Timex's Popular "Weekender" Watches Are In Impulse Buy Range Today

Timex's Weekender Watches are the most popular we've ever listed in our Commerce segments. They're extremely versatile and come in a variety of colors, and today they're marked down to the $30 range, plus an additional 30% off with code WEEKEND30. [Amazon]

If you want to class your new watch up a bit, our Promotions Team (separate from Commerce) recently ran a deal featuring FormFunctionFrom, a company that makes beautiful leather watchbands that are compatible with the Weekender.

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— Kinja Deals (@KinjaDeals) June 9, 2014

Check Your Child's Car Seat for an Expiration Date

Child safety seats are important, but you may not realize that they have expiration dates—so check yours now.

No, the seats don't turn into pumpkins after the expiration. After the "Do Not Use" date, though, they manufacturer estimates that the plastic might break down or the seat longer meets federal safety standards.

The average "best by" date on these child safety seats is six years. That's fine if you only have one child, but if you reuse it for a second child or have a second-hand seat, check for the date. If you can't find the date on the seat, contact the manufacturer. They'll know where to look.

How to Find Out When Your Car Seat Will Expire | The Stir

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.

Roomer Travel Lets You Sell Your Non-Refundable Hotel Reservations

Try a Writing Meditation If Sitting Still Isn’t Working For You

Meditation has a ton of benefits, and you can do it lots of ways. Many practices focus on sitting still, but you can also meditate while writing.

Buster Benson, the founder of 750words, explains how writing is a form of meditation we can all do. Instead of setting a word limit, set a time limit and write whatever comes to mind. Don't judge or censor what you're writing—just observe your thoughts and write what you see. He explains one reason this type of meditation might work for some people:

The act of typing serves as a hand rail on our thoughts, and occupies a certain part of the brain that generally gets restless and looks for something to do, because it's already doing something: typing. Disabling that restless squirrel in your brain is the reason why activities like walking, showering, doing the dishes, gardening, etc are all such great activities for stirring up creative thoughts. Free writing has the added benefit of providing a tangible trail of thoughts as they rise up. You're essentially hitching your subconscious directly to your typing fingers.

A writing meditation isn't that much different than journaling, and any tool works for a writing meditation. The difference is here you'll observe your thoughts rather than write about your day or to solve a problem.

If a silent or still meditation hasn't worked for you, check out the link for ideas on how to start a writing meditation.

Better Than Meditation - Better Humans | Buster Benson

Photo by Sebastien Wiertz.

Top 10 Lifehacker Posts of All Time

Lifehacker launched exactly ten years ago today (happy birthday to us)! In light of the occasion, let's take a look back at some of the most popular posts we've shared with you this last decade.

This list is, more or less, our top 10 best performing posts by unique visits as determined by Google Analytics (there are many different measurements we could have used, but we went with this one). We took a few editorial liberties when putting it together, since some posts that had the most traffic are no longer relevant, or needed to be replaced with updated versions. In any case, we hope you enjoy this look back and thanks for reading us—whether you've been with us from the first post or just discovered us last week. Let's all go have some cake.

10. How Long to Nap for the Biggest Brain Benefits

This post from 2013 is both a health and a productivity tip: The amount of time you spend napping will have different effects on your energy and brain power. Posts about sleep in general usually do pretty well in these parts, such as the science of the perfect nap and how to reboot your sleep cycle, perhaps for obvious reasons. Sleep is one of the three pillars of health (along with nutrition and exercise) and most of us can't get enough of it.

9. How to Plant Ideas in Someone's Mind

Good ol' Evil Week, where we explore the dark side so we know how to beat it. If you've ever want to manipulate someone so you can get what you want—or detect when someone's subtly manipulating you—this post is a must-read. It covers popular persuasive strategies, cleverly planting "clues" during your conversations for what you want, and more. Of course, there are more ethical ways to go about this as well.

8. Hack Attack: Burn Almost Any Video File to a Playable DVD

Although this post is from eight years ago, the technique still shockingly works. You'll need the open source, free Windows utility DVD Flick and these step-by-step instructions to create playable DVDs.

7. How to Get a Complete Workout with Nothing But Your Body

Who needs a gym when you can get a full-body workout with no equipment at all? These exercises—covering cardio, upper body, core, and lower body—can be done practically anywhere. (So they're great when you want to keep in shape while traveling or you don't have the room or budget for an expensive home gym.) We've also posted our own well-rounded Lifehacker Workout if you want more workout ideas or want to get over inevitable fitness plateaus.

6. Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks

Google search is packed with so many shortcuts and tools that few people probably know all of them. We took a look at the top 10 hidden search tricks back in 2008, then followed up more recently with 20 Google shortcuts and 10 more after that. That's a lot of shortcuts! And they're pretty handy.

5. Geek to Live: How to Format Your Hard Drive and Install Windows XP from Scratch

Sometimes it's best to just start all over again from a blank slate. Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani wrote this XP guide back in 2006, and judging from its popularity, it's classic how-to guides like this one that help geeks and non-geeks alike the most. Although we're long past Windows XP, the basic steps are actually still pretty similar. But if you want something a bit more up-to-date, check out this guide to formatting your hard drive and this one for learning how to do a clean install of Windows (while keeping your files, settings, and tweaks intact).

4. The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Building a Hackintosh

Ah, the hackintosh. For some, just mention of the word sparks joy. Over the years, we've posted countless guides to installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, and most of them made it into our top posts of all time. Of course, almost all of them are out of date now, so bookmark this one for the most relevant, continuously updated instructions. Building a hackintosh is still as great a project as it ever was.

3. Five Best DVD Ripping Tools

Lifehacker readers' five favorite DVD ripping utilities from 2012 are still awesome at what they do: Quickly and easily ripping DVDs and Blu-ray discs to files so you can watch them anywhere. You'll find options for all OSes here, several of them free.

2. How to Supercharge Your Router with DD-WRT

This is the updated version of our second most popular post of all time: Turn Your $60 Router into a $600 Router. DD-WRT makes it possible to do much more with your router than you can with your router's default firmware, like improve your wireless signal, add advanced features, and more. (DD-WRT also tends to be more secure, as was the case with the WPS router vulnerability easily cracked with Reaver.)

1. How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password

Gina's How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack guide is the site's top post of all time. But by now, you probably know you shouldn't be using WEP for your Wi-Fi network, and instead should be using the much more secure WPA2 (with AES encryption, if possible). WPA is still crackable, though, so it's an important subject to learn about. Check out both our guides on WEP and WPA password cracking for info on how to protect yourself.

That's it—our top 10 posts from our first 10 years. Thanks for taking this slightly navel-gazing journey with us, and more importantly, for sticking with us so long. We'd be nowhere without all of you guys, and our site would not be nearly as awesome without all your tips and contributions. So if you have a favorite post that didn't make the list, share it below!

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Lifehacker's Weekend Roundup gathers our best guides, explainers, and other posts on a certain subject so you can tackle big projects with ease. For more, check out our Weekend Roundup and Top 10 tags.

This Graphic Shows Bunch of Desk-Based Exercises for the Office

How to Make XBMC Easier to Use (Especially for Non-Geeks)

So you've created a kickass, play-anything media center with XBMC, but it's a too hard for your less tech-savvy friends and family members to use. Here are a few ways to make your home theater PC so easy that your four year old could use it.

Blast from the past is a weekly feature at Lifehacker in which we revive old, but still relevant, posts for your reading and hacking pleasure. This week, we're making your home theater a little more friendly.

Get a New Skin

The default Confluence skin is pretty good-looking, and there are some even prettier ones out there if you look around. However, not all of them are exactly easy to navigate, especially for those unfamiliar with XBMC. For example, Confluence's horizontal menu is hard to see, and its Movie and TV show menus are in a cluttered submenu. Experiment with some other skins and see which ones are easier to navigate.

I personally really like "Transparency" for its easy-to-read vertical menu. You can see every menu item on the menu page (that is, you don't have to scroll to see any of them), and nothing is buried in a submenu. From the main menu, you can see the Movies, TV Shows, Play Disc, and other options and go straight there with a few taps. It's much easier for an XBMC newbie to navigate than something like Confluence, Aeon, or Alaska, and it's still pretty darn attractive. Of course, there may be others out there, so search around and see what else you can find.

Program Your Remote for Easy Navigation

Certain remotes work out of the box with XBMC, but sometimes getting a simpler remote and programming it yourself can be more user-friendly (either with LIRC or using something like a customizable Logitech Harmony remote). Take care to program buttons in a way that makes sense—I spent years with an unintuitive button layout because I just matched XBMC's functions to the buttons they sounded like, which wasn't ideal. Play around with your remote and see what layout makes the most sense. Watch out for the "back" and "menu" buttons, which I found the trickiest to assign to something intuitive. If you really want to see if you've done it correctly, hand it off to someone else that hasn't used XBMC and see if they can find their way around without help. If they can, you've found the ideal layout, and you should stick with it.

You might also try going with a remote designed specifically for XBMC, like one that works on iOSor Android. Not only will they have buttons assigned to specific XBMC features, but you can even browse your library right from your mobile device and get it to play on the TV. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Clean Up Your Main Menu

Head on over to Settings > Skin Settings and search for the menu editing section. Take some time to remove all the things you don't use, like "Pictures", "Music", and "Weather". Make sure to clean up the submenus too, if your skin has them—things like "Recently Added", "Random", and "Browse by Genre" aren't exactly confusing, but they can create a lot of clutter, which makes the menu harder to navigate. Some skins will even let you remove the submenus altogether. Remove the "Videos" option and replace it with separate "Movies" and "TV Shows" menu items. And, if "Play Disc" isn't enabled, make sure you turn it on for those occasional DVDs you rent or borrow from friends.

Put Streaming Add-Ons on the Main Menu

There are some great add-ons in XBMC that allow you to stream video from the web, but digging through the Add-On section isn't exactly fun. So, put some of your most used add-ons on the main page, so you don't have to go digging through other menus to find them.

This takes a few steps, but is really quite easy:

1. Navigate to one of the add-ons you want on the main menu (say, USTV VoD—the add-on that streams from tons of cable channels). Bring up the context menu and choose "Add to Favorites". This step isn't necessary for all skins, but it is necessary for many, including Transparency.
2. Head to Settings > Skin and find the option for customizing the main menu (in Transparency, it's called "Menu"). You should see some "Custom" or "Favorites" slots, where you can add custom menu items. Enable these and choose the add-on you want from the favorites menu.
3. Repeat this process for all the add-ons you want on the front page. They should all show up on your main menu for quick, easy, pain-free access.

If you've cleaned up your main menu as we described in the previous section, you should now have a menu that's incredibly easy to navigate and has movies, TV, streaming video, and everything else you could ever want.

Enable Kiosk Mode

One of the most confusing parts about XBMC can be when you accidentally enter the "View" menu while scrolling through your movies or TV shows (the one that's hidden behind the right edge of the screen). Once you've got everything set up the way you want, you can turn on "kiosk mode" to lock your chosen views and get rid of this hidden menu. That way, when someone's browsing through your videos, they don't accidentally stumble on this menu or change your view mode by accident. In Transparency, you'll find kiosk mode under Settings > Skin Settings > General > Enable Kiosk mode. Check your skin's documentation for more info on whether it has kiosk mode and where to find it.

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XBMC has come a long way, but it's still not the most user-friendly program on the planet. Hopefully, with these simple tweaks, you can get just about anyone using your XBMC box in no time. Got any of your own suggestions for making XBMC easier to use? Be sure to share them in the comments below.

Images remixed from Tanberin and Julien GONG Min.