Photo: Joshua Resnick (Shutterstock)

After the 2019 American Time Use SurveyPeople spend between an hour and a half and two and a half hours in their gardens. Unfortunately, regardless of your plans for the day, the weeds keep growing and the flowers still need watering. How do you regularly maintain your garden and take time for the rest of your life?

Plants don’t wait for you to add them to your schedule. Here are some gardening activities that you can stop in a time crisis.

If you only have five minutes to spare, do five-minute gardening projects

Five minutes will give you just enough time to complete the basics like watering, planting, pest control, or cleaning. Garden lover Laetitia Maklouf created a useful one Five minute gardening method This means you can get more done in your garden over time in just five minutes a day.

On Monday you can spice up your garden, e.g. B. Remove weeds, fix bugs and clean as much as possible in five minutes. then prune the next day. You gradually do what you would have in an hour and a half, but over a week or two.

If you only have ten minutes to spare, do ten minute gardening projects

When you have five minutes left, ten-minute projects can take your quick gardening to the next level.

G / O Media can receive a commission

Mulching

Adding mulch to your garden is a practical way to make your garden more self-sustaining. Mulch helps plants retain moisture and prevent weeds from germinating and growing. Horticultural expert Joe Lamp’l Urges gardeners to use only mulch made from natural materials so that it can decompose with the soil and not get dirty. Good housekeeping suggests spreading a 5 cm layer of mulch and leaving space around the stem and trunk of the plants so that the water can easily get to the roots.

Stake out the garden

Some plants like it Loofahs live on grapevines, which means they need strong structure to climb as they grow. Good housekeeping It is recommended that you take ten minutes to bend and shape metal wire to peg your plants. Mark out provides plants with a stable base to withstand strong winds and other extreme weather conditions.

When you have 30 minutes to spare, do 30 minute gardening projects

Half an hour is just enough time to complete a major gardening project without feeling rushed. These projects can include:

Fertilize

Before planting, you’ll want to create an environment for your plants to thrive in. Broadcast fertilization is the best method for a 30 minute project and causes the fewest problems during the planting process. When broadcasting, the fertilizer is spread evenly over the desired area and mixed with the soil three to four inches deep. It doesn’t have to be done all at once, so you can set a timer to do as much as possible in half an hour and leave the rest for the next day.

Tillage

Soil tillage is best done after fertilizing the soil for planting. The best time to plant your land is the spring season, once the Soil becomes dry. Since there is a specific timing required for tillage, you will need to plan your 30 minute gardening session based on the weather.

Since you only have 30 minutes, plan a small area of ​​your garden and have it right tools ready. Start in one area and work that Earth in rows. Take your time so that you don’t overwork the floor. And if you’ve separated a small enough area, you can probably finish your garden in half an hour, no problem.

Get free technical support from Lifehacker’s Senior Technology Editor

Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? We’d love to answer it in a future Tech 911 column! Describe your problem in an email to david.murphy@lifehacker.comand make sure to include “Tech 911” in the subject line.

Encryption is a wonderful thing. While I don’t do full drive encryption on my Windows desktop at home – courtesy of BitLocker – it’s just because I’m the only one who ever uses my system and I don’t hold anything of value to it. (All of my personal documents and everything else I would encrypt live on one NAS box this is usually off.)

I do this partly because I’m lazy, partly because I want my PC to perform at its peak, and partly because I fear the day the encryption will fail – or because I don’t think about everything I have to do, if or when I have to reinstall Windows 10 – and I can’t access my data.

It’s a Lifehacker reader situation Jon is all too familiar with. As he writes for this week Tech 911 Questions and answers:

“I have a Western Digital external hard drive and a folder on the hard drive is encrypted with Windows Bitlocker. I forgot I did this, reinstalled Windows and can’t access the files anymore. Is there any way to fix this? “

G / O Media can receive a commission

You wrote down your recovery key, right?

This is exactly the scenario that I don’t want to deal with, which is why I prefer not to use Bitlocker. I stick with something like that VeraCryptJust so that my operating system is not tied to the encryption process. That, and I just have to remember one gigantic password that I can store in a password manager, write down, and record under my desk, or store it by any other possible anti-spy method.

You should have been asked to save a BitLocker recovery key if you enabled encryption on your external drive. If you cannot remember or have no idea where you kept that key, this is the main problem we will address.

Unlock an Encrypted Drive Is simple. In theory, all you have to do is launch File Explorer, right-click the drive, and unlock it. You will be prompted for the password or PIN that you set up when you initialized BitLocker.

If you don’t know the password or PIN that you used to set up BitLocker, this is where you’ll find the recovery key. It’s basically your digital lifesaver. If you don’t have it, you are lost. That is the nature of encryption. Was there an easy way to bypass it and get access to your files? Then what would be the point of encrypting the drive? Anyone who has physical or remote access to your system can intrude directly into your data after a few minutes of work and initially invalidate the point of a recovery key completely.

Still, you have a lifeline, even if all the talk about a recovery key doesn’t shake your memory. You may have saved this key in your Microsoft account when you set up your BitLocker encryption. If so, you can find it with this link. Microsoft’s key archive is pretty extensive, assuming you’ve ever saved it on your account. Just looked at the link and found my keys for desktop PCs that have been around for years.

If it doesn’t exist and you have no other storage to have the key stored in, consider your data lost. Well, technically it’s still there, you just have no way of accessing it. And no, there are no workarounds you can use and no brute force techniques you can use to try to regain access. As the developer of the popular M3 Data Recovery Tool describe::

“As we know, BitLocker is a hard drive-level encryption solution. So if you forget the BitLocker password and have lost the BitLocker recovery key, the data recovery software (including M3 BitLocker Recovery) cannot and will not break into your BitLocker encrypted drive. This is both a political and a technological limitation. “

I hope this link will help you. If not, you may want to go through your preferred generic passwords to see if you might have used one of them when you set up your BitLocker drive. That being said, this is a valuable reminder that even external drives should be backed up somewhere – ideally an unencrypted location that you protect with physical access, or even a cloud storage provider that can handle the encryption itself.

Do you have a technical question that keeps you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Are you looking for advice on apps, browser extensions, or utilities to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below or by email david.murphy@lifehacker.com.

Photo: Syda Productions (Shutterstock)

One of the worst problems with losing your job is dealing with finding health insurance. Fortunately, you have a few options, although there are tradeoffs with quality and price. Here’s what you can do.

Option 1: how to sign up for an Obamacare health plan

A bronze plan may have a high deductible for medical benefits, but it will protect you from unexpected high-cost scenarios that can ruin you financially. While this is the lowest tier plan, it can cost a lot, anywhere from $ 200 to $ 400 per month. The good news, however, is that people with incomes up to 600% of the poverty line (up to $ 76,560 for a single person) are eligible for a subsidy that covers either all or part of the cost of your monthly premium. This calculator helps you to come up with an estimate.

Start by buying a plan Healthcare.gov, even if you live in one of the states that have set up their own exchange. Click Get Coverage, select your state and you will be directed to the correct location.

Option 2: how to sign up for COBRA coverage

If you liked the coverage you already received from your previous employer, you can keep this plan by enrolling with the federal government Consolidated Omnibus Budget Adjustment Act Program better known as COBRA.

G / O Media can receive a commission

The program allows you to stay with your employer’s health insurance for up to 18 months after your employment has ended. There is a catch, however: you have to pay the full premium yourself, plus a small administration fee. That could cost you hundreds of dollars as employers pay roughly 80% of your premiumsThis is a heavy price that most people have to pay.

In order to register, your employer or your health insurance company should send you a declaration of eligibility after your employment relationship has ended. If you were expecting one but haven’t received it yet, contact your company’s human resources department or your health insurer directly. However, as soon as you receive notification that you are eligible for COBRA, you will need to register within 60 days.

Option 3: Join a family member’s plan

Because the loss of your insurance is a qualifying event, you have 30 days from the end of your insurance to enroll in a spouse or family membership plan. This may even be a better option than the ones listed above, depending on the cost and scope of your family member’s insurance. If it turns out to be great, you may want to stay on someone else’s insurance plan even after starting a new job.

Option 4: How to Apply for Medicaid Coverage

Medicaid is government health insurance for people with limited income (usually) less than $ 2,382for 2021). Unlike Obamacare plans, which are run by private companies, patients are usually patients do not pay the cost for recovered medical expenses, and in some cases, too retroactive coverage. However, the plans vary by state – you’ll need to use this Healthcare.gov calculator to see if you qualify.

Photo: Lena Ogurtsova (Shutterstock)

Humidifiers tend to have hard water deposits on the bottom of the water tank and around the heating connection. I tried scrubbing this area with all sorts of materials and could never really get it clean until I found out that sprinkling citric acid over it works wonders to remove this buildup with minimal scrubbing.

Depending on the size of your humidifier, boil six to eight cups of water and take a box of citric acid powder. Remove the water tank and pour citric acid into the base enough to cover the surface. Then pour the boiling water. Add citric acid as needed to cover the affected area. Then let it rest for five minutes scrape away the debris. Repeat this process as many times as necessary, but it shouldn’t take many.