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Laundry: the weekly time-consuming chore that ties you up for some hours.  If you’re one of us poor folks who can’t afford help, you’re likely to dread doing laundry, especially if you have to go to a laundromat.  I’ve picked up some best practices on how to do laundry that I share here to help save you some time and energy while preserving your garments.

1. Get a hamper with 2 or 3 divisions (or use 3 buckets)

To save time when doing laundry, get a hamper with 2 divisions – 1 for whites and another for colored clothes – or with 3 divisions if you have clothes that need dry cleaning.  Otherwise get 2 or 3 buckets or whatever containers you want to keep your clothes separated.  It’s much easier than going through a big container and separating everything.

(I can hear men saying, “What do you mean ‘separate’ garments?  Don’t you just throw everything in?”  To avoid whites staining from color bleeds and to prevent whites from turning the color of faint pee, it’s best to separate colors from whites).

2. Wash whites last

Bleach should be all washed away by the time your whites are done washing but to be safe it’s best to wash whites lastly.  Use warm or hot water to wash whites and never pour bleach directly on the garments as some formulas can stain the clothes.

3. Separate your socks

It’s a pain looking for socks in the washing machine – and sometimes you can’t even find them!  There are 2 things you can do:

Get sock clips (this link is from the Container Store but you might be able to find cheaper ones near you).  This is more time consuming to put together but makes it easy to put away socks since you don’t even need to look for the pairs; you might even decide to just put your socks away in the clips if you don’t want to fold them.

Keep a bag of sock clips hanging off the side of your hamper and pair up your socks before throwing them in the hamper.  The clips can go in the dryer, too.

4. Use a mesh bag for small garments

Zippered mesh bags are your laundry’s good friends.  You can put your socks (if you don’t want to use the clips mentioned above) and underwear in the mesh bags so you don’t have to look for and separate your small garments later.  Mesh bags are sold as bags for delicate garments and they save you from the headache of detangling tights or pantyhose from your clothes too.  I don’t recommend bags with strings as they usually open in the wash.

(If you’ll be washing delicate garments with sequins or other decorations you should still turn them inside out to wash even when using the mesh bag).

You should be able to find a mesh bag with a zipper in a big home store or at a local 99-cent type of store.  Hang your mesh bag on the side of your hamper and throw your small garments in there as you take them off.  Don’t fill more than 2/3 of the bag though otherwise your garments won’t dry well.

5. Use cold water for colored clothing

Washing your clothes in cold water prevents or reduces color bleeding and fading as well as shrinkage and overall wear of clothes.  In addition, it reduces a little your energy costs and CO2 emissions.

Unless you work with manual labor your everyday clothing doesn’t need the heavy cleaning hot water provides.  For everyday sweat and dust cold water works just as well.  For heavy sweat spots you can use pre-washing home treatments or buy products specific for this.

6. Dissolve the soap before throwing in clothes

This is for top-loading home machines.  I used to put all the clothes in my machine then throw soap on top but that stained a few delicate garments.  So what to do is run the water first and throw the soap in.  Wait for the water to filla bit and dissolve the soap then throw in the garments.

7. Use drying sheets to prevent static

Especially in the winter, pulling clothes out of the dryer will give you a tiny shock.  Drying sheets prevent this and make your clothes smell good.  (You can use the used drying sheets to clean dust off your computer monitors and TV screens).

8. Use sweat pads to prevent sweat spots

Sweat pads are thin patches that prevent your shirt from touching your underarms and creating a sweaty spot.  There are disposable and reusable pads, though I’ve only seen reusable ones for women as they need to attach to something like a bra strap.  Disposable pads stick to your shirt’s underarms.  I must confess that I didn’t find the disposable pads very comfortable but I know of many people who use them and can’t live without them.

Putting into practice the tips offered in this guide will get your laundry done in a practical and productive manner, leaving you dressed your best for the work week ahead. If you have any other laundry tips, please leave them in the comments!

While spending time on Facebook may not be the most productive thing you can do, it can be a valuable tool – when used in moderation.

But have you seen the new Facebook privacy settings? Do you know that if you are not cautious, your personal data could appear in public streams? Follow these privacy tips to remove any doubts you might have.

1. Don’t Add Applications Randomly

Certainly the most important tip if you love spending time on Facebook. There have been instances in the past when certain apps were hacked into and user data was compromised. So, be careful and don’t just add every other Facebook app you come across.

2. Create Lists

Facebook lists are a great way to manage your news feed and your friends. Also, learn how to create friend lists in Facebook chat.

3. Check Privacy Settings Carefully

Sometime ago, Facebook simplified user privacy settings. Check them out. Read this official guide too, to know more about those settings.

4. Protect Your Photos

You must have heard stories of private photos of certain celebrities appearing in public Facebook stream. If you don’t want it to happen with your pictures, make sure you check what’s there for the photos you upload in the privacy settings, and how to customize it.

5. Think Before Sharing

And finally, it’s always good to give a second thought to that status message you are going to enter, or the video you are going to upload. May be, it doesn’t need to be on Facebook.

What do you think? Should we be cautious on Facebook? Or is the whole privacy thing blown out of proportion?

I’ve had a home office for the past ten years. During that time, my wife and I have moved four times. Besides working full time at jobs we love, Lori and I also run our own side hustles: I write, and she creates art and jewelry. Juggling all that leaves little room for a social life, especially in the suburbs. That’s why we traded a bigger space for a shorter commute.

While I’m not looking forward to the process of relocating my home office, I am excited about our new space. After leaving our three-bedroom townhouse, we’re moving into a 900-square foot condo in the center of town. Most Americans wouldn’t even consider this option, but it’s designed to help us spend more time together. This caused us to rethink what we want to get from a work space in our home, and we’ve come up with five guidelines that shaped how we’re designing the new home office setup.

#1: Think Multipurpose

For the first time in a decade, we won’t have a dedicated room as a home office. Trading off space for lifestyle doesn’t mean giving up functionality. Instead of sacrificing a whole room as a home office, we’ve set up what would have been our dining room into three potential configurations. That corner desk lets us flex between a home office space, a dining area, and a crash pad.

With a dining room table that collapses against the wall next to the desk, we can have some surface area when we really need it for projects. If we find ourselves hosting more overnight guests than we have couches, there’s plenty of room for that air mattress. While entertaining, the desktop computer can stow away in the closet, making our corner desk perfect for a drinks station.

#2: Be Inclusive

You could describe my first home office as a mashup of Mad Men and Twin Peaks: a misguided attempt at feng shui that left my huge wooden desk facing toward the door of our spare bedroom. Instead of a real office, I really created a man cave. Lori felt shut out from what was meant to be a family business.

Although home-working friends often complain about their interruptive spouses, Lori and I have developed some cues and clues to keep us from stepping on each others’ creativity. Our space is open enough to simulate co-working, with enough privacy when we need it.

#3: Capture the Clutter

Two creative people getting married can result in disaster if you’re not prepared for some give and take. In our current home office, we finally had the right amount of space to set up a desk that wrapped around two walls of the room. It gave us lots of space to work, and lots of space to collect clutter.

Our new space forces us to get things done. We picked a corner desk that gives us the right amount of space for a small inbox. Papers get scanned with a tiny Doxie scanner into Evernote, so we can both access copies of key bills, paperwork, and receipts. Everything other than critical documents makes a one-way trip to the shredder.

#4: Stay Flexible

When we work together, it’s often about getting photos of her creations onto the web or proofing cover art and photos for one of my books. That’s why we chose small, fairly portable pieces of furniture. Having a few pieces we can quickly whip around the room means we can go from a pop-up photo shoot to a markup session with just a few moves.

It’s also important for us to share the room’s resources when we can get the most done. I tend to do most of my best work in the early morning, before I head out to the Major Corporation. Lori gets creative at night. The corner computer’s big screen lets us get a lot done during our hot zones. If we need two computers at once, we’ve got laptops and that convertible dining room table as fallback.

#5: Have Fun and Think Funky

I still have nightmares about the ugly, pressboard home office furniture my dad and I glued together when I was still in high school. Instead of a typical office desk, Lori found a corner unit that enhances the color and texture of our hardwood floors. The folks at the furniture store indulged us by helping me carry upholstered dining room seats across the showroom to find one that had the same kind of ergonomic support as my favorite mesh task chair. Lori loves the unusual design of the chairs we chose: green with playful embroidery on the back that will make our new space bright and cheerful, even when we’re working hard.

These five ground rules really helped us hammer out a new kind of home office for our new space. Everything’s on delivery trucks now, but I’ll update the post with some pictures of the final product once we’re done moving in.

The blue sky view. Not a cloud in sight. Perfect conditions, endless opportunity, unlimited potential.

People often formulate ideas using the “blue sky view,” a hypothetical landscape where challenges are nonexistent, success is straightforward, and every lucky break seems to go your way.

Advocates of blue sky thinking say that brainstorming in an idealized, setback-free setting allows you to focus solely on the idea, not the related obstacles or logistics. You develop the idea in a perfect, immaculate universe, and then approach the potential challenges separately.

But, even a bad idea can look good if you picture it within an idealized, utopian scenario. The blue sky view could distort your expectations and affect your judgment. Under the blue sky, a risky move can look like a safe bet.

Undeniably, the road to success will seem clearer if you wish away the obstacles. The question is: Does the blue sky view truly help you formulate viable plans, or does it leave you unprepared for the inevitable challenges of reality?

In roughly 30 years of full-time employment, I have been both a manager and an individual contributor.  Through the years of experience I’ve developed my own preference, of course. While I’ve come to my own conclusion on the matter, some of you are just beginning to explore both options as possibilities. Let’s talk a little bit about what is attractive – and what is not – about both types of jobs.

Manager

What is attractive?

• A manager title tends to carry with it an air of importance or significance in the workplace.  This is just a fact of life.  Certainly, the level of significance between managing and individually contributing has diminished over the years due to the increased importance of specialization.
• There is much more interaction with people, whether it be the people that you manage, or with other managers.  Some may not consider this an attractive aspect of managing, but going in a manager certainly understands that this will be the case.
• More $$$.  The pay scale, at most companies, tends to be higher for a manager.  Not always, but more often than not.
• As a manager you can delegate responsibilities thereby displacing some of the mundane tasks that your job title entails.
• Opportunities will exist for you to go to seminars to help make you a better manager and to develop personally.  Some of these seminars may be “Dealing with controversy”, “Time Management”, or “Effective Public Speaking”.

What is not?

• Managers have to deal with the many personal issues related to the employees who work for them.  This could take up an exorbitant amount of time in the life of a manager.
• Pressure.  You will be asked to give presentations at various meetings or seminars.  If you are not comfortable with public speaking this could be a major headache.
• You will have to guide the employees that work for you to grow as effective employees.
• As a manager, you will be responsible for annual reviews which, depending on the number of workers you have, could be a large part of your job.

Individual Contributor

What is attractive?

• You can focus more on the job at hand without the distractions that could come with a manager’s position.
• You are only responsible only for yourself and your own actions.
• You can much more easily become an “expert” in a particular area at your workplace.  If you are a PC technician you can concentrate solely on that expertise.  If you are a manager of PC technicians, you may have to service computers in the event of one of your workers is on vacation.  But you won’t become an expert by constantly building, servicing, and upgrading personal computers on a regular basis.
• If you can specialize in a particular area of expertise, such as a database administrator, your pay may match or exceed that of other managers in your company.
• Depending on your job, it is much more probable that you are able to telecommute since you don’t have to manage people who are at the office.

What is not?

• You may not be taken as seriously in the workplace as a manager. 
• You cannot delegate anything you don’t want to do, to an underling.  On the other hand, your manager may delegate mundane tasks to you, leaving you less time to work on your area of expertise.
• Your manager can dictate areas of development in which may not be interested.  Perhaps your manager wants you to handle all oral presentations for your group and you have no interest in public speaking.  You basically have no control over what your manager wants for you, even if your manager is guiding you to develop public speaking skills for selfish reasons.
• Stuck in the office.  Managers typically have more access to travel in the workplace, whether it be to training classes, seminars, symposiums, or to sister offices.  As an individual contributor you may not have as many opportunities of getting out of the office as a manager may have.

As stated above, managing and individual contributing have their positives and their negatives.  In my own personal experience, my preference is as an individual contributor, which is my current job type.  I think the ability to become proficient in one particular area of expertise, is extremely important to me.  Today, specialization in a desired area of technology translates to job security.  As an individual contributor, I can focus.  As a manager, I always had to be aware of the people who worked for me and whether or not they were doing their jobs.  That is a responsibility that I simply did not relish.

Obviously your personality type has a lot to do with whether you will be happy in either role.  For me, there is no “individual contributor vs manager” competition.  I am happy to be responsible for myself – because I know that is one person I can always count on.

Gorgeous old vintage photographs always have certain qualities about them that are unmistakable, but many of these qualities disappeared with the great shift from film photography to digital photography. In today’s quick tip, we’ll have a look at a few very simple tips to bring that vintage look back, into the digital age.

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Step 1

The first thing we need to do is select an appropriate image to use. Typically warm images with a strong light source and a lot of contrast work best, but you should also think about the subject of the photograph itself. Does it have an old-school feel about it? If so, then it’s probably a good candidate for this effect!

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Step 2

To get started, the first thing we’ll do in Adobe Photoshop is to duplicate the layer. You can do this by right-clicking on the layer and selecting “Duplicate Layer.”

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Step 3

Now we’re going to turn our duplicated layer into a high-pass filter, which will add more detail to the image. Select Filter > Other > High Pass from the Photoshop menu bar, and set the radius to 3 pixels.

Once you’ve done this, set the blending mode of the layer to “Overlay” – and you should be able to see the effect clearly by toggling the layer visibility on and off.

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Step 4

Next, we’re going to add a couple of layer adjustments. Select the layer which contains the original image, then click on the circular icon at the bottom of your layers window to add a new adjustment.

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Step 5

The first adjustment that we’ll add is Curves, this is the most complicated of the three adjustments. First select the Red channel from the RGB dropdown menu and mimic the shape in the screenshot below, then do the same with the Green and Blue channels respectively. Switch the dropdown back to RGB to see all three channels overlaid in the same way as they appear below.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and close the layer adjustment window.

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Step 6

Now select the original image layer again and add another layer adjustment, but this time select Brightness/Contrast instead of Curves. All we’re going to do with this adjustment is drop the contrast to -20. Once that’s done, close that layer adjustment window.

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Step 7

Selecting the original image layer again, we’re going to add one last layer adjustment. This time select Levels from the layer adjustment menu. The only we’ll do here is to move the left-hand slider (black) from 0 up to 20. Once that’s done, close the layer adjustment window.

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Step 8

The last step is to add the magenta hue that really completes this effect. Create a new layer that sits above all your other layers and fill it with solid magenta. You can do this easily by setting C, Y, and K to 0% in the colors palette, and setting M to 100%. Next set the layer blending mode to “Screen” and drop the opacity down to around 25%.

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The Final Image

That’s it! You’re done – and your final image should now look something like this:

Friday Photo Critique is our weekly community project, where we publish a photograph submitted by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the image. It’s a great way to learn more about photography, express your viewpoint, and have your own image critiqued!

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Quick Ground Rules

1. Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen photographs that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
2. Feel free to offer any type of advice – composition, lighting, post-processing etc.
3. You can also link to photographs that you feel offer a great example of this type of image shot exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for Friday Photo Critique!

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The Photograph

Photographer: Igor Vilela Rotundo

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached the scene or taken the photo differently? A massive thank you to everyone who commented last week.

The most constructive and helpful comments will be featured on the site. Interested in submitting your own photo? You can do so here!

PHP’s prepared statements (for database access) are fantastic. Not only do they help secure your database queries, but they’re also particularly more efficient for larger products. However, there are a couple issues that appear to make these methods less flexible than we’d hope. For one, we must utilize the bind_result method, and pass in a specific number of variables. However, what happens when this code is within a class, and we won’t immediately know how many variables to pass? Luckily, there’s a solution! I’ll show you what it is in today’s video tutorial.

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Final Code

<?php

function read()
{
   $parameters = array();
   $results = array();

   $mysql = new mysqli('localhost', 'root', 'root', 'db') or die('There was a problem connecting to the database');
   $stmt = $mysql->prepare('SELECT body FROM posts') or die('Problem preparing query');
   $stmt->execute();

   $meta = $stmt->result_metadata();

   while ( $field = $meta->fetch_field() ) {

     $parameters[] = &$row[$field->name];
   }

   call_user_func_array(array($stmt, 'bind_result'), $parameters);

   while ( $stmt->fetch() ) {
      $x = array();
      foreach( $row as $key => $val ) {
         $x[$key] = $val;
      }
      $results[] = $x;
   }

   return $results;

}

$results = read();
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
   <meta charset="utf-8">
   <title>untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php foreach ($results as $row) : ?>

   <p> <?php echo $row['body']; ?> </p>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</body>
</html>