The Essential Kitchen Skills No One Taught (but Everyone Should Know)

Most of us never get a crash course in how to cook or find our way around the kitchen. We learn from others: friends, parents, cooking shows, or cookbooks. That means it's easy for there to be gaps in our knowledge, like things we really should know, have been doing wrong, or just never had to learn. Let's take a look at some of them.

Writer Pro Is a Minimal Text Editor with a Powerful Set of Tools

Mac/iOS: ia Writer is one of the more popular minimal text editors out there, and Writer Pro for both Mac and iOS is something of a step up from that. While it retains the simplicity of just offering text on a page, Writer Pro also adds in several modes for different steps of writing and an incredibly useful syntax control to give you a lot more power when you're editing. Writer Pro has three different writing modes: note, write, and edit. Each of those modes operates the same, but has a different font and cursor style so you can differentiate between the different tasks. When you're writing in each of those different modes, a different file is saved so you can always bounce back to another version. That said, you'll always be writing in Markdown, but you can easily export as a Word DOC, HTML, or PDF. The feature that really makes Writer Pro stand out is its new syntax control. This automatically highlights different syntax like adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and everything else. So, when you're editing, you can just turn on a switch to display all your adverbs and then happily go through and delete most of them. This also helps catch any redundancies you have. If you're editing a large piece of text, it's an amazing tool to have around. Writer Pro is expensive at $20 a piece for the iOS and Mac versions, but the syntax control alone makes it worth it if you're editing a longer piece. The iOS and Mac versions are identical in feature set and both manage to retain the magic that makes a minimal text editor like ia Writer great while still adding in a lot of features. Writer Pro's certainly not for everybody, but it's worth a look if you want a little more out of your minimal text editor without stepping all the way up to Word.

Make Your Own Internet-Controlled Lamp with a Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is great for powering all kinds of home automation projects. If you want to get those power outlets connected the internet so you can control them from anywhere, DIYer Jack Minardi shows off how to do just that. The system here uses some cheap remote controlled outlets, some transistors, breadboards, and the Raspberry Pi to power a system where you can remotely turn off a lamp from anywhere. It's not just a lamp either, you can turn anything connected to the outlet on and off from the internet. The build requires some soldering, but if you're interested in building something like a DIY WeMo for yourself, Minardi's build is a good place to start.

Humming Timing Counts Down a Timer Using Music from Your Library

iPhone: You have plenty of options for timers for your iPhone, but if you're looking for something a little more fun, Humming Timer allows you to set a timer, and then it picks a song from your music library that matches that time. If you've seen the classic '90s film Hudson Hawk, you'll recognize Humming Timing's strategy. Just set a timer, and it then picks a song (or playlist of songs) that matches that amount of time. When the music stops, your timer is done. You can't go through and change songs, pick moods, or exclude genres, but it's still a fun way to countdown while you're cooking or whatever.

The Sorta Is a Flexible Notebook with Removable, Rearrangeable Pages

We've looked at some great paper notebooks before, but Sorta is a new notebook/binder with removable, rearrangeable, customizable pages that may work great for you. Sorta offers a number of notebook styles, but the interesting thing is that the paper is always removable and swappable, so you can put grid paper in for diagramming and lined paper in for taking notes in a talk or meeting. You can even combine them, so it's like carrying multiple notebooks in one. The Sorta is a bit of a combination between a binder and a traditional notebook, and brings the best of both worlds to the table—it's small enough to carry around with you, but flexible enough that adding and removing pages is easy. If you're getting back to basics and embracing pen and paper as a way to stay organized or take notes, you probably need a notebook that's at least flexible enough to work with you instead of against you while you work. Productivity methods like the Bullet Journal method work best when you have a paper notebook you enjoy using, and even if you're just taking notes in meetings or class, having a good notebook you can use for the task at hand helps.

What Are Some Encryption Options for iPhone?

You can encrypt email on an iPhone with your standard Mail app or with apps from the App Store, no jailbreaking required. The Apple experts at Stack Exchange provide some tips. I've started taking security more seriously lately. Now, I have emails signing automatically and encrypting where I have their key. Previously I only did this when necessary, but I'm trying to breed a sense of change. I have no issue with GPG in Thunderbird, Outlook, or on Android with K9 Mail and APG, but I have no idea how to handle GPG on iOS. I can't accept that there's no way—it seems ridiculous, or maybe I'm approaching the problem wrong and there is a more appropriate route than GPG? See the original question. Try S/MIME (Answered by zigg) PGP is a fantastic standard and has many uses and great implementations, but if you want to sign and encrypt email with a minimum of fuss, I think you'll find as I have that S/MIME is more well-supported. Many mail clients (including the stock Mail apps on iOS and OS X, and other popular clients such as Microsoft Outlook) can handle S/MIME out of the box with no add-ons. Email certificates are authenticated by a CA, like SSL certificates for the web, instead of requiring you to rely on the PGP web of trust to authenticate others' certificates and have them authenticate yours. You can get a free S/MIME certificate from StartSSL. Once you've created it, you can export it from your browser (be sure to use a passphrase!), email it to yourself, then open it within the iOS mail application to install it. Your Mail account settings will then offer options to use the installed certificate to sign and/or encrypt your mail. (I have no affiliation with StartSSL, other than as a satisfied, non-paying customer.) A Couple PGP Options (Answered by Gilby♦ and Dave♦) Try iPGMail. From the iTunes descriptions: "iPGMail is an app that implements the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) and allows the user to create and manage both public and private (RSA and DSA) PGP keys and send and receive PGP encrypted messages." Another option is oPenGP. oPenGP is a solution to support OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) on your iOS device. Editor's note: These answers have been condensed from their original forms. An Alternative (Answered by Zeno Popovici) You don't necessarily need a program to do encryption. Yes, if you want PGP, you'll need one of the programs above. If you want to have simple signing and encryption just get a certificate (free email cert is available from Comodo) and upload it on the phone. Once added a verified mark will appear in your contact card for the corresponding email address. Now you can go into mail account setting and enable encryption and signing. The only downside is that you can't activate/deactivate per message. You have to restart the mail app once signing or encryption is activated/deactivated. The same process goes if you have a Mac/OSX and are using the native mail app.

How Do You Approach Challenges in Your Work?

Challenges offer growth. They create opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them and discover that we can overcome difficulty when we try hard enough to get what we want. But not all challenges help. Some are too easy or too hard at certain points in your life. How have you approached the challenges in your work? How have they helped you learn and succeed? This quote from famous graphic designer Milton Glaser suggests a nice balance: In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, "Prove it." He didn't think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother's belief to overcome my father's resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can't overcome a father's resistance you're never going to be able to overcome the world's resistance. It's much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents. Some of the best video games understand how to challenge us just the right amount by giving us no more than we can handle and then increasing the difficulty. This works because we feel accomplished, learn from what we've done, and feel ready to tackle more. The same sort of thing tends to work with work and life, though it isn't quite so perfectly calculated. How have you dealt with your challenges and what have you learned in the process?