bread and omelets in a bag for more wacky DIY recipe shortcuts, and hit the link below for more cake-in-mug details.
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