How should you take care of your knives? Can you adequately sharpen them at home or should you leave it to the pros? What's the difference between honing and sharpening? Here's our advice!

Continue reading "Should I Have a Pro Sharpen My Knives?" »

An organized kitchen doesn't have to be super minimal; it just has to function well. These editor-approved kitchen organizers help make the tools and ingredients in your kitchen more visible and accessible, so you can cook with more ease and joy!

Continue reading "Editors’ Picks: Kitchen Organizers" »

Looking for ways to snack smarter? Follow these tips and easy, delicious, snack-satisfying recipes to help you (and your kids) through those mid-day cravings.

Continue reading "12 Recipes and Tips for Healthier Snacking" »

This meal plan is all about making dinner as easy as possible. Lots of swaps and suggestions to use what you have on hand will make this week’s weeknight dinners a snap to make!

Continue reading "Weekly Meal Plan: 5 Low-Stress Dinners" »

Thought banana bread couldn't get any better? Try this riff on our original banana bread recipe by adding cream cheese in big, bold swirls.

Continue reading "Cream Cheese Banana Bread" »

Want to know what the most well-loved recipes for the month of April were? You know the ones: the recipes our Simply sous chefs (that’s you!) have been cooking, sharing, and talking about nonstop. Read on to see what made the cut!

Continue reading "The Most Popular Recipes in April" »

This one-pan chicken dinner is made with potatoes, onions, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and an easy paprika sauce. Dairy-free, gluten-free. 1 hour start to finish.

Continue reading "One-Pan Paprika Chicken with Potatoes and Tomatoes" »

Shopping for potatoes? Here’s how to know which kind to buy, and the best way to store them.

Continue reading "How to Buy and Store Potatoes" »

Let the kids do the cooking! Kids of all ages can choose something to make for breakfast, dinner or dessert. Serve Mom this Mother’s Day while she puts her feet up!

Continue reading "16 Recipes Kids Can Make for Mother’s Day" »

Got potatoes? Going to cook them? Here’s what you need to know for prepping them.

Continue reading "How to Clean and Prep Potatoes for Cooking" »

This slow cooker taco soup with ground beef is so easy — and SO GOOD! It's perfect for busy weeks with flexible cooking times for any schedule. Serve with tortilla chips, cilantro-lime rice, or cornbread.

Continue reading "Slow Cooker Taco Soup" »

Eat baked potatoes on the regular? Make your baked potatoes a meal with these winning combos and recipes for toppers!

Continue reading "10 Ways to Top a Baked Potato" »

A mimosa, the classic combination of orange juice and sparkling wine, makes the perfect pick-me-up drink. It’s light, refreshing, and easy to make. Don’t have orange juice? Mix and match with any citrus fruit you have around.

Continue reading "Classic Mimosa" »

This week’s meal plan is all about keeping it simple. Hand over the meal plan to the kids or the non-cook in the house and let them whip up any or all of these easy weeknight dinners.

Continue reading "Weekly Meal Plan: 5 Easy Dinner Ideas" »

Tart rhubarb and creamy custard—sweetened with just a hint of orange zest and nestled inside a flaky crust—are a match made in rustic pie heaven. This no-fuss single crust pie takes only a few minutes to prepare.

Continue reading "Rhubarb Custard Pie" »

Music sharing pioneer Audiogalaxy returned this week, but not with the features its former users — or its founder — hoped to offer. The former Napster competitor found that, even with music-industry support, a legal file-sharing service is a long way from becoming reality. Continue reading on GigaOm.com.

German rights holders have turned litigation against file sharers into a money machine that just keeps on giving. P2P activists estimate estimates that Germany’s BitTorrent users faced more than half a million lawsuits in 2010. Some people even got sued multiple times for the same file. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Looks like mass lawsuits aren't just for Germans anymore: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is estimating that some 75,000 people have been sued for allegedly sharing pornographic movies in the US. This revelation comes as part of a new amicus brief (PDF) the civil liberties group just filed on behalf of 500 file sharers, asking an Illinois judge to squash a lawsuit against people accues of sharing videos from First Time Videos LLC, better known under the porn brand FTVGirls. A footnote of the amicus brief states:

"As of January 14, 2011, by an informal count, well (over) 75,000 people have been sued in similar (in some cases nearly identical) complaints arising from the alleged infringement of pornographic movies. This includes 4507 individuals sued in the Northern District of Illinois alone, in nine separate lawsuits. In addition, mass copyright complaints based on non-pornographic movies have also been brought against over 13,500 people in the District of Columbia."

I just wrote a story about lawsuits like these on NewTeeVee, explaining how German rights holders have filed more than half a million of such lawsuits in 2010. It looks like U.S. rights holders are well on their way to repeat these numbers, unless courts step in - which is of course exactly what the EFF wants. The group blogged on Monday:

"Friday's brief is the latest of EFF's efforts to stop copyright trolls -- content owners and lawyers who team up to extract settlements from thousands of defendants at a time. Tactics include improperly lumping defendants together in one case and filing it in a court far away from most of the accused people's homes and Internet connections. When adult film companies file these predatory lawsuits, there is the added pressure of embarrassment associated with pornography. All of these factors can convince those ensnared in the suits to quickly pay what's demanded of them instead of arguing the merits of their case in court."

It's worth noting that not everyone in the porn biz ready to sue the file sharing masses. Pink Visual's Allison Vivas told me recently that she has no intention to sue individuals, and Private CEO Berth Milton even said that piracy is promotion. Watch the entire interview with him embedded below:

Hollywood has set its sight on file hosters like Hotfile.com, which was sued this week by the MPAA’s member studios. Many of the legal arguments made against Hotfile could also easily be applied to RapidShare, Megaupload and even cloud-based backup and file synching services like Dropbox. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.com.

The controversial file hoster RapidShare has taken a first step towards entering the digital content business: The company launched a download store for video games last week, and it is promising its end users to enable the sale of any kind of file soon. Continue reading on Newteevee.com

BitTorrent’s new Project Chrysalis client now makes it possible to share files of unlimited size with your friends even when you’re not online. The company is caching files and using a revamped UI to make the facilitation of BitTorrent downloads much easier than before. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

German content owners have been busy pursuing alleged infringers: Local ISPs have to hand out around 300,000 names and addresses of file sharers caught in the act ever month, according to data from a German industry association. Will we see similar numbers in the U.S. soon? Continue reading on GigaOM Broadband.

Have you ever watched a TV show episode or Hollywood blockbuster on a website that didn’t have the proper licenses? Then you could be in trouble, at least if the example of Kino.to catches on. Rights holders are threatening to sue users of the now-defunct site. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

Warner Bros. systematically abused an automated takedown system provided by Hotfile, the file host claims in a countersuit against the studio. The claims made by Hotfile include information on the behind-the-scenes actions taken by Hollywood to enforce its rights against file sharing on cloud file hosts. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen and his company are moving forward with its P2P live streaming project, expanding field trials and courting indie bands to stress test Cohen’s algorithms. However, it could still take months before BitTorrent Live is ready for prime time. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

The hardware business is a tough one. And in the smartphone space an incredibly crowded, expensive and competitive one. It’s perhaps noble then that Vodafone tried but ultimately failed with its bespoke Vodafone 360 handsets, which were based on the LiMo operating system and manufactured by Samsung. The mobile operator announced this week that while [...]

As some of you may have noticed, last100 has been dormant of late and even off-line for a few weeks. The truth is that other blogging and work commitments have kept me very busy recently but more serious, the site was hacked. Badly. Malware was installed through a back door exploit and I had to [...]

Over at TechCrunch I’ve penned an op/ed piece on why I’m in love with the Kindle. Or more specifically, why the dedicated e-Reader still has a role to play in the context of Apple’s iPad and competing multifunctional tablet computers, such as the plethora of Android-powered devices that are about to hit the market. I’m [...]

Yesterday was a really fun day spent at Nokia World, the Finnish handset maker’s annual shindig. Conveniently, this year it was held in my home city of London and I got to cover the event for TechCrunch Europe. On day one, Nokia unveiled three new smartphones running Symbian^3, the C6, C7 and E7, which I [...]

Announced back in July, Nokia’s new flagship N8 smartphone began shipping on the last day of September to those that had pre-ordered the device (it’s now available on most UK networks). As did the first review units sent out with almost military provision to chosen technology bloggers, this writer included. Having already declared “Nokia is [...]

Introducing tenthings.me What started off as a bit of fun on a long New Year’s day weekend, has launched as TenThings.me: … a place to share (up to) ten things about yourself that your friends and co-workers might not know. It’s in part inspired by the recent viral hit threewords.me but also an old blogging [...]

On paper at least, Nokia’s E6 smartphone could have been designed just for me. It keeps most of the design cues and form-factor first seen on the E71 and its successor the E72 – easy one handed operation, great physical QWERTY keyboard, rock solid build (well, the E71 at least), superb call quality, free turn-by-turn [...]

I’m not entirely sure who the Samsung Galaxy Note is aimed at, but as somebody who gets to observe from the sidelines, this is one fun, functional and loveable device — although it comes at an out of contract price of around £450-500 upwards, give or take. The biggest talking point of the Galaxy Note is its [...]

This is a quick update about how things are going to be working with my travel photography tours during this time of crisis.  Obviously, with international travel nearly impossible right now, some changes needed to happen, and some adjustments are going to need to continue over the next couple months. Below, I chat quickly about […]

The post A Note About the State of My Photography Tours and Workshops appeared first on Brendan van Son Photography.

This week has been a tough one.  It has just become more and more clear that the global travel situation isn’t going to clear up until at least early in the fall.  So while we’re still very hopeful that our Namibia trips starting in September will still happen, we’ve sadly had to cancel or postpone […]

The post Cancelling/Postponing Photography Trips appeared first on Brendan van Son Photography.

With many of us in isolation, we’re spending more time streaming our webcams.  We’re actually finding that we can be highly functional via web meetings in places like Zoom.  The only problem is: the webcam quality is terrible for streaming.  Thankfully, Canon announced this week that you can now turn nearly any Canon interchangeable lens […]

The post Best Webcam Set Up for Streaming or Zoom Meetings appeared first on Brendan van Son Photography.

velocityconf: Free webcast w/ @jon lives http://t.co/TxL60Oagos 'Michelin Starred Cooking with Chef at Etsy' starting NOW. #velocityconf #devops

velocityconf: @rkustner Congrats, thank you, and good luck!

velocityconf: New #velocityconf speaker interview w/ @sascha_d http://t.co/zg4tzDzIlH Config Management: It's Not About the Tool

velocityconf: @tsantero @garethr No, there's just a lot that goes into producing #velocityconf. Plus the chairs are getting ready for Santa Clara + NY! :)

velocityconf: Help your dev + ops teams be cross-functional and more successful. http://t.co/1mqGK3zh0U Free webcast 5/22 w/ @lnxchk

velocityconf: If you don't understand your ppl, you don't understand #Ops http://t.co/DQTBLJlWza New #velocityconf interview w/ @katemats

velocityconf: Free webcast from our friends at @citrix 5/29 http://t.co/IOeY4U0wUP Learn to consolidate 40 load balancers and ADCs into single platform

velocityconf: RT @suzaxtell: #WomeninTech You're invited to a women's meetup on Tues May 28 in SF w/ @courtneynash @mjawili, more http://t.co/MsMZ0IK8L2

velocityconf: LAST DAY for #velocityconf EU call for speakers http://t.co/qShofQCDPl Share your best #WPO, #Ops, and #DevOps stories.

velocityconf: New #velocityconf CA program preview is up: http://t.co/rKjf91RXdD @ariyahidayat on End-to-End JS Quality Analysis.

velocityconf: RT @oreillyanimals Vote Instant Wild's Digital Eyes & Ears for Wildlife Protection to win Google Global Impact Award http://t.co/Z0EetiQshZ

velocityconf: @da3mon Sorry! We were just doing some followup with past Velocity attendees. Sorry to intrude. No harm intended. :-(

velocityconf: Who's up for a 5 minute lightning talk. Last day to get your #Ignite proposal in for #velocityconf CA. http://t.co/pzL0WJtQH5

velocityconf: Call for speakers and registration is open for @webperfdays in Silicon Valley http://t.co/cJKBmynkjI June 22, Google HQ (cc @sfwebperf)