I didn’t know this until I heard the local news team mention it, but Easter is right around the corner.  Easter is March 31, which means that we’re just about a week away from Easter.  If Easter is catching you unprepared and you need some tips on how to naturally dye your eggs into an arrangement of beautiful colors, then USA Today has some great hints on how to use natural food products to color eggs.

It’s pretty amazing to see just how little blueberries or coffee or onions it takes to color an egg into a color prettier than even chemical dyes can manage.  The same tips also work for food, if you want to make food dyes.  I’ve had a mix of blueberries and raspberries turn a crock pot full of wheat berry into an awesome crock pot of purple, delicious globs.  It also added a lot of flavor to an otherwise flavorful dish, but the coolest part was (and remains) the awesome color.

Image:  Blisstree

Remember your iPhone 3?

As smart phones get more and more omnipresent and more and more people are farther along in their phone cycle having owned multiple smart phones, there’s a growing surplus of old, unused phones just kind of hanging around, taking up space, gathering dust in drawers, and generally not being used.  Now, most phones can get some money on the sales market, if you can find a buyer or turn to the Internet to sell your old phone, but these phones are still potent enough to be reused in other ways.  Lifehacker has some tips on how to give your smart phone a second life as some other device.

There are a great deal of cool things you can do with your own iPhone, from using it as an in-car MP3 player you sync wirelessly from your driveway to a VOIP handset for making phone calls within the privacy of your own home for Skyping away from your desktop or laptop.  You can turn your phone into a gaming system (especially if you have an Android phone), which sounds like a great idea, but the most useful idea might be to turn your old smartphone into a remote control for either a television system or for a camera.

Given how much remotes get lost, having another universal backup that just happens to be an old smartphone is a great idea.

Google Chrome is my web browser of choice, and in situations where I have the option to force it upon other people, I do so.  It’s clean, uncluttered, fast, easy to use, and fairly resistant to viruses and other malware bits that one can pick up while browsing the Internet.  However, it’s got some hidden tricks up its sleeve, and not just the ones you can find on the Google Chrome store.  Here are 10 things you didn’t know Google Chrome could do.

There are a lot of handy extensions and drop-ins out there, and there are also fun ones.  Like the one you see above, Cornify!!  All you have to do is click the Cornify!! button and your screen goes from whatever you were looking at before to a Comic Sans wonderland full of rainbows and unicorns and glitter and all kinds of wonderful, fun stuff.  Not the most useful app in the world, but can you really put a price on amusement?  If you want useful, check out Chrome Flags as a password generator.

As for me, I’ll be getting my Corn on.

Java and Javascript exploits are nothing new for computer users.  All computers, be they OSX, Windows, Linux, or some other flavor of OS, all run Java.  Java is one of the most prevalent cross-platform programs in computer history, so it’s a great way to try and get viruses of various kinds into computers.  Typically, most users don’t use Java for much, but it’s always there and always on.  However, that may be changing.  The Department of Homeland Security has advised millions of people to disable Java on their computers.

The reason?  Multiple massive security flaws, of course.  Oracle, the owners of Java, have a staggering 86 security fixes coming down the pike for Tuesday, but until then the DHS is playing things cautiously and advising users to shut Java down unless absolutely necessary.   Disabling Java is actually pretty easy, and Oracle has instructions on how to turn Java off for those who need the extra help (and the Java website is a great test to see if you really have disabled Java, because it asks you if you want to turn Java on to view the website).

Are you looking for pure, raw speed?  Google Fiber is the way to go, at least as far as Netflix is concerned.  As one of the world’s biggest users of bandwidth, Netflix knows a lot about who gives what speeds.  In the first of their monthly ISP rankings, Google Fiber posted a blazing fast speed of 2.55 megabytes per second of Netflix transfer speeds.

If that doesn’t sound terribly fast, remember it’s based off of Netflix service, which features a variety of videos of various qualities and bitrates.  Netflix’s HD streaming is typically 4800 kilobytes per second, while SD content is 22kb per second.  Since the average user watches a mix of HD and SD content, that will obviously affect transfer speeds for all services tested, be it Google Fiber, Uverse, or AT&T’s mobile speeds.  Besting the competition is nothing to sneeze at, and as Netflix rolls out more HD service, you may very well see these numbers shifting more and more in Google Fiber’s favor.

Now, let’s see about getting Google Fiber everywhere, and then we’ll see how they stack up to major market carriers.

The score is now 2-1 when it comes to the presence of Zuckerbergs in big tech companies.  When it comes to the proliferation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s family in Silicon Valley tech firms, Google has taken the lead on Facebook.  Two of Mark Zuckerberg’s relatives, his sister Arielle and his brother-in-law Harry Schmidt, work for Google.  Arielle came on board when Google recently purchased Wildfire, a social media marketing company.  Schmidt, no relation to Google founder Eric Schmidt, is married to Donna Zuckerberg, sister to Mark and Arielle.

That’s pretty funny, when you consider just how much Google and Facebook find themselves in competition these days.  Still, I imagine it makes for interesting family conversations, though just how high up Arielle Zuckerberg and Harry Schmidt are in Google remains to be seen.  I imagine they’re less keyed in to Google’s inner workings than Mark is in Facebook’s day-to-day activities.

Image: Autocowrecks

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and you know what the Fourth of July means.  Fireworks!  Fireworks are the traditional way to celebrate America’s birthday, and while fireworks are a whole lot of fun, they can also be dangerous.  Thank goodness we’ve got The Preventor there to… protect us.  Oh, what’s that you say?  You don’t know who The Preventor is?  Well friends, Neatorama has the scoop, or you can just watch the video below.

The Preventor is the star of an anti-fireworks PSA known as “Dangerous Games,” which tells the story of how bottle rockets can kill you and everyone you love; M-80′s are apparently more powerful than the atomic bomb in this universe.  It’s funny, because it’s a terribly-written PSA starring a very uncomfortable man in a full-body foam rubber suit, but it’s also funny because, well… fireworks can cause a lot of problems if handled incorrectly, but most people (even kids) are smart enough not to hold onto something that will explode for very long.  I’ve always felt like fireworks safety concerns were more a fictional creation of people wanting to restrict fireworks sales and less about legitimate fears over child safety.

Then again, I also didn’t grow up in a world where you could buy quarter sticks of dynamite at every gas station.

Getting ready for vacation, but not quite ready to cut your digital umbilicus to the outside world?  Can’t say I blame you; so much of our lives–work, social, whatever–depend on being online.  Fortunately, with wireless devices and wifi and all that fun stuff, you’re never not online if you choose not to be.  Lifehacker has a guide to getting your gadgets ready for summer, including tips for cleaning out sand, ways to dry out wet devices, ways to protect your devices from the sun and rain, and even tips on how to get the most mileage out of your electronics while outdoors.

Since I got a netbook, I see people carrying around computers, e-readers, and whatnot all the time, but on the beach?  I don’t think I’m brave enough to do some light reading on my Kindle app on the sand and so close to the surf.  I’m one of those weird people who hates it when my books get wet; there’s no way I could handle getting sand into an expensive piece of electronic equipment (or even a cheap one, for that matter).

From the always brilliant xkcd:

For those of you who don’t know or aren’t big typography nerds, kerning is the space between letters used in a particular font.  Actually, there are two terms for this, kerning and tracking.  Tracking is when all the letters have the same amount of space between them, and kerning is when the space between the letters is based on the letter pairs.  (If you miss the joke, look carefully at the sign on the wall, specifically at the gap between the C and E in Offices.)  Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation for it at its kerning page, but it also has  a handy image, which will be shared below.

While I’m no graphic designer, and thus I don’t see kerning issues as easily as they do, I have been an English nerd for most of my life, and what a designer sees in kerning, I see in grammar, syntax, and improper apostrophe use.  I know their pain all too well.