5 free tech tools for staying organized - PCWorld

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If you’re struggling to stay on top of your tasks or keep track of your notes, maybe what you need are some new tools.
I’m always looking for better ways to stay organized. When I find a new app that sounds promising, I pit it against my existing tools in a game of survival of fittest, leaving only the ones that work best for me.
These are currently the five services I rely on the most for note-taking, bookmarking, and task management. Most offer premium subscriptions, but their free tier hold up well for individual users. As we head into the new year, perhaps they’ll provide just the kind of fresh inspiration you’re looking for.
Further reading: 18 work-from-home tech products that will level up your office
Jared Newman / Foundry
Every weekday morning, my desktop computer automatically loads Tweek Calendar, a beautifully simple app and website for managing weekly tasks. You can add new tasks by typing on the blank lines, and you can move items around by dragging and dropping.
A paid subscription adds Google Calendar sync, recurring tasks, and subtasks, but I don’t need any of that. For me, Tweek isn’t a heavy-duty task manager or full-blown Google Calendar replacement, but rather a quick way to reflect on the remaining week. (This story I wrote for Fast Company describes how you can set up the auto-loading component.)
Jared Newman / Foundry
When I’m ready to start a task in earnest, I’ll create a page for it in Notion, which lets you create freeform notes with their own checklists, subpages, tables, and more. Notion can be intimidating at first, but if you start with simple notes and expand outward, you’ll quickly see how powerful it can be.
The hub for all my written work is a page called “Jared’s Scratchpad.” From there, I have links to subpages for my Advisorator and Cord Cutter Weekly newsletters, along with any freelance articles I’m working on. Each of those pages might have their own subpages if further organization is necessary. (One example: When I’m interviewing people for a story, I’ll create separate pages for every source, each with their own transcriptions and highlighted quotes.)
Once I’m finished with a story, I file it away to my “Archive” folder, effectively clearing it off my to-do list. This works better for me than any dedicated task management tool, because there’s no limit on the kinds of notes I can create.
Jared Newman / Foundry
Notion’s biggest weakness is that it can feel clunky for simple notes. When I just need to quickly jot something down or dictate it by voice, I use Google Keep, whose reverse-chronological layout lends itself to transient notes. It’s my go-to app for storing sudden flashes of inspiration, writing down group take-out orders, and avoiding Seinfeldian parking garage mishaps. (Apple Notes might scratch a similar itch, but I like that Keep works just as well on Android devices.)
My wife and I also use Google Keep for our shared grocery list. With its Google Assistant integration, we can ask any nearby Google Home or Nest speaker to add an item to the list, usually right after realizing we’ve run out of something.
Jared Newman / Foundry
For me, bookmarks exist in their own category of notetaking, deserving of special treatment. I use Raindrop.io to save all the stories I plan to read and write about in my newsletters, filing them away with either Raindrop’s browser bookmarklet or the share function of its mobile apps. This becomes its own kind of to-do list, as I gradually delete items from my story queue as I’m building each newsletter.
Raindrop goes well beyond the capabilities of browser-based bookmarking. You can mark each folder with its own icon, read articles in a distraction-free view, and share collections with others. But I mostly just like Raindrop for its comfortable, straightforward app design and the ability to use it across virtually any computing platform.
Whenever I need to get something done at a particular time, I use whatever voice assistant happens to be on hand. That might be Siri if I’m carrying an iPhone, or Google Assistant if I’m using Android. The point is that I can just use voice commands to quickly give myself a reminder and move on, knowing that I’ll get notified on my phone or smart speaker when the time comes.
Sign up for my Advisorator newsletter to get more tech advice like this every week. A version of this column originally appeared in the newsletter.

Jared Newman has been helping folks make sense of technology for over a decade, writing for PCWorld, TechHive, and elsewhere. He also publishes two newsletters, Advisorator for straightforward tech advice and Cord Cutter Weekly for saving money on TV service.
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Precision Textiles Expands Portfolio of USDA Certified Product with ... - Furniture World

Furniture World News Desk on 12/14/2022


Precision Textiles, a leading supplier of coated fabrics, nonwovens and laminations for the bedding, automotive, and home furnishings industries, has expanded its portfolio of  U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bio-Preferred certified products after receiving  certifications on its  Fire- Flex® needle punch fiber materials and their CELLULOFT® FR quilt fiber.   
The USDA’s BioPreferred program certifies a verified minimum amount of renewable, sustainable biological ingredients are present in the product’s material makeup. Precision manufactures FR solutions for home furnishings, automotive, and healthcare industries with a continued effort toward safe, sustainable, chemical-free solutions for its respective industries.
“Both new product families join its IQFit Glass Free, IQFit Contour, PurLoft and Endure IFR product offerings giving the company and our customers the most comprehensive assortment of sustainable FR solutions in the mattress industry,” said Scott Tesser, CEO of Precision Textiles.  “The addition of these new Bio-Preferred certified products will allow our customers to expand FR sustainable compliance solutions to their product lines giving greater flexibility with future product development needs.”
Both Fire-Flex® and CELLULOFT® products possess more than 50% sustainable ingredients with a chemical-free FR solution application that also meets the latest state guidelines governing flame retardant chemicals in home furnishing products.
The USDA’s BioPreferred program is an initiative that was created by the 2002 Farm Bill and recently reauthorized and expanded as part of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. The goal of the program is to increase the development, purchase, and use of biobased products, displacing the need for non-renewable, petroleum-based chemicals.
“With an increasing number of states implementing stricter regulations on the use of Flame Retardant materials and with popular market trends towards the use of more naturally sustainable products, Precision Textiles R&D Team has ramped up its effort toward delivering products to our customers that are worry-free and aligned with market trends,” said Tesser.
 
 
About Precision Textiles
Founded in 1987, Totowa, New Jersey-based Precision Textiles is a global supplier of coated fabrics, nonwovens and laminates for companies in the mattress, home furnishings, automotive and healthcare industries, as well as military apparel. With a specialized emphasis on flame retardant-compliant materials designed for use in mattresses and sleep products, the company manufactures its family of products globally, including at its 250,000-square-foot headquarters in New Jersey, which includes a state-of-the-art laboratory, factory and warehouse, as well as a 160,000 square-foot manufacturing and warehouse facility in Troy, North Carolina.   The company also operates four additional warehouses located in Los Angeles, Fort Worth, Texas, Clearwater, Florida, and Troy, North Carolina – as well as a warehouse in Asia. For more information, visit wwwprecisiontextiles-usa.-usa.com.
 
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A Thru-Hiker's Ode to the Humble Day Hike - Outside

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With inflation on the rise, I scrapped plans for another long summer hike. On little daily walks through South Dakota’s Black Hills, I’ve rediscovered the surprise and delight of getting back to basics.
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The cattle rancher in the dented red truck laughed when I told him I was looking for someplace new to hike. We had both taken a rugged gravel road, beset by mudholes so deep they made me contemplate crashing asteroids, into the southwestern edge of South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest on a toasty day in early July. He was checking the water tanks for a small band of stock roaming the rims of several interlocking canyons, the same land I was looking to walk—if only I could find a path. Leaning from his window, he spread his hands wide and scanned the horizon slowly before turning back to me with a knowing grin. If you’re walking it, he seemed to say silently, it’s all a trail.
This, of course, was right: a trail is just a reductive word for someplace other people have already walked, and no one was really going to tell me where not to roam among most of the Black Hills National Forest’s 1.2 million public acres, an area about twice as big as Rhode Island. Go, and you might find something worth checking out. I have been remembering this (or, perhaps, learning it for the first time) during a summer of ceaseless day hikes in South Dakota, my unexpected home for the season.
During a pause from traveling one of the United States’ iconic long trails or another while moving 20 miles or so per day, I have been hiking the way most folks do: an hour or three at the time, in search of a little exercise and maybe someplace I’ve never been. As a thru-hiker, after living out of a backpack for months on end, it has been a refreshing return to basics, a way to rediscover the delight and surprise of walking through an unbroken landscape without the pressure of heading toward Canada or Maine or anywhere specific at all. The humble day hike has reminded me of the endless joys of exploring for the hell of it. Everyone always talks about how thru-hiking changes your life—day hikes, I like to joke, are now repairing some of their damage.
I thought I’d be crossing the country again this summer, perhaps grabbing the final jewel of a Triple Crown or brushing against the Canadian border for 1,200 miles and three states via the Pacific Northwest Trail. But by early March, when my wife, Tina, and I emerged from the swamps and sands of the Florida Trail, inflation was already at a 40-year high, with talk of recession rising in a commensurate rush. Rather than blow our savings on hostels and postage for resupply boxes, we decided to settle down for a few months and save money.
We sold our cabin in North Carolina, piled our family of pets into a van, and sprinted across the country, leaving the South for South Dakota, so she could guide paying tourists through federally protected caves in the Black Hills. While she’s been underground, I’ve been overhead on most days, looking for my next half-day adventure, with our dog, Alice, at my side and a little Nathan water-toting backpack buckled across my chest.
I mostly cherish the wonderful absurdity of an extremely long hike, the way you decide on day one of your excursion to forgo the comforts of civilized society and indulge pain and filth and hunger, then repeat said decision for, say, six months. But stepping away for this spell has offered a welcomed jolt of refreshing perspective, too, highlighting some downsides I tend to ignore when I’m in the thick of the thing, pushing as many miles as I can stand.
Thru-hiking, for instance, indulges our inclination to always pursue something bigger and better, to seem like an indomitable hero conquering some impossible endeavor. And then there’s the prevailing notion that thru-hikes should be shared, whether by YouTube channels vying for subscribers, or on Instagram stories vying for chuckles or awe. Maybe these dual impulses are just our human nature at work, functions of our quests for self-improvement and community, but it’s hard not to see them as extensions of rank capitalism, too—creating a brand and broadcasting it, the antithesis of disappearing into the woods to craft an epic of and for yourself.
And given the political turmoil of recent years and the unlikelihood that it will soon abate, escaping into California’s Sierra Nevada or Wyoming’s Wind River Range—sans cell-phone service, news updates, and the like—can sometimes feel like shirking the responsibility of democracy. I have friends who went sober (and stayed that way) during the Trump era so they could pay attention, be present; I, on the other hand, often disappeared into the woods, an ostrich wandering among the trees.
There’s no competitive or completist pressure, no need to see every white blaze or to keep up with anyone.
Day hikes, meanwhile, bring none of these conflicts. Vanishing from the vortex of bad news and screen time for two hours is productive and restorative in a way that a six-month hiatus isn’t—a pause for sanity, not a retreat for selfishness. And I find it hard not to contemplate 500 years worth of current events while traveling in the Black Hills, land the United States government stole for gold despite multiple treaties and that the Sioux still rightfully want honored.
There’s no competitive or completist pressure during a shorter outing, no need to see every white blaze or to keep up with anyone. This is, I think, what it means to actually hike your own hike. And aside from telling Tina vaguely where I might go for safety’s sake, I don’t feel compelled to share most of what I see, to capitalize on personal experience as professional content. Instead, I simply relish in the small surprises and little wonders I’ve encountered while sauntering down the semi-permanent scars of forest service roads or faint wildlife traces, while skittering up limestone cliffs or among ponderosa pines beneath great granite spires.
Such surprises have proven endless. There was, for instance, the peace sign carved into the verdant valley floor below the rim of the Stratobowl, where scientists launched observation balloons into the stratosphere nearly a century ago. There was the clutch of pronghorn—that is, “the South Dakota antelope”—I startled alongside a spring while following a footpath so faint I had to squint to find it. (I soon turned around, for fear of a mountain lion lurking in the brush.) And there was the complete bison skeleton at the base of a gulch in Wind Cave National Park, so freshly mauled by one such wildcat that the bones remained moist with sinew.
I’d forgotten that the primary point of it all was to have an adventure, to be delighted by the unexpected encounters of the outdoors.
On the day that I met the cattle rancher checking his water tanks, I wandered up and down a series of ridges for hours, eventually cutting across a creek toward a short limestone pillar that looked like a giant’s surreal pillow. When I finally returned to the car, his cows were lying beside and grazing around it, as if my vehicle had joined their herd. Alice and I stood among them for a quarter-hour, reveling in the little spell of wonder into which I’d walked.
Last summer, as I neared the halfway point of the Pacific Crest Trail, I encountered two perpetually baked dudes, who not only gifted me fruit-flavored rolling papers, but also added extra miles to their thru-hike by taking, it seemed, most every side trail they crossed. They paused their northward progression repeatedly to walk most of the 170-mile Tahoe Rim Trail or sneak into Yosemite Valley and journey up its famed waterfalls. I worried needlessly about them: What if they got hurt on one of these excursions and had to bail on the PCT? What if they ran out of time to reach Washington before snow hit the Cascades hard? What if they, as their journey crossed the 3,000-mile mark, got tired of hiking, of making the daily decision to press on?
I’m realizing now, strolling the limestone-strewn canyons and creekbeds of the Black Hills, that they had it right. In my overzealousness to complete the task at hand, to check the box of “2021 PCT Thru-Hike,” I’d forgotten that the primary point of it all was to have an adventure, to be delighted by the unexpected encounters of the outdoors. It’s hard to be surprised when you’re staring at a map or an app, heading forever in the same orderly direction as your peers. That footloose pair was adding day hikes to their thru-hike because they wanted to have more fun. The true trail led wherever they happened to be walking.
With a little money hopefully pocketed, we aim to return to thru-hiking later this year, with the Arizona Trail on deck in the fall and the Continental Divide Trail in the spring. The temptation to churn through miles and get it done will of course return on such long journeys. But I like to think that this season of side trails has taught me to slow down and just enjoy hiking again—something nice to do, not something epic that has to be done. I hope that lesson outlasts my time in South Dakota.

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Lorraine's Soup Kitchen & Pantry taking services mobile - Spectrum News 1

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CHICOPEE, Mass. - A Chicopee food pantry is taking its services on the road to ensure families in need have enough food to get by.

Lorraines Soup Kitchen & Food Pantry set up a mobile location at the public library Tuesday. 
The service provides nonperishable food, produce and other edible items for locals who maybe in need.
On Tuesday afternoon, the soup kitchen hosted a food drive next to the Chicopee Public Library.
Board Of Directors member Al Picard​ said they've seen more people show up as the weather has gotten colder, and added that it's important for their pantry to be as active as possible.​

"The goal is to make sure that in these tough economic times for some folks, that we can take care of them by providing them some of the necessary food items they need," Picard said.
He said people can support the soup kitchen by volunteering, as well as making donations of food and money. Anyone interested in learning more about the local service can do so on their website.

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Apparently You Can Do The Dishes Without Scrubbing Them - DenGarden

You come home late on a Sunday night from running errands all weekend and the sink is full of dirty dishes that have food cooked and dried onto them, the last few hours of the weekend are creeping up and the work/school week is about to begin. This is a worst nightmare sort of situation, all you want to do is melt onto the couch binging the newest season of LIB on Netflix. But now you have to spend the remaining few hours of your stressful day scrubbing dishes that seem impossible to wash.
Before this scenario gets out of hand and gives you anxiety just reading it, know @creative_explained has a dishes hack that will take care of those forgotten about stock piled dishes waiting to eat up your last two hours of your remaining weekend night 
Well this video just gave us life… you mean we can actually let the dishes sit a day to go do something fun and come back to a quick spray spray clean clean? Count us in!
To make his magical self cleaning dish bath the man first closes the sink drain, puts the dishes in the sink trough and sprinkles baking soda all over them. Then he adds two cups of white vinegar and one cup of hydrogen peroxide, tosses in a few slices of lemon and fills the sink with water. He lets the dishes soak for 15 minutes and then pulls them out, rinses them, and sets them on the dish towel to dry. 
Now if this grosses you out a bit you could always drain the water and fill it back up with hot soapy water then drain and rinse the dishes, which will still be way faster than trying to hand scrub them.
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