A vacation can range anywhere from a dream to a nightmare. While some of that depends on circumstance, there's plenty you can do to make your travel easier, more efficient, and more fun. Here are our top 10 favorite tips, tricks, and hacks to help make your next trip really great. More »

Whether you're renting or you own a home, it's easy to let repeated tasks of home maintenance slip your mind. Over on Apartment Therapy they've outlined the five repeating home maintenance tasks most people forget and a simple way to remind yourself to do them. More »

Upset that the Makerbot can’t produce solid, smooth objects for your home 3D printing pleasure? Why not give the iModela a look.

This CNC milling machine costs a little under $1,000 and uses a drill head to carve out 3D objects in solid plastic. The iModela is made by Roland DG (a subsidiary of the guys who make musical instruments) and has a very Japanese UI and aesthetic, which is pretty cool. They offer some interesting free models and a plastic sample kit for folks interested in getting started.

Some BoingBoing commenters are also recommending the DeepGoove1 CNC mill that can mill steel as well as wood and plastic. These things might not be quite ready for general home use yet, but the fact that you can grab a CNC machine for around a grand is pretty incredible in itself.

via BB

Have you ever purchased a big appliance only to realize it's not compatible with your home, or you can't perform repairs on it without calling in an expert? Gadget blog Cool Tools has a simple solution: read the manual before you make the purchase. More »

The kitchen drawer is a great place to hang your towels, but every time you open the drawer, the towel falls to the ground. Instructables user noahw solves this annoyance with our favorite office supply: the binder clip. More »

Your iPhone (or other iDevice) has but one button you use constantly: the home button. It has many functions, and so it's prone to becoming unresponsive through heavy use and the passage of time. Designer Khoi Vinh has discovered that this problem is easily resolved with a little WD-40: More »

Dried apples are not only a nutritious snack, they're fantastically delicious too and easy to make at home. All you need is a little lemon juice and water and you can preserve a bunch of apples for the whole winter. More »

Design This Home, the latest game title from iOS game development studio App Minis, is debuting as a new way to add gaming elements to designing your dream house, keeping your residents happy, and completing tasks. As App Minis founder Alex Ahlund explains, “Think The Sims with a greater emphasis on home decor and design.”

Design This Home, which is currently available for download in the App Store, allows you choose from a number of architectural styles of homes including modern, traditional, country, Southwestern, European, Asian, and Victorian. You then have nine different rooms to decorate and can customize every element of your home such as arranging furniture, putting up cabinets, painting the walls, renovating the floors and more. As you complete more tasks, you increase your home’s value and collect more income from your residents.

At launch, the game includes 500 items of customization. Ahlund says the studio places a heavy focus on visual design in crafting the graphic rich and animated 2D iOS title.

You may remember Ahlund from his former company, mobile app directory AppVee, which was sold to Appolicious in 2010. A former video game designer, Ahlund decided to go back to his roots to launch an iOS game development studio. The studio’s current offering of games have 7 million downloads in total. The startup itself is composed of former employees from Electronic Arts, Atari, PlayFirst, Floodgate and Google.

The easiest way to create clutter in your home is to say "I might use this one day". To find out whether you're creating clutter or being thrifty, weblog Unclutterer recommends treating it like the mate of a sock you recently lost: keep it for a predetermined amount of time, then toss it. More »

For those of us who have toiled away long-hours after everyone else in the office has left for the day, working really long hours only to go home knowing you'll have to be up and back at the office before you know it can be a depressing thought. Now a new study by a team of international researchers has proven what many of us already know: regardless of your income or socioeconomic status, working long hours can increase your risk of depression and other related mental illness. More »