Display Outdoor Christmas Lights Safely [Safety]
The holidays can be a hazardous time. Icy conditions, fires in improperly maintained chimneys, attacking that damn clam shell packaging with a box cutter, don't let your Christmas lights do you in!
Over at the aptly named DIY website, DoItYourself.com, they've assembled a list of excellent safety tips regarding outdoor Christmas lights. Some of the most frequently overlooked are the most obvious when pointed out:
Avoid using the larger seven-volt light bulbs. Sure, they are bigger and brighter, but they also burn much hotter than mini Christmas lights. One of the most common causes of holiday-time house fires results from these bulbs being too close to gutters filled with dried out leaves.
Having dragged myself through dozens of slushy and bitter cold Michigan winters now and come to associate winter with all things cold and wet, it never occurred to me that left over leaves in the gutters could be such hazardous tinder! For more easy to implement safety tips, check out the full article. Photo by quinet.
Ask the Commenters Roundup [Hive Mind]
- Any tips for a soon-to-be-iPod Touch owner
- What can I do to get the most out of my feed reader?
- What linux distro do you recommend for a Pentium II?
- Downloading torrents locks up my internet connection, why?
- Does Vista's Ready Boost really give much performance increase?
Manipulate Vector Images with Open Source Inkscape [Featured Download]
Cross-Platform: Inkscape is an open source vector editing program. If you are looking for a free alternative to the Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape has a host of features that make it worth taking for a spin.
Inkscape can be run on Windows 2000/2003/XP, Mac OSX, and Linux. Skilled users of Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw may find more advanced features missing, but I found in testing— as a casual Illustrator user— that all the features I regularly rely on for vector editing were present and easy to use. Common functions like shape and text tools, drawing, linked images, clones, layering, path markers, etc. are well marked and easy to apply. Inkscape maintains a gallery at Deviant Art to show off work submitted by users, worth checking out if you'd like a quick peek at the capabilities of Inkscape. For more free image editing goodness, check out GIMP. Inkscape is open-source, with installation packages available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.
Create Colorful Bows from Magazines [Holidays]
The perfect compliment to your DIY wrapping paper would be a hand made bow. Instructables user Tiffany Tomato has a straight forward guide on how to turn color scrap paper and magazine pages into big bows. All you need is the paper, tape, scissors, a ruler, and a stapler. For more ideas on recycling around the holidays, check out how to recycle a cereal box into a gift box and reuse your old gift wrap to store decorations.
Traveas Tracks Flights, Sends Mobile Alerts [Travel]
Traveas is a web-based flight tracking tool. Tell Traveas where you are flying out of and in to and the site will keep you automatically updated on the status of weather, flight delays, and other information related to the airports and flights you are using. You can check the status on the site itself, but the best feature is the forwarding of critical updates to your mobile phone. For another service to keep an eye on flight delays, check out DelayCast.
Where The Locals Eat Helps You Enjoy Local Flavors [Dining]
Every sizable city has a host of tourist oriented locations: gimmicky places, over priced eateries, gift shops. Where The Locals Eat is a restaurant guide to spare you searching for delicious and authentic food.
The reviews of local restaurants are divided among the fifty largest cities in the United States, with the top one hundred restaurants in each city further categorized. You can drill down through the reviews to see where the best place to get sushi, burgers, pizza, shrimp, or any of a hundred odd sub-categories of dining. If the town has a great Asian Fusion joint, you'll find it.
More importantly, Where The Locals Eat makes it their business to ensure you'll find it. Every review includes the basics: address, phone number, website if they have one and also includes a map, driving instructions, and the ability to send all that information to your mobile phone. If you're sporting an iPhone, there an application called LocalEats. 
If you have no idea what you're in the mood for, but you want something local and delicious, Where The Locals Eat has a Top 100 Map function that displays all of the top restaurants surrounding you. Now when laying semi-comatose from jet lag in your hotel room, you can impress your travel companions by pulling a great (and close!) dining pick out of thin air.
The real test is trying out the directory against a local city you've already well experienced. In my case for testing purposes, Metro Detroit was the stomping grounds of choice. I decided to query Where The Locals Eat with a request for the best steakhouse and best soul food restaurant, paying respect of course to the locale of choice. I already had two places in mind that I considered the best of the best in Metro Detroit and Where The Locals Eat delivered spot on. It turns out that the two of us were in agreement for best of class: The Rochester Chop House for delicious steak of all kinds and Beans & Cornbread for the kind of soul food you can feel stuck to your veins a month later. For more help picking restaurants, check out the authentic reviews at OpenTable.
The Holiday Tricks that Save You The Most Time [What You Said]
Last week we asked you to share you favorite holiday tips. You responded and we rounded up the best to share. Photo by laffy4k.
Nobody will ever accuse the readers who responded to the thread of being anything less than pragmatic. If you found this holiday to be a bit stressful, take their advice to heart for the next year.
Spread out your shopping. Spreading out holiday shopping has a host of benefits. Foremost, you can take advantage of the best times during the year to buy things. Participating in the mad rush to buy gifts in December is not only stressful, but it puts you in a position of likely overpaying for things because you're stuck paying the going rate at the last minute. Other reasons readers gave for benefiting from shopping all year: it allowed them to budget and spread out the cost and it was less stressful to buy a gift here and there than to fight the holiday crowds. Photo by jpockele.
Shop online. Paired closely with shopping in advance, shopping online was another reader favorite. No crowds, competitive pricing, and a nearly infinite selection of goods makes a stroll through the virtual aisles a nearly meditative experience compared to battling it out in the toy aisle of Wal-mart with an mom hopped up on Starbucks and guilt. Take advantage of the bounty that the online shopping experience offers by reading over our guides: The Savvy Shopper's Guide to This Year's Online Deal Finders and Become an Online Power-Shopper. Photo by loosepunctuation.
Consolidate. The idea of consolidating aspects of the holiday season came across in different ways for different people, but was a predominate theme. Some people did all their shopping in one swoop—usually online— while others consolidates visits to see the maximum number of people. Others still cut down on prep work by stashing all their presents in one place and doing a mass wrapping and mailing, similar to the previously covered gift wrapping and mail station. Photo by Dan4th.
Give less stuff. While many of the posters advocating giving less were simultaneously boycotting Christmas entirely, it is worth mention. We've even talked about giving less stuff. If you're bogged down in the hunt for the perfect gifts, the last minute gifts, and the tide of materialism that engulfs most holidays, it might be time to scale back. While holidays throughout the year have various reasons for their existence, the real reason for holidays is to relax, celebrate, and take a break from the monotony of labor. There is a reason after all that most holidays involve food and liquor. If giving too much taxes your nerves and your pocketbook, and if preparing for the holidays seems like more work than your real job it's time to scale back and focus more on enjoying the time off with friends and family. Photo by Sister72.
If you have a tip you're itching to share but missed the original post, by all means share in the comments below!
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