People who are thinking about buying an antenna frequently ask two questions: Will the antenna get good reception? And will it be hard to install? In brief, the answers are it depends and no. Antenna ReceptionSeveral things can affect the quality of your reception, but the main factors are your distance from a broadcast tower…
For this guide, we ordered four popular salt and pepper grinders and put them to use in a busy family household. We measured how hard (or easy) they were to fill, how much time and effort it took to grind the salt and pepper, how even the grind was, how noisy each set was, and…
How to Get Started With Barefoot Shoes Photograph: Masudnpathan/Getty Images You’ve probably been wearing padded shoes most of your life. Don’t expect to toss them and be able to do the same mileage—whether walking or running—in barefoot shoes. To a certain degree, you must relearn how to run and walk. It’s going to take a…
“Our subcontractors never should have driven their canvassers in a U-Haul van and those involved were immediately reprimanded,” Tim Pollard of Blitz Canvassing tells WIRED. On Wednesday, October 30, Muldrow and her fellow door knockers were fired hours after the publication of the WIRED story. At first, some people had trouble logging into Campaign Sidekick,…
CR’s experts say that checking your oil is an important preventive maintenance task on cars that have a dipstick, the long metal strip that extends into the oil pan from near the top of the engine. Most new cars also have an electronic oil level sensor, but that may alert you only when the oil…
Run times have improved. Several battery and self-propelled mowers in our ratings offer impressive run times of 70 or more minutes. (The average run time of battery mowers in our tests is 45 to 50 minutes.) Some manufacturers are designing new models with multiple battery slots. When one battery is spent, another can take over,…
A new Mayan city, lost in the dense jungle of southern Mexico for centuries, has been discovered from the computer of a PhD student hundreds of miles away. This is the story of how he did it. The settlement, named Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon, has all the characteristics of a classic Maya political…
in 2020, Apple’s MacBooks entered a new era. The company announced it was moving away from the Intel chips it had been using since 2006; in their place, it rolled out the first Macs with the Apple-designed M1. Cut to 2024 and the company now offers the choice between 14 custom processors, the latest of…
An engine is fully lubricated long before it reaches full operating temperature. When your car sits for an extended period of time, the oil drains down to the bottom of the oil pan. Once you start the engine, the oil pump quickly circulates the oil throughout the motor, lubricating all the necessary moving engine components….
No two snowflakes are alike, and that presents a problem for CR’s testing protocol. “We need to run our tests with something we can standardize, for consistency,” says Dave Trezza, who oversees our snow blower testing. That’s why he and his team use a mixture of a certain type of sawdust, saturated with water, in…