My Top 5 Favorite Life Hacks

Well, it’s been one heck of a run but as the semester draws to a close so too does my class-required Life Hack blog. Life Hacks Lab is a weekly blog required for my class, Writing Across the Media 2. I was tasked with coming up with a weekly blog to teach me how to write for the web. I figured testing out life hacks would be a fun way to fulfil my blog requirements. I wasn’t wrong.

With all that being said, this will be my last post to Life Hacks Lab. I decided it would be a fitting end to look back on my favorite life hacks. I’m lucky. My blog actually provided me with a few handy tricks I can continue to use in my life. Today I will be presenting you with my top five favorites.

5. Breaking an Apple in Half

This hack was one of the first few that I did. I chose to film myself trying to break the apple in half. I figured it would be better than showing pictures and just writing that I had broken the apple. This was fun because I didn’t end up filming very many of the hacks I tested. I also just really like this hack. Sure, you could cut the apple with a knife but any random Joe can do that. If you want to impress people, break the apple in half with your bare hands!

4. Soda Cup Lid as a Coaster

I like this hack because of how useful it is. I get meals from fast-food restraints all the time. I find it just really cool that the lids of fast-food cups double as coasters. It not something I think a lot of people know. At the very least, you could show someone this hack and impress them.

3. Turn Your Milk Jug into a Garden Shovel

Okay, so maybe this isn’t the most useful life hack I’ve done but I did enjoy making it. I thought it was really creative to cut a milk jog into a shovel. I actually have a bit of an update for this hack. The shovel doesn’t really work very well in the ground but it might just work as a flour or sugar scoop in the kitchen. If you measure out how much flower the milk jug shovel can hold it can make an effective scoop. I haven’t actually tried it because I can’t find the scoop but it would seem to work in theory.

2. The More Eraser Hack

This life hack was the one where you sharpen the back of a pencil to get to the rest of the eraser under the metal piece. I had to put this one on the list. Not only did I think of it myself but I also use it all the time at my tutoring job. Having the eraser last longer prolongs the usage of pencil.

1. The Cellphone Holder Hack

It’s no secret that I loved this hack. Holding a cellphone in a car with a rubber band is very helpful for me. I still use this hack when I need to get somewhere new and don’t have someone in the car with me to navigate. This hack is the best hack I discovered online this year.

That’s it then. I have had a wonderful time testing out life hacks here on Life Hack Lab. Thank you to anyone who has read my blog. Let me know in the comments what your favorite hack was from this blog. Maybe I’ll read it!

Turn Your Milk Jug into Garden Shovel

This week’s life hack does exactly what the title implies. You can turn a milk jug into a garden shovel. How? Here’s how!

Let me start off with a disclaimer. You may have varying degrees of success with this life hack. Milk jugs come in many shapes and sizes. Not all of them will be able to be cut into a perfect garden spade. I only personally tested this with a medium-sized milk jug that I bought at Jewel Osco. I have no idea if it would work on large milk jugs or containers from different grocery stores. I’m not made of cash. I only bought the one jug. If you would like to test it out with other jugs of different sizes feel free. Leave a comment below and let me know how it goes.

With all that being said, let’s get into the hack. I started by washing off the nutrition guide stickers that come on every milk jug. This may have been a mistake because it left over some sticky residue on the part of the jug that would eventually become the shovel.

Next, I grabbed a marker and marked the area I would cut out. This step isn’t mandatory. I just decided to do it because I thought it would be a helpful visual for this life hack. Then I cut along the dotted line. Well, I didn’t really cut it. It was more me poking holes along the line and dragging the shape end of the scissors down the line.

It was a little more difficult than I was expecting, but it wasn’t too bad.

In the end, it actually worked out pretty well. The medium-sized jug I used cut into a lovely shovel. Is this as good as a normal small gardening shovel you can buy? No. Metal shovels are more durable than plastic milk jug shovels. The plastic shovel was a little bit flimsy but I was able to do some digging with it. It would still be easier with a normal metal shovel though.

 

I have to admit, this isn’t the most useful life hack. I can’t really say that this life hack is for people who don’t want to spend money or for people who need a last-minute gardening tool. This hack takes too long to make for it to work last-minute and, honestly, I’m not sure if last-minute gardening is even a thing. If you’ve got the time and money to plant a garden, you probably have the time and money to go buy a real garden shovel.

I could see this being a fun arts and crafts project for kids though. Parents or grandparents could have a nice time making these shovels with their children or grandchildren and planting some flowers with them. Just as long as the child uses safety scissors or gets help cutting from the parent.
 

That’s it for this week of Life Hack Lab. Stay tuned for even more Life Hacks in the future!

I Made My Own Life Hack!

I’m switching up the formula for today’s blog entry. For the first time ever, I present to you a Life Hack that I discovered all on my own. That’s right, I didn’t find this hack online. I invented it.

The More Eraser Hack:

I’m going to tell you the story of how I discovered this hack. Believe it or not this hack took me, basically, my entire life to come up with. When I was little I always used to get annoyed when the erasers on the ends of my pencils would wear out.

I could always see that there was more eraser left inside the metal part of the pencil but as a child I just had no way of getting to it.

Fast-forward to middle school where I had the idea to peel off half of the metal by the eraser to get to that extra eraser. Doing this makes the eraser on your pencil take twice as long to fade away. I kept doing this for years.

Whenever I would run out of eraser on a pencil I would peel off some of the metal to get to more of the eraser.

Then, in high school I got a job as a tutor at Kumon Math and Reading Center. I still work there today actually. My first few years there I started noticing that the students would just stop using the pencils when the erasers wore out.

So, I would sometimes peel the metal parts of some of the pencils off during down-time so the students could use the pencils longer. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t very effective. Peeling off the metal with my bare fingers took a while and after the first few my fingers would start to hurt like crazy.

About a year ago I had, what I consider to this day to be, my greatest discovery ever! Sad, right? At Kumon, I have this little portable pencil sharpener that looks like this.

There is a hole for a normal number-two-sized pencil and a hole for a slightly bigger pencil. One day, about a year ago, I had the bright idea to take a pencil with a worn-down eraser, stick it backside into the big hole of the sharpener and sharpen it. Just like that, I had created my very own life hack.

It works beautifully. You can cut the metal off the extra bit of eraser that is inside the pencil very easily with a pencil sharpener.

This will work with pretty much any handheld non-battery-powered pencil sharpener. It is easier to use the standard slightly larger pencil hole found on many common pencil sharpeners but it also works on number-two-sized holes.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just write a five-hundred-word blog about one quick five-second life hack. Yes. Yes, I did.

Honestly, I was just so proud that I invented my own life hack that I had to share the story of how I figured it out. I’ve checked online and its seems like a very small percentage of people have also figured this hack out.

What did you think of my life hack this week? Do you know of any other eraser-related life hacks? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear about some. As always, see you next week on Life Hack Lab!

Rubber Gloves Instead of Lint Rollers?

Today life hack was the most annoying and difficult life hack I’ve ever tested out. It was so monotonous that I almost gave up. But I stuck it out and finished it because that’s how dedicated I am to this blog. Read on to find out why this life hack was a nightmare.

This life hack says you can use rubber gloves like a lint roller to remove pet hair from clothing. There’s no real trick to this one. You don’t have to cover the rubber gloves in glue first or spread any liquid to get the fur to stick to the gloves. The hack says you just rub the rubber gloves all over the clothing to get the fur off.

My younger brother was gracious enough to let me try this on his winter jacket. It already tends to get dog fur stuck to it so I thought it would work well for this hack. I figured I would let my dog sit and play on it for a few minutes to really get it covered with fur. I regret everything.

After about five minutes of letting my dog role around on my brother’s coat I was satisfied with the layer of dog fur covering it. I donned my trusty rubber glove and went at it. At first things looked good. The glove was getting some of the fur off. This life hack was working.

 

I decided to keep at it for another few minutes. But as the minutes turned into hours, the hours into days and the days into years (Okay so maybe it just felt like years) I began to realize some of the fur would just never come off. The right side of the coat in the image below shows the outcome of using the rubber glove to get fur off the jacket.

I then grabbed a lint roller and went to the other side of the jacket to see if it worked better than the rubber glove. It did.

 

The left side of the image below is the result of using the lint roller on the coat. It worked better than the rubber glove that I used on the right side.  

 

The lint roller was easier to use and worked better than the rubber glove. To be fair the rubber glove did work but I would never use it in place of lint roller. The only way I would recommend use this hack is if you don't have a lint roller and it's an emergency.

This life hack gets a slight pass from me.

Then came the part that really annoyed me. After I decided the lint roller worked better than the rubber glove at getting fur off the coat there was still hair on the coat. I continued to lint role my brother’s jacket for another thirty minutes after I was actually finished with the hack. At one point, I got so desperate to get the hair off I actually took a vacuum cleaner hose and tried to suck the fur off the jacket. It didn’t work any better than the lint roller.

In the end, the only real lesson I learned from this hack is to not let your dog play on top of your clothes.

If you have any fur removal hacks that work for you I’d love to hear about them below in the comments. As always, if you are interested in reading about any other life hacks I’ve tested out you can find all of them in the blog archive to the right. Stay tuned for more life hacks every week.

Batteries and Soda Lids

I found two life hacks this week that really excited me. The first hack involves an interesting way to use fast-food soda cup lids while the second involves using incompatible batteries to power household objects. They are both neat tricks. But did they actually work when I tested them out? Read on to find out.

Soda Cup Lid as Coaster:

This life hack blew my mind when I first found out about it. Picture a soda cup lid that you would get from a fast-food restaurant. Okay, enough of that. Now look at the picture of a soda cup lid below.  

Have you ever wondered about the odd shape of the fountain drink cup lid? Notice the millimeter-deep indentation circling around the inside of the lid. Have you ever wondered why that is there? I myself had never really given it a second thought.

This life hack says that if you flip the lid over you can place the cup into the indentation and use it as a cup holder. So, I tried it out on a Wendy’s cup. It worked!

 

 

The cup fit right into the lid and made for a lovely cup holder. The lid remained on the bottom of the cup even as I held it up into the air. I don’t know how commonly known this is but I certainly never knew about it.

 

Using AAA Batteries in the place of AA Batteries:

I initially thought this next hack would be really cool to test out. Too often I find myself in dire need of AA batteries only to check my hallway closet and find nothing but AAA batteries. But what if I could use those AAA batteries on a remote controller that only takes AA’s?

This life hack would certainly be worth trying out.

The hack says that you can use AAA batteries in the place of AA batteries by placing tin foil on the negative end of the AAA battery. First I tried it on my TV remote. No luck. I thought maybe I hadn’t added enough tin foil.

 

So, I added a bit more foil and guess what? A light on the remote flashed for half a second when I tried to change the channel. After that? Nothing.

Then I tried the same thing with my Xbox 360 controller. I put AAA batteries where the AA’s would go and added tin foil to the negative ends. I locked the batteries in place and pushed the power button. Still nothing.

 

I was really determined to get this one to work. I tried more and less amounts of foil and even attempted this hack with two different flashlights. Unfortunately, all my efforts came back as failures. I’m sad to say that this life hack was a fail.

 

What did you think of this weeks tested life hacks? Do you want to try out the lid hack next time you go to McDonalds? Leave a comment and let me know.

Check out some of the other life hacks I've tested in the blog archive on the side and stay tuned for even more hacks right here on Life Hack Lab.

Dustpan Life Hack:

Raise your hand if this happens to you. You’ve got company coming over in just a few minutes and you’ve got to do a quick clean-up of the house.  You take out the trash, wash the dishes and dust the furniture.

There’s only one chore left to do. Sweep the floor. You grab a broom and practically break your back sweeping up every last bit of dirt from the floor. You look up at the clock. There’s still three minutes before your guests arrive. “I’ve got this,” you think aloud. All you have to do is get the rest of that grime into the dustpan and you’re home free.

You sweep the bulk of the dirt into the pan. There’s still some left on the floor. You sweep again. Not much better. You sweep two, three, four more times. There’s still a line of dirt on the floor in front of the dustpan you just can’t pick up. You hurtle your broom at the wall! You fall to your knees and shout, “Why God? Why have you chosen me for such a forsaken task?”

Okay, maybe not. But those lines of dirt you can’t quite sweep into the dustpan are really annoying.

I’ve found a life hack that claims to help with this little problem. Simply take a piece of tape or two and place it at the edge of the dustpan. This should decrease the space between the floor and the pan and make sweeping soot into the pan much easier.

So, I tried it. At this time, I would like to put up a disclaimer. The white powdery substance that you can see being swept into the dustpan in the photos is in fact flour. Nothing more. I simply needed something I could sweep into the dustpan that would be easily visible on a wooden surface.

I tried it first without tape. The line of flour I expected was left over after my best attempts to sweep it away.

Next, I tried it with the tape.

This did seem to work better than no tape. Unfortunately, there was still a thin line of flour left over. Even with the tape, the floor wasn’t completely clean.

 

This life hack is a fail. I guess I’ll just have to stick with a mop to finish off that last little bit of dirt left over from sweeping.

Got any good floor cleaning tips? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Be sure to check out other posts to the side and stay tuned for more life hacks every week right here on Life Hack Lab.

 

Cookie Scoop Apple Snack

It’s time once again for another fruit life hack!

I did some double-dipping this week. Not only did I find a cool new life hack but I also made myself a nice snack. What can I say? I got hungry while wandering through the endless digital corridors of the internet for life hacks.

Basically, I found a picture of small round pieces of apple dipped in peanut butter with toothpicks sticking out. I thought to myself, “How did they get the round apple slices?” Then I saw the most ridiculously amazing photo of a cookie scoop carving out a spherical apple slice.

(This is sort of what the photo looked like but I took this picture.)

I knew I had to try it.

I grabbed an apple and a cookie scoop and went to work. The first scoop of apple was beautiful. It was perfectly rounded on one side. At this point things were going well. There is something incredibly satisfying about using a cookie scoop to cut apple pieces.

Now, I don’t really understand how but the second scoop cracked my apple into two pieces. I guess I’m just really good at breaking apples in half. Fortunately, it doesn't really matter what happens to the apple you're carving. The round apple slices are the important part.

I ended up using two apples for my plate of six apple sphere snacks. I was only able to get three full scoops out of each apple. I would recommend using larger apples to get more scoops.

After I carved out some apple pieces, I inserted the toothpicks into the side of the apple spheres with the skin on it. I used standard toothpicks but I also think lollipop sticks would work well.

Then, I found a jar of peanut butter and dipped the apple pieces in. It worked really well. The toothpicks were long enough for the apple pieces to reach the peanut butter in the jar.

I would definitely consider this life hack a success. It is a unique way to serve a peanut butter apple snack. It would make a good appetizer at a house party.

Unfortunately, I did end up wasting the parts of the apple that I couldn’t scoop out. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. You can just eat the left-over parts of the apple or feed them to a pet.

What’s your favorite toothpick appetizer? What kind of food pastes do you like to dip your apple slices into? Leave your answers in the comment below!

 

Car Phone Holder Life Hack

It’s time again for another week of Life Hack Lab!

Something magical happened while I was testing the life hack this week. For the first time, I’ve found a hack that I actually intend to keep using.

I don’t mean to make it seem like the life hacks on this blog up to this point were all bad. Whether it’s been breaking apples in half, poking holes in strawberries or even organizing charger chords, I have certainly tested a few good life hacks so far on Life Hack Lab.

However, none of the previous passed life hacks compare to the simplicity and usefulness of this week’s life hack.

Now that I’ve sufficiently overhyped this hack let’s dive in.

Car Cellphone Holder:

I’m a millennial. I’ve never used a paper map while driving before. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if you handed it to me. I use my IPhone GPS app to go anywhere I haven’t been before.

Sometimes using my phone to navigate gets tricky. It’s not like I can hold my phone the entire time I’m driving. Usually I set it don on the seat next to me and listen for instructions on where to turn next. This is a problem because the phone has this annoying tendency to slide all over the place while I’m driving.

I suppose I could get an IPhone holder that clips to an air-blower in my car. Or, I could use this simple life hack.

All you need for this one is a rubber band, a phone and a car to drive. You wrap the rubber band around one of the blower shutters and slide your phone in the two loops that form. This will hold your phone in place perfectly.

I won’t lie. It took me a minute or two to get the rubber band through the shutters but once it was there everything worked just right.

No longer will I have to risk my life fishing for my phone on the floor while dodging traffic on the highway. With this life hack the GPS is at eye-level to the driver for a hands-free navigation experience.

Maybe this hack is specifically useful for me in my life but it will work for anyone else who struggles while using their cellphone GPS in the car.

This week I’ve found a couple school-related life hacks.

Write Multiple Lines at Once:

 

This first life hack is for all the 1^st to 5^th graders who totally read my blog. Are you tired of suffering through writing line after line of how you will never do that one thing you did wrong ever again? Don’t put up with this cruel yet not-so-unusual torture! Stick it to the man with this fantastic hack that will multiply your efficiency and have you finish your sentence of sentences in a fraction of the time.

It turns out you can write multiple lines of the same sentence at one time if you use more than one writing utensil. I used four pencils to test out this life hack. I have to admit; my mind was blown when I tried out this life hack. This is a really cool trick. Is it practical? Not at all. Take a look at some of my attempts to make this hack work.

 

It was actually hilariously difficult to make a few sentences that looked somewhat decent. The pencils kept slipping and sliding in different directions. Sometimes some of the pencils would stop making contact with the paper halfway through a sentence and I would have to start all over again.

Even if you’re a grade-schooler whose teacher is forcing them to write lots of lines over and over, you aren’t going to fool your teacher with this trick. Even if you manage to get all of your pencils connecting to the page correctly, your teacher will notice that every four sentences look exactly the same. You’ll be forced to write, “I will not use life hacks to cheat on my punishments,” one hundred times.

This life hack is a fail. It technically works but it looks just awful.

 

Highlighter to Remove Permanent Marker:

This next life hack I found online says you can remove permanent marker from your skin more effectively by covering it with highlighter ink first. I put a line of permanent marker on both of my hands to test it out. The mark on my left hand received a coating of highlighter ink while my right hand did not.

After that, I washed my hands with soap. In the end, neither mark washed off any easier than the other. As you can see from the photo below, my hands were both left with basically the exact same ghostly permanent marker stain.

This permanent marker life hack is a fail.

Plus, this hack will totally wreck your highlighter.

 

 

I guess this was a tough week for life hacks. I ended up failing both of my attempted hacks. Come back next week to see if I can’t find some life hacks that actually work.