Egging you on

Who would have known I needed help in cracking eggs? I came across this in Cooks Illustrated. I don't know if it works yet, since I haven't had a chance to try it. Let me know if you are able to test it out. It may save me from always fishing for egg shells after I crack.

Don't crack the egg on the edge of the bowl or counter. Instead use a flat surface (such as the kitchen counter or a breadboard) and tap the egg, then pull the halves apart over the bowl. Presumably, this results in a cleaner break.

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who didn't know this.

Browse till you drop

I've been a regular reader of PC Magazine since its inception -- back before there were color displays and hard drives. When the Web finally arrived, PC Magazine started compiling what it considered the 100 best Web sites every year. It is something I often consult when I'm trying to find a good place to begin exploring a category. Warning: once you start browsing around these sites, you can spend a lot of time, especially in the "undiscovered" territory. Anyone for bad tattoo art?

After you spend a few hours browsing the best Web sites, you can go waste the rest of your day trying out what PC Magazine considers the best free software of 2009. From music to finance to graphics, most of what you need can be found on the Web for free. If you are spending money, you aren't doing it right.

Books, Books, Books!

To any librarians who read this blog, this news might be as old as the dewey decimal system. Try not to drool, while yawning over your keyboards. But for the rest of you reading folk, here's how to get free books in the mail.

Head over to Goodreads and sign up for their free service. Besides being a great place to keep a record of what you and your buddies are up to, literarily speaking, you can click on the Bookswap section to have someone send you their used books just for the price of shipping. What's more, every time you send 10 books, you get 1 book for F-R-E-E!

Book it Dano.

The cloud gets bigger

If you have a Google account, you can now store all sorts of files in its cloud, and not just word processing documents and spreadsheets, up to 250 MB in size. This is a good option if you need to use a file from different computers, or you want to keep certain files backed up for safe keeping. One of the best uses might be for file sharing. You can share a file or folder with other people, making it easy to collaborate on projects and to avoid file transfer problems with e-mail attachments. There are limits on the amount of storage you can use unless you pay for a premium account, but for day-to-day use it should be more than sufficient for most of us.