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Tech-savvy chefs pull off amazing dishes with sous vide, or cooking vacuum-sealed food in temperature-controlled water tanks. If you’ve got an instant-read thermometer and a vacuum sealer, you can produce similarly paradigm-shifting steaks with a DIY sous vide setup.

The Savvy Housekeeping blog suggests that all you really need are those two main components—and there’s a good chance you could just borrow your parents’ or neighbors’ vacuum sealer for a set of steaks, if you can’t find one on Craigslist or eBay—to pull off a sous vide technique that doesn’t require a $400-plus piece of equiment. There’s a few other items required to keep the steaks in the water, but it’s stuff you probably have. Savvy Housekeeping also gave their stakes a post-bath pan searing with just salt, pepper, and olive oil, but you can feel free to get nuts with your uncle’s secret seasoning or whatnot.

It’s not a set-and-forget method, though—you’ll need to really watch your sealed-off steaks in their immersion bath:

We wanted to keep the meat between 134-135 degrees. To do this, we set the stovetop on the lowest temperature and the alarm on the thermometer at 136 degrees. When the temperature got that high, the alarm went off and we added 1 cup cold water to the pot. This brought the temperature down to 134 degrees. It took the water 10 minutes to raise the two degrees again, the alarm went off at 136 degrees, and we added another cup of cold water. We did this every ten minutes and it kept the steaks right around 135 degrees.

After your steak gets to that perfect temperature, you give them a little sear on the pan, and, well, the photograph results speak for themselves. You’ve cooked a steak to a healthy temperature at a slow pace, without oxidizing your meat, and without succumbing to your oven’s inconsistency.

Update: Commenter thinkerer posts two helpful notes and links on sous vide cooking in the comments. Douglas Baldwin at the University of Colorado at Boulder has A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking that provides far more depth on the techniques, science, and safety considerations involved. He also points out the Wikipedia entry for sous vide, which suggests that, when cooking sous vide, you should ensure you hit the right temperatures and use meat that’s had minimal exposure to bacteria and other contaminants, as you trade open-air exposure concerns for botulism-related contaminants. Then again, the author herself comments that those fears seem lessened for meat you’re searing and eating immediately.

Pulled off your own submersion cooking stunts before? Do tell, and link or post pictures, in the comments!

Listen up, y’all: I’ve got another delightful time-wasting Tumblr for you: Museum of Modern Tweets. Every Tuesday on this inspired blog, artist Odessa Begay renders a visual representation of a celeb’s 140-word message.

Although social networking could be seen as merely an outlet for mindlessly blathering into the abyss, a lot of folks are finding creative ways to appropriate the medium. Begay’s site, which appears to have been up for about a month now, is just the latest in this artistic stream of technological consciousness.

Celebrity depictions include Ryan Seacrest, Nick Jonas, John Mayer and Lance Armstrong, and offer trippy interpretations of what the celeb has tweeted. Check out a few of my favorites below:

Part of a Burgeoning Tradition

Like I said, the Museum of Modern Tweets isn’t the first site to riff on social media. There’s also Sophie Blackwell’s Missed Connections blog, in which the artist illustrates those fateful Craigslist messages:

And check out the Facebook group “I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held,” which you can join if you would like the chance to have Held paint your profile photo.

Tags: humor, social media, tumblr, twitter

Last week Lifehacker reader UnMicD offered a simple bookmarklet for searching Craigslist in our #openthread. Over at the Productive Geek forums, user Brady modified that bookmarklet to search file-sharing site MediaFire. The results: It’s a little like when Napster was good.

To create the bookmarklet (this is how you do it on Firefox—other browsers should be similar), just right-click your bookmarks toolbar, select New Bookmark, and paste the text below into the Location field:

You can name the bookmarklet whatever you like. Brady takes it a step further and assigned it a nice favicon using the Favicon Picker Firefox extension (which means you can skip naming your bookmarklet altogether). Once it’s all set up, just click the bookmarklet, enter your search terms, and see what you come up with.

This is by no means a new idea, of course—some folks have been using Google as their personal Napster for years (see number three).

Matthew Delorey was a 26-year old with a business plan: selling hacked cable modems. This is the sort of business that a budding entrepreneur should probably keep on the down-low, or at least limit to those tiny text ads at the back of magazines where satellite descramblers are sold, but that’s no way to rake in the cash.

That’s why Delorey, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, posted ads on Craigslist and then—rather incredibly—put up YouTube videos with names like “Massmodz.com How to Get Free Internet Free Cable Internet Comcast or any Cable ISP—100% works.”

The founders of Sofa.com, Pat Reeves and Rohan Blacker, have launched a new startup that should be particularly useful for anyone who has ever had trouble finding things to do in their community, or while on vacation.

With Ooh.com, they’re offering a place for activity providers to sell their services with as little fuss as possible — much like eBay did in the late nineties for used and collector goods, but without the auction aspect.

At the site, activity providers can post their events (pretty much anything “time-bookable”) for free, and allow customers to check out via Paypal or Google Checkout. Activity providers can incorporate Flickr and Youtube into their listings and can promote events to Facebook and Twitter from within the site. It doesn’t look like the site has any place for free events — but given that there are so many other online venues for finding free activities, it’s probably better for Ooh.com to stick within the paid event niche.

Ooh.com competes with the likes of Craigslist and Eventbrite, but its all-in-one solution for activity providers is fairly unique. It’s simpler than Craigslist because the activity provider doesn’t have to worry about tracking incoming payments via a third-party service, and it caters to individuals and smaller activities better than Eventbrite.

The service already boasts some 1,000 activities from North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. According to the company’s press release, the variety of courses and activities listed so far include:

[A] jam and chutney making course in Hampshire, paragliding with hawks in Nepal, a holiday cottage in Dorset, medieval jousting lessons in California, film screenings in London, financial crisis tours in New York with a former bond trader, ski lessons in Japan, lindy hop lessons in Belfast, hip hop tours in Harlem and bushcraft days in Missouri.

While there are many similar options available, Ooh.com’s simplicity may be an appealing option to activity providers and users just looking for something fun to do.

Ooh.com is based in the UK, and we’re currently awaiting funding details from the company.

If you ever need to hand out your phone number in a public forum or, say, give your number to a stranger on Craigslist, you rarely want to give away your real number. Free service inumbr generates free, auto-expiring phone numbers.

We’ve mentioned inumbr twice before when it was called Craigsnumber and simply numbr, but it’s been renamed yet again, this time to inumbr. It’s a bit annoying that it’s constantly changing, but it’s also the only dead simple disposable phone number service we know of.

Just go to the site, pick your city, set your expiration time (one hour, one day, one week), then tell it where to forward your calls. Google Voice actually steps in and eliminates, to an extent, the need for something like this (Google Voice lets you filter and even block calls you don’t want), but the simple throw away number is nice to have under the right circumstances.

Originally posted 2009-09-09 18:25:32. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Today’s featured workspace isn’t just a huge overhaul and upgrade but it also incorporates many tips and tricks we’ve covered here at Lifehacker.

Lifehacker reader Kelly Chambers was inspired to overhaul her office, in the process using several tricks we’ve shared with you here at Lifehacker including going the door-as-desk route, using rope lights for ambient lighting, building an inexpensive monitor stand, and using rain gutters as cable managers. She offers the following detailed run down of how she overhauled her space:

About 2 months ago I was seriously inspired by Meredith Perdue’s post to design a studio that I could really sink my teeth into; starting with building my own door desk. I wanted a French Country feel with a minimalist approach including the best cable management I could muster. I wanted all this for under $100.

My project began on Craigslist where I found the PERFECT desktop; a 1940s cherry stained door for $20. Without stripping the it, I painted the door antique white and lightly distressed it. Found the paint at Lowe’s “oops counter” for $2.

Through Freecycle.net, I found a sliding glass door which I knew I could use as the glass top to the door. I removed the frame, separated the double panes bad thoroughly cleaned the glass. Spent Zero dollars here folk – and even have a spare overlay!!! I already owned French Country table runner and decided to repurpose it as the cushioning between the glass and the door which also adds a bit of character and interest.

I completed the desk by originally purchasing two $19 three shelf bookcases at WalFart to add storage and stability. Because I wanted full pass through, I did not apply the cardboard backing. This, unfortunately, proved to be EXTREMELY unsteady which lead me back to Ikea where I bought two VIKA ARTUR trestles ($30/each) that came with a shelf on each leg. Now, it’s super stable and VERY nice looking!

The project actually came out to less than $100… and I got it all done in a month. I adore my new converted dining room turned Studio and my furry kids love it, too!

PS – If you want to see the original design, you can view the photos here.

You can check out more pictures below or visit her Flickr pool for even more detailed photos of her workspace.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

Want a Collector’s Edition Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien Carry-On Bag? Head on over to eBay, where Conan O’Brien’s team has listed the item for the very affordable starting price of $399.99.

On second thoughts… perhaps not — someone has just put in a fake bid of $999,999, essentially preventing further bids.

The item was posted by the show’s team last week, and has five days left to run. Based on developments this weekend, it’s likely you’ll see more “Tonight Show with Conan” castoffs being auctioned off soon — Conan is reportedly getting the boot from NBC, in a deal that may be announced as early as today.

Conan also attempted to sell The Tonight Show on Craigslist this week, adding that he was ““willing to trade for Coldplay tickets.”

Tags: conan, ebay

Fostering a sense of local community in the age of the Internet and globalization is no easy task.

A new venture called BlockChalk from the former product lead of del.ici.ous Stephen Hood and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, is trying to tackle that problem. BlockChalk is a service that lets people use their phones to text messages for others in the neighborhood without compromising their privacy. You can leave opinions about local businesses, set up deals with other neighbors or even report a lost cat. Hood says it’s already in 10,000 neighborhoods and 6,600 cities.

Today they’ve launched an iPhone app so you can keep track of short notes or the latest “chalks” in your neighborhood. The company already has a HTML5 web app that works with the iPhone and Android-based phones and an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi.

The criticism that the pair have for existing location-based services is that they work for early adopters who have lower expectations of privacy, but they may not be so readily accepted by more guarded users. Anonymity, of course, raises other issues. How do you seed a social networking service without real or tangible relationships built-in? How can people be engaged if there’s no context for the others they’re interacting with? That said, there are anonymous community sites that have thrived, like Craigslist.

We’ve seen other attempts at building information services for local communities. EveryBlock, which was acquired by MSNBC, just launched a ‘Notify Your Neighbors’ function yesterday to let regular people share updates about what’s happening on their block. ‘Neighborhoods’ was another early Facebook application launched in 2007 that had an intriguing concept because it was tied to real identities and places through the social network. But it only has a little over 8,000 monthly active users. Then, of course, there’s the grand-daddy of them all, Craigslist, which does have a mobile web site.

The pair say they’re looking for seed funding for the project.

TrendsSpotting Market Research is kicking off its predictions for 2010 with its report on social media — comprised of forecasts from everyone from Mashable founder Pete Cashmore to Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame.

The report, which offers a tip of the hat to Twitter with its 140-character-per-prediction slideshow format, offers a smattering of prognostications, but we were most intrigued by two that came up again and again throughout the slideshow: Businesses finally integrating social media and seeing an actual ROI, and a shrinking/customization of the online world.

Business and Social Media

Some businesses already have a social media policy (as Brandon Jennings now knows all too well), but according to the Internet luminaries consulted for the report, we can expect a lot more engagement with online communities in the coming year. We already know that it’s feasible to make money off of services like Twitter — Dell did it — it remains to be seen how far companies will go when it comes to embracing the web to turn a profit. Some of the choicest quotes are below:

“Business will finally admit that social media ain’t some fad for kids and B-list movie stars.”
- Marta Kagan, managing director, U.S. Espresso-Brand Infiltration

“Social media in 2010 will cease being the shiny new object and instead become part of the everyday lexicon of business.”
- Charlene Li, Founder, Altimeter Group

“Look for social to become less about the ‘what is it’ and even more about the ROI.”
- Marc Meyer, principal, Digital Marketing Response Group

Shrinking the World Wide Web Into Communities

As the web becomes more expansive and all-encompassing, it’s only natural that we seek to contain it in some way, especially as mobile technology takes our real world interactions into the online world with such tools as Foursquare and other location-sharing devices (which Cashmore predicts will be spreading like proverbial wildfire this year).

The experts consulted on the report had some fascinating ideas regarding exclusivity that don’t seem all that far-fetched considering recent debates about privacy and the like. Check out some of the most intriguing conjectures below:

“I see velvet rope social networks, where some kind of gating to keep out the commons will occur.”
- Chris Brogan, president, New Marketing Labs

“Twitter will offer a premium level option that’ll allow the creation of hosted invite only discussions.”
- Marc Meyer, principal, Digital Marketing Response Group

“The technology will begin to fade into the background so that people can focus on the relationships that are created because of the technologies, not the technologies themselves.”
- Charlene Li, founder, Altimeter Group

What Do You Think?

Check out the slideshow below for more predictions and share your own in the comments.

Tags: social media