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“Your kitchen towels could give you food poisoning, study suggests,” “Do you know what’s growing on your kitchen towels?” “Beware of your kitchen towel,”—these are just a few of the tea towel-related headlines that made the rounds this weekend. A press release from the American Society for Microbiology was picked up by news outlets from USA Today to CNN, prompting these doomsaying headlines, but the story itself is nothing new. Your kitchen, like all kitchens, is kind of grotty—and research indicates that the humble kitchen towel may be the grottiest thing in it that you regularly touch. But it’s important to remember that most of the planet is teeming with bacteria, and most of them don’t do much to bug you.
The ASM press release summarized a new study from researchers at the University of Mauritius, who presented their findings at a microbe conference held this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. The study, presented on Saturday, has not yet been published—at this point, the only thing available for other scientists to critique is the abstract, which outlines the research methods and results. However, its results line up with other peer-reviewed kitchen microbe studies.
According to the study abstract, which was provided to Popular Science by the ASM, lead author Susheela Biranjia-Hurdoyal and colleagues concluded that “kitchen towels could be [a] very important source [of] bacterial contamination which could contribute to food poisoning.”
The researchers reached this conclusion by culturing bacteria from 100 kitchen towels collected after a full month of regular use and washing. They also had the towel’s users fill out a questionnaire about their living conditions. Based on this evidence, the researchers report bacterial growth on 49 percent of the towels. Specimens from large families—and especially families with children—had more bacteria on them, while wet towels were more likely to have coliform bacteria (the family that E. coli comes from). Coliforms and staph bacteria were also more prevalent on towels that came from meat-eating families.
Their results echo a 2014 study on bacterial occurrence in kitchen towels published in the journal Food Protection Trends, says Drexel University scientist Jennifer Quinlan, who was not involved with either study. That paper from University of Arizona scientists looked at 82 kitchen hand towels from households in Canadian and U.S. cities, and also included a questionnaire about living conditions. They found E. coli on almost 26 percent of towels, while coliform bacteria in general showed up on 89 percent.
Without a look at the full paper, Quinlan says, she wouldn’t want to draw conclusions about the new study’s methods or fully assess its conclusions. Quinlan also has questions—for example, she says, she would have expected bacteria on one hundred percent of the towels, not just under fifty. And while the abstract discusses coliform bacteria, it doesn’t specifically identify E.coli—only the AMR press release does that.
However, she says, none of the findings in and of themselves were very surprising. The new study indicates that many people use kitchen towels for multiple things, from drying hands to wiping up spills, and that they frequently don’t give towels enough time or space to dry out. “Humid towels and multipurpose usage of kitchen towels should be discouraged. Bigger families with children and elderly members should be especially vigilant to hygiene in the kitchen,” Biranjia-Hurdoyal said according to the AMR press release.
Add these results with another 2014 study published in Food Protection Trends, in which researchers from Kansas and Iowa State Universities found that cloth kitchen towels were the most frequently handled contaminated surface in the kitchen, and it’s clear that kitchen textiles are something to keep an eye on. But there’s no cause for alarm: most microbes are harmless, and simple safe food-handling practices can help keep more dangerous bacteria in their place.
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Organize Your Digital Life Easily With My Life Organized
With the new year comes resolutions. I myself have made a few that I am working to keep. Some people I know have vowed to be more organized. Having an Android phone can make getting your digital life more organized if you let it.
My Life Organized is a cool little Android application that lets you treat your life like a project. Think of MLO as a to-do list on steroids. Let me explain.
With a regular to-do list, there are the basic options: task, due date and maybe a sub-task.
This is great if you have things on your list like get milk, pick up dry cleaning and fill out permission slip for Jimmy’s field trip.
What if you are planning a party or you are remodeling the kitchen though? These will have multiple mini projects that need to be completed before the main16 project can be completed. Does this sound like your life? While there is a desktop application (both free and paid versions, I will just be talking about the Android app here) Here is how MLO can help. The paid desktop applications will let you sync with Outlook or the Windows app.
Starting out with My Life OrganizedWhen you download and open the app, you will have a bunch of sample text to show you how to use the app. This can be easily erased or marked as completed.
There really isn’t an obvious menu to switch between the different modes oalign=”left”r sorting options. To switch modes, touch the left side of the top green bar.
This will pull up a list of options. You start in the Inbox, but some other options are:
Outline
Goals
Active Actions
Due next 7 days
Start next 30 days
Nearby
Using MyLifeOrganizedWhen you start adding goals, tasks and projects, you will see you can add in as much or as little information as you need. For example, when you are adding a task, you can add the usual info and add reminders, but if you look at the picture below, you will see more options. Urgency, which Goal the task is for and Context.
GoalsThe goals feature is great. You can add a goal and select timeframe for the goal. If you read any kind of success or productivity book, short and long term goals are talked about a lot. This is a good way to set a goal then add in all of the tasks you need to complete to reach that goal.
ContextContext is a cool feature. It kind of goes with the Getting Things Done (GTD) style of managing your time. You can set a context of @OfficeComputer or @Home to a task. Then, when you are at your office computer, you can use the menu to sort by this context and see everything you need to do while you are at your desk. I thought this was a great way to stay focused.
ConclusionWhat I like about this super to-do manager is that it works well if you are following the GTD time management method, but it also works for those of us who do not. The goals and context feature really set this organizational app far apart from the others I have tried.
Do you think this is overkill for a to-do list? If so, what apps do you use to manage your time?
Trevor Dobrygoski
Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.
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Fingal Brings Your App Icons To Life
Take a moment to look at the Home screen on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad; what do you see? Some things that come to my mind are: stillness, simplicity, and boredom.
With a promising new jailbreak tweak release dubbed Fingal, which is now available as a free download in Cydia’s ModMyi repository, you can add a touch of motion and liveliness to your Home screen.
Why Fingal is an awesome addition to your deviceJust take a minute to stare at the animated GIF above. What you’ll see are a variety of application icons moving around and showing a little bit of animation. This is indeed the core functionality of Fingal, which promises to be a new kind of theming platform for iOS 8 and iOS 9 devices.
Here’s a closer look at some of the animations:
The animations you see for each of the individual app icons on the Home screen are very smooth and fluid, but obviously, the newer your device is, the faster the graphics hardware is going to be able to process the animations without lagginess. But nonetheless, even on a jailbroken iPhone 5 that I use regularly to test tweaks, I’m not seeing these animations slow me down too much.
How Fingal worksFingal adds a preferences pane to the Settings app where you can pick and choose the theme(s) that you want to enable. The preferences pane is separated into two sections – Enables Themes and Disabled Themes. You can drag the individual items back and forth between the two sections based on what you want to use for making your Home screen more exciting.
The “Basic Example Theme” is installed by default on any device that you install Fingal on, and it’s a good way to see how your device will perform with animated app icons. The animations are mostly basic, and chances are, you’re not going to use it on a regular basis because you’re probably going to rather install a third-party animated theme from Cydia with much more stunning animations.
You’ll also notice we have a ton more themes for the individual app icons themselves. In our example, we’re using a third-party Fingal-compatible theme called ShakeIt Plus, which is available for free from the ZodTTD & MacCiti repository in Cydia:
Once installed, you can head back over to the Settings app and visit your Fingal preferences pane, and you’ll see new themes available for:
AlienBlue
Camera
Contacts
FindMyiPhone
GoogleMaps
Health
Maps
Messages
Mystery
News
Notes
Passbook
Phone
Settings
Telegram
VoiceMemos
YouTube
After dragging them to where you’d like them to be – enabled or not – you can tap on the “Respring” button at the top right of the preferences pane to respring your device and save your selection. You’ll then be able to visit your Home screen and see the themes in action.
My thoughts on FingalFingal is one of the coolest theme releases to date, and the fact that I can say that says a lot in itself because I’m not much of a themer; I’m a minimalist. With Fingal, you can keep the stock look of iOS on your Home screen, but add a touch of animation to it at the same time, or you can go all out and theme the icons to look completely different.
As for battery life? – Well, additional drag on the hardware does mean that your battery life could take a little bit of a hit, but it’s not going to be a dramatic amount. I would suggest just not being on the Home screen to stare at the animations for long periods of time, but with how cool everything looks after the fact, I do understand if you might be lured to the Home screen now more often than before.
Fingal, which is a free download from Cydia’s ModMyi repository, is an excellent new theming platform for any jailbroken device. At this point in time, the animated icon theme platform is very new and the selection of third-party themes is limited, but with time, you can expect something like this to grow in popularity and more developers will join the bandwagon to create some awesome effects and animations for your Home screen that you can pick from.
If you’re a graphic designer or theme creator, and Fingal looks like something of interest to you, I would encourage you to take a look at the inner workings of Fingal, which the developer has kindly made open source, and try to tackle a creation of your own.
5 Best Tools To Make Your Life Easier
Social listening is the perfect way for a business to keep its finger on the pulse of what its customers are saying about the industry. In 2023, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, a trend that is looking to continue through 2023 and beyond.
Why Is Social Listening Important?No matter the business, it’s impossible to manage your customers/userbase without using social media. Any successful modern business will run a variety of social media pages, with the most common being Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Social listening is important as it allows you to:
Efficiently engage with customers.
Solve problems proactively.
Research keywords.
Drive sales.
Perform competitor analysis.
Gain industry insight.
Lots of the above are time-consuming endeavors. To expedite the process, there’s a wide variety of tools available that help businesses derive useful data from their social media platforms. We’ve gathered the 5 best tools to help with social media listening.
5 Best Tools to Make Your Life Easier 1. AwarioAwario is a great tool for businesses of all sizes. With affordable plans starting from £24 per month, Awario allows for smaller businesses to get started with their social listening plans.
It features a variety of tools that help you monitor mentions of brands, competition, your industry, or complex Boolean queries (algebraic expressions that help users narrow down searches to unique parameters).
The latter can be used to identify plagiarism in your work. This works by searching for word-for-word copies from accounts other than your own. It can also identify mentions of your brand that are unlinked, allowing you to form relationships with those talking about you (but not giving you the super-valuable link!)
In addition to the above, Awario also offers a free social selling addon that uses predictive insights to locate users who are looking for products just like yours.
Pricing
Awario has three pricing models: the £24/month Starter package, £74/month Pro package and the £249/month Enterprise package, helping cater to most businesses.
2. Sprout SocialSprout Social offers a powerful, multi-faceted tool that provides an all-in-one social media management platform.
With features offering a host of listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis functionality, Sprout Social provides a comprehensive social media management platform that’s suitable for a variety of businesses.
Sprout Social prides itself on being able to streamline social media processes by allowing the user to plan, create, manage and deliver social content and campaigns across the entire team, before using powerful analysis tools to glean what you need.
Sprout Social offers a powerful, multi-faceted tool that provides an all-in-one social media management platform.
With features offering a host of listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis functionality, Sprout Social provides a comprehensive social media management platform that’s suitable for a variety of businesses.
Also read: The Top 10 In-Demand Tech Skills you need to have in 2023
Pricing
Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial to anyone considering using their services. Following from that, packages come in three shapes: Standard, Professional, and Advance, costing £70, £106 and £177/month respectively.
3. Falcon.ioFalcon.io is an all-in-one social media management and customer experience platform for established medium-to-large companies.
This platform distinguishes itself by using a single dashboard to facilitate your social media requirements. Ease-of-use is key to chúng tôi allowing users to find everything they need on a single, simple page.
Pricing
There are two pricing options for chúng tôi ‘Essentials’ and ‘Full Suite’.
The ‘Essentials’ package comes in at £92/month and offers a more basic service for single users and small teams. There’s also a 14-day trial of this service if you want to get a taste before buying.
The ‘Full Suite’ package is the whole hog and features a plethora of features for larger companies. Pricing is done on a case-by-case basis for this package and requires a demo to be held to proceed.
4. MentionA highly competitive and powerful solution, Mention combines social monitoring, analytics and competitor espionage into one svelte package.
With three key principles: Monitor, Listen and Publish, Mention aims to improve the social media experience for businesses/entrepreneurs.
Mention allows users to input competitor lists. This allows you to monitor your competitors, measure your share of voice and get insights on what social media content is working for them. This feature accompanies all the usual social crawling and management features that other options provide.
Pricing
One of the most cost-flexible options on this list, Mention has pricing options that suit anyone, from individual entrepreneurs to large multi-national corporations. They’ve even got a limited free plan that allows a single user to experiment and learn the platform.
For annual subscriptions, the prices are as follows:
Solo – £18/month
Pro – £59/month
ProPlus – £119/month
Company – £320+/month
5. Brand24Perhaps the most comprehensive social listening tool available on the market, Brand24 brings together all the most useful features into one easy-to-use platform.
Also read: iPhone 14 Pro Max Is Apple’s New iPhone To Be Launched In September (Know The Release Date, Specification, Rumour & More)
Pricing
Brand24 offers three tiers: ‘Plus’, ‘Premium’ and ‘Max’, coming in at £35/month, £70/month and £142/month, respectively. Slightly pricier than some of their competitors, Brand24 might be prohibitively expensive for individuals or start-ups. As with many tools, they offer a 14-day free trial for you to get a taste before you commit.
What Businesses Benefit from Social Listening?The short answer? Every business! In 2023, it’s more important than ever to have a developed, complete social media strategy in place. Managing multiple social media platforms can be incredibly difficult without the correct tools to facilitate efficient analysis.
Investing money into social listening tools will prove profitable in the long run, as you can find the data you need to get ahead of your competition.
P
Petros KlianisSEO Consultant who helps businesses in optimising their digital presence by boosting ranking performance in organic search engine page results. Petros creates content that can be easily found by search engines and digested by people.
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Save Your Digital Life With Primo Iphone Data Recovery
This is a sponsored article and was made possible by Primo. The actual contents and opinions are the sole views of the author who maintains editorial independence, even when a post is sponsored.
It’s happened to everyone at some point. You lose the data on your phone or even lose your phone itself. You may feel as if all is lost, but it doesn’t have to be. You can easily save all your data, even if you’ve never backed up before.
You can accomplish this with Primo iPhone Data Recovery. It allows you to recover data directly from your device, from an iTunes backup, and also from iCloud. It will recover photos, videos, messages, contacts, call history, etc. Because users often want to recover Messages and Contacts, Primo has created easy to follow instructions for retrieving deleted text messages and retrieving deleted contacts.
Additionally, it gives you repair tools for times when you’re stuck on a black screen or in an endless restarting loop. Basically, it saves your digital life.
Using Primo iPhone Data RecoveryPrimo iPhone Data Recovery can be downloaded for either Windows or Mac. A personal license, allowing you to download it to one machine, will cost you $39.99, while a family license, allowing you to use it on up to five machines, will cost $59.99. Either way, you can download it initially for free to do a free scan of your device to see if you want to invest the money in a full license.
For the purposes of this review I used the Mac license on a 2011 Mac Mini.
Recovery OptionsEveryone has a different preferred way of backing up their device, and regrettably some don’t do it at all. No matter your current backup process, even if you have none, there are still recovery options for you, with each explained in full on the website so that you can choose the appropriate method.
In the Settings before you start, you can change the software to save to your choice of folders and also choose the output format of your various files. Just be sure to do this before you begin the recovery.
I have a newer iPhone and iPad and back up everything to iCloud. Recovering from iCloud would be too easy, though, so I dug up my old iPhone 5 that I retired last year and tried to do a recovery of what was still stored on my device.
Primo then went to work analyzing the content on my iPhone. It took considerable time, but this was because of two reasons: for one, I’m using a really old Mac Mini that is exceptionally slow, and for another, the reason I stopped using this iPhone was that it had little memory and was full. So there was a lot of data to analyze by a very slow machine.
Once it’s done analyzing your device, it presents you with all the possible files that you can save. They haven’t been downloaded yet. Primo is just letting you know what’s on there should you decide to recover it. Because my phone was so full, some files had been overwritten, at least in part.
This took a very long time. Again, I’m using an ancient computer and a full iPhone, and I was trying to recover attachments from several years. It was already late at night, so I went to bed and let it finish overnight and had a “Completed” message the next day.
All this info was now saved to both my iCloud folder as well as my Documents folder. Because I have iCloud on both my Mac and my iPhone, I can easily move the files out of my iCloud folder on my phone into where they belong. But without iCloud, I would need to transfer through iTunes or another method.
And indeed, every single message attachment dating back to 2010 was recovered. It’s understandable then that it took so long to recover it all. That’s seven years worth of attachments!
Restoring Data to Your ComputerAdditionally, other than just recovering your files, you can also fix your iOS system crashes and issues as well. Unfortunately I couldn’t test this feature since I don’t have a device that’s experiencing issues.
But it would have definitely come in handy last fall. When my iPhone 7 was a few weeks old, I did a system update, and it sent me into an endless reboot. I tried every recovery method known to man, and none of them worked. I had to spend half a day taking it in to the Genius Bar where they just ended up replacing it. It’s great to have another option in my pocket such as this!
ConclusionAll in all, Primo iPhone Data Recovery will save your digital life. It can recover your data no matter how you back up or even if you never back up and can even repair your phone when you think all is lost. For me, instead of just downloading it when you have the need for it, I can see downloading it to keep it around so that it’s available in those emergencies.
The more and more you do on your phone, such as adding, deleting, updating, saving, etc., the less and less chance you have of recovering everything, so why not keep this software around so that you can recover or repair when you need to and not risk losing anything?
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent nearly 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with more than 10 of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past three decades. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.
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Top Tips To Save Battery Life On Your Iphone
If there is one thing iPhone owners can all agree on, it’s that the iPhone battery should last longer. While that may require some breakthroughs in battery technology, all hope is not lost. With a few smart tips or tweaks in iOS settings, your battery life can last most, if not the entire day, even with heavy use. Follow the guide below for the best ways to save battery life on an iPhone and leave the charger at home.
Battery-Hogging AppsThere is a strong likelihood this list may be full of apps that surprise you, including fan favorites like Facebook. Deleting the Facebook app and accessing the Web version of Facebook via Safari can help significantly with battery life. This list will also help you see how addicted you are to other apps or games that are quickly draining the battery. When you know the prime suspects, reducing their usage or finding alternatives could improve battery life in a big way.
Disable Background App RefreshOne of the best and worst features of the iPhone is Background App Refresh. Basically, this feature enables apps to update in the background so that when you next open the app, everything is already loaded. It comes in handy for critical apps like Email apps or Maps (Google or Apple) but is definitely not necessary for most other apps.
You do not have to disable it across the board for every app, but the more you disable, the more battery life you can gain back. To check which apps have this feature enabled:
1. Open the Settings app.
3. Scroll through the app list and disable the feature for any apps that you do not frequently use or need.
Wi-Fi Over Cellular Connectivity Low Power ModeLow power mode places the phone into a mode that preserves power by disabling or limiting a variety of functions.
When this feature is on, the battery in the status bar turns yellow. Once your iPhone is charged to 80% or higher, Low Power Mode is automatically disabled.
Use Dark Mode Limit NotificationsCutting down on the number of notifications is a quick way to save a little battery life. Every time a notification arrives, the phone has to light up and make a connection to Wi-Fi or cellular towers.
To reduce the number of notifications:
1. Open the Settings app and tap on notifications.
2. Go through each app individually (yes, this could be a lot of apps) and adjust whether or not you want to receive notifications through banners, sounds, badges, etc.
3. The more you disable, the more battery life you can win back.
Reduce Device BrightnessTurning up the brightness on your iPhone has a negative impact on your battery. The higher the brightness, the more battery it uses.
Turn Off Location ServicesLocation and GPS tracking can be incredibly useful with apps, especially map applications, but using it frequently can impact battery life.
To get to these location functions:
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Scroll until you see the Privacy option.
3. Tap on “Location Services.”
Now you have an opportunity to go through the list app by app and see what is using your location information. Weather, email, and retail store apps are likely to want to know your info to serve you better. Other apps may not necessitate such access, so disabling them will allow you to preserve battery life. You can also disable Location Services entirely, but that also prevents critical apps like Maps from assisting you while driving.
As you can see, it is easy to save battery life on an iPhone. Smaller, less impactful options like Siri or dynamic wallpapers can also eat up small amounts of battery life each day, so you may want to disable them, too.
David Joz
David is a freelance tech writer with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. He loves all things Nintendo.
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