Category Archive

Nitty Gritty

This is our category dedicated to the hard topics of occupancy – the realities of having a home. Nitty gritties might involve moving, dealing with appliances, handling passive aggressive landlord notes, or choosing a utility company.

What are your life hacks for drinking more water?

I have a problem: I don’t like the taste of water, but I know I need it… you know… to survive as a human being on the planet Earth. So I finally came up with a few life hacks in order to trick myself into consuming more water. Here are a few of my tricks, then I want to hear yours.

Use this app to match real-world colors with paint colors

With the ColorSnap app from Sherwin-Williams, you can use your smartphone (iPhone, Android, and Blackberry) to match real-world colors with paint colors.

If I don’t know you, I won’t talk to you: why I have a cruel blacklisting app on my phone

While attending a small film festival a few years ago, I made the mistake of texting my vote for the festival’s best film. Within a couple days, my phone number had been sold to marketers and I started receiving a ton of text spams.

This made me very angry. I was already dealing with telemarketers calling my mobile, trying to sell me mortgage refinancing and carpet cleaning, and now I had to deal with shitty text spamming too? It started getting to the point where half the time my phone made a noise, it was a voicemail from a telemarketer or a text spam.

How do you celebrate the life of a departed loved one?

The Offbeat Empire has been there for many of my life stages, I hope the community can be here for me now as well. I’d love any advice and guidance from those who have lost a loved one and have chosen to do an event to celebrate their life.

Productivity hack: The internet kill switch

As a writer, I’m at my laptop pretty much all the time. Sadly, that means the siren call of the internet is loud and constant. The urge to stop what I’m doing “just for a second” to check Facebook or news headlines or “research” something on Wikipedia for the next several hours is substantial. I figured the best way to combat this — other than developing a stronger will to not goof off — was to get rid of the internet when I didn’t need it. Thus, the internet kill switch was born.

Amplify your tunes wirelessly with the power of SCIENCE

You’re bored and you want tunes, but you don’t want to crank the speakers in the living room/you don’t have space to use your laptop/you’re afraid you’ll spill on it. You’re stuck listening to headphones which can be inconvenient or doing without entirely, right? Nah.

Use this phone wallpaper hack to make sure your phone comes back if it gets lost

Today’s great idea came from my best friend, Erik, on how to keep my best electronic friend from disappearing forever.

Use tube-free toilet paper to cut down on waste

If you are like me, throwing the cardboard tubes in with the bathroom trash is not an option because they go into the recycle bin. So a line of empty tubes line up on my windowsill, and it’s just not pretty. We switched to the tube-free kind of toilet paper, and that problem disappeared.