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20 Jan 2010

Breakfast in bed seemed like a good idea—until you overturned the cereal bowl and made a huge mess. Here’s how to rescue your mattress from certain death.

Image by soundfromwayout.

No matter what size mattress you have, it’s not going to fit in your washing machine, so you need to clean it where it stands. Strip the sheets and immediately blot up all the liquid you can with some thick towels. A Shop-Vac or handheld shampooer with a water extractor attachment is great for sucking out liquid trapped deep in the bed.

If that doesn’t work, housekeeping blog Home Ec 101 has an idea for a last-ditch effort:

As a last resort, for a mattress that is no longer under warranty, consider steam cleaning, but approach the job with care, try not to get the mattress too wet, and remove as much moisture as possible with the unit. Allow the mattress to dry fully before replacing the mattress pad.

Of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so once the ordeal is over, invest in a good mattress pad to protect your bed from future mishaps. Hit up the post for more tips on caring for your mattress and ways to keep it ship-shape year-round.

Do you incorporate mattress care in your monthly housekeeping routine or do you change the sheets and forget about it? Talk about it in the comments.

Mattress Cleaning and Other Indoor Sports [Home Ec 101]

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Tags: BED, home, housekeeping, housekeeping routine, idea, last ditch effort, mattress cleaning, ounce of prevention, pad, thick towels

Switch Android Home Screens via Thumbnails [Shortcuts]

In: Coding

20 Jan 2010

Yet another new-to-me Android 2.1 feature: tap and hold the dots on the bottom right and/or left of your home screen to see thumbnail previews of ALL the phone’s screens. Tap on a thumbnail to switch to that screen, no swipe necessary.

As you can see in the screenshot, the thumbnail previews don’t include wallpaper—the background is just white, for better visibility—but they do show the icon and widget layout so you can identify which screen’s which. This type of screen-switching will be familiar to virtual desktop lovers, or folks who use Spaces on OS X.

Android continues to live up to its reputation as “OS by Easter Egg,” Jeff Jarvis’ description . If you don’t want to have to hunt down every egg yourself, here’s Android 2.1’s best features in screenshots.

Switch Android Home Screens via Thumbnails [Smarterware]

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Tags: Android, easter egg, Egg, feature, home, home screens, jeff jarvis, mdash, screen, thumbnail, thumbnail previews, X. Android

iTrust iPhone App Catches Snooping Spouses in the Act [IPhone Apps]

In: gadgets

19 Jan 2010

It doesn’t really matter if you’re a no-good, cheating scumbag or simply married to a paranoiac nutcase—either way, you probably don’t want your partner scanning your every text message. The iTrust honeypot app can catch iPhone meddlers red-fingered.

iTrust takes a screenshot of your homescreen (which you can take by pressing Sleep+Home at any time) and sets it as a full-screen background. If someone tries to use your phone while it’s running, they’ll see what looks like a regular homescreen, but won’t be able to do anything with it—it’s a dead image, after all. Whatever they try to do, though, is saved in an excruciating, slo-mo simulated screen recording.

Intruders could obviously just hit the Home button to kill the app completely (not before trying to tap the screen a few times, though!) and the app doesn’t let you recording snooping beyond generalized icon-mashing, but hey! At least you’ve got proof that your spouse tried to open your call history six times while you were taking a dump, which will surely be of help next time you’re having a pleasant conversation abut how much you hate each other and want to die.