Lifehacking
I find myself fairly devoted to Gawker-run blogs, and I don’t really know why. I enjoy reading Deadspin (mostly for Drew Magary’s stuff, which has a nice blend of sports, nonsense, and parenthood humor). Gizmodo is far superior to Engadget for tech stuff. Lifehacker is quite nice for apps, projects, and advice.
“Lifehacking,” a term with rising usage recently, is not a great word to use for what I like about the site. Typical lifehacking, to me, is lame stuff like “Get a Hotel Upgrade by Emailing the Manager Directly”, which is kind of the zero-sum thinking that can often be seen on college campuses, sticking it to The Man. And by The Man, I mean a middle class small business owner who now has 100 more e-mails per day thanks to idiots wanting a bigger bed for free.
I see what I might call “white hat lifehacking” to be more like “life engineering,” in the sense of applying principles and resources in a sensible way to deliver value beyond the status quo. I would provide “Build a Cheap Home Automation System in 10 Minutes with Ninja Blocks” as an example of the noble type of lifehacking.