feature image via shutterstock
Horrifying, this week Congress voted to let your Internet service provider sell your browsing history and info to whoever they want, basically, without you knowing or consenting. One thing you can do to attempt to maintain some basic privacy is using a VPN, something upon which Ali helpfully wrote a guide this week!
Meat safety! It’s not very fun to learn about, but you only have to get violently ill once to know why it’s worth it.
Is the premise of a crisis prep guide for non-paranoid people inherently flawed? I don’t know, really, but the power did go out in my whole neighborhood for seemingly no reason this week and the author makes a good point that I don’t have any faith in the Trump administration’s FEMA response to be, you know, effective, so maybe stocking up on batteries isn’t the worst thing I could do, idk!
cc: Laneia: How to Craft the Perfect Cheese Plate
Our States, an interactive guide that helps you find out what bills relating to immigration, policing/protest, reproductive justice, voting rights, LGBT issues and economic justice legislators are working on in your state. Stay informed and get involved! This week I also started using the VoteSpotter mobile app – it lets you know when your representatives have voted on something, and lets you contact them without leaving the app to let you know what you thought of their vote. It’s not the same as contacting them before then to try to influence their vote, but we’re only human, and it’s not possible to weigh in on every single vote before it happens.
I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to start seedlings for my garden inside without having my cats eat them all, and found this guide to making a mini greenhouse! I’m excited to look into it. Also, this very fancy self-watering planter!
This is sort of an excuse to brag, BUT: after over a year of my circa-2014 MacBook Pro being barely functional and knowing that my hard drive was slowly and inevitably failing, I bought a solid state hard drive, popped open the inside of my laptop and replaced my old hard drive myself. The hard drive plus the torx screwdrivers I had to buy to install it cost less than $200 — still kind of a big investment, but a lot less than replacing my whole computer, and now my computer works seriously like new. If by some chance you’re in a similar position, this is the most helpful guide I found to teaching myself how to do it — the only thing I did differently was go to the Genius Bar afterwards to have them reinstall the operating system rather than trying to do it myself.
A comprehensive guide to unsubscribing from email newsletters.
Spring Cleaning Away Your Existential Dread, from Jennifer Culp at The Establishment!
Lately I’ve been thinking about how my going to the gym/what I do at the gym is limited by how unfamiliar I am with a lot of the machines; I’m aware that most of them have instructions on them, but I often feel too self-conscious to check them out for the first time when the gym is busy and I’m surrounded by people, especially if I know someone else is waiting. For a lot of them, I don’t even know what they’re called, so it’s hard to look up what I should be doing with them. That’s fine, I thought, surely there are myriad guides online that cover all the standard gym machines in great detail! Surprisingly, that guide is actually not that easy to find, but here’s the closest thing I’ve found so far. If you have a better resource, please share!
In the last iteration of this column, someone suggested a roundup of meditation/mindfulness apps. I’m not sure I’m qualified to do that, especially since the market is changing so rapidly — it feels like there’s a new meditation app every week! But I will share that this week, I realized an app I already had downloaded, Calm, had a feature I’d been looking for: a basic moving graphic that you can breathe along with to help yourself take deep, regular breaths and slow down for a minute. Like this graphic for breathing in sync to, but in your phone and on the go!
