Pogue's Basics: Life: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) for Simplifying Your Day by David Pogue

Pogue's Basics: Life: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) for Simplifying Your Day Reviews

• 
  HBalikov

  David Pogue became a media tech star through his online column on practical technology help. He writes with clarity and enthusiasm. So, I was interested when I got this book as a gift. Then, I found out that this is one of a series of helpful books that include: money and technology.
  
  For this book, Pogue is ready with “essential tips and shortcuts…for simplifying your day.” My reaction ranged from “Oh!” to “I think I knew that.”
  
  Some under Oh!
   Use your phone to record tickets to shows or a taxi’s license or the parking spot in a large public garage where you parked
   If you bread gets stale it can still be rescued if you get the crust really wet and then heat it in the oven for about ten minutes at 300 F.
   If you open a banana by its tip rather than the stem you avoid squishing and stringy parts
   There are times when your WiFi signal is strong but you should turn WiFi off.
  
  
  Some under “I think I knew that.”
   Squish a new soap bar to the old one while its wet
   Use a paperclip to prevent losing the end of a roll of tape
   The difference between Advil and Tylenol
   The one-step trick for perfect posture
  
  
  Your results may differ. Glad I got it as a present. Not sure who will find it worth $20 American to buy for themselves.
  3.5*
• 
  Heidi The Reader

  David Pogue and his team tested every suggestion in this book to verify that each works the way it is supposed to. The result is a gem.
  
  "... the morsels in this book describe features hidden right under our noses, features that lots of people don't know about. As well as 'Everyone's been using it wrong' insights. Plus tips that are clever, unexpected, and useful." pgs 5-6
  
  I knew some of the tips in these pages, but certainly not all of them.
  
  When I'm done with this book, I'm going to gift it to my pre-teen, who thinks she knows everything but obviously doesn't. I think she'll find this incredibly handy in a few years.
  
  "A pot of water doesn't boil over if you lay a wooden spoon across the top of the pot." pg 81
  
  Who knew? I didn't. That's one of the tips I've already used to make my life easier.
  
  I've also utilized the tip for how to get ketchup out of the bottom of the bottle. And no, it's not leaving it upside down and leaning against something for two hours though that does work. It is a much more immediate solution.
  
  Some of the technology tips may be outdated, only because this book was printed in 2015. But I haven't tested them all yet, so don't hold me to it. It's one small section in a stellar lineup of life "basics" that cover topics including the car, travel, food, clothes, your body, animals, house and home, and more.
  
  Highly recommended for anybody who's looking to make their lives a little bit simpler. Let's be honest then, that's everybody.
• 
  Jim

  Some tips are trivial, some you know , some you don't know and won't use, and some you don't know and might use. Overall I liked it.
  
  It is the type of book I would not of wanted to buy at full retail but would like to receive as a gift. I read this as a library copy.
  
  
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tedtalk...
  
  Pogue at TEDtalks... I have not watched this yet.
• 
  Lost Planet Airman

  "You'll find more than 150 tricks, shortcuts, and cheats for everyday life: house and home, cars, clothing, travel, food, health, and more." David Pogue has a casual yet engaging style that makes for an easy presentation of these shortcuts and "life hacks" to make life easier.
  
  SRC Spring 2018 Task 15.7, although I grabbed it from the library shelf simply to find out if there were cool ideas within. (Yes, there were!)
• 
  James

  I gave this a skim at the local library and it looks like a collection of tips and tricks from older books. Your favorite search engine can give you this information without wading through a book. If you are a dinosaur like me and don't carry an e-reader thingy when you travel, you probably already know the travel tips so you still don't need this book.
• 
  Icewineanne

  I was hoping for some terrific, unique tips that would "wow" me. Instead I got tips on how to tie my running shoes so they don't untie during the day & how to untie them easily when you want to take them off. How to save on iPhone data charges - go to cafes, bars, public spaces where free wifi is offered. Basically lots of common sense tips that the average person is already knows.
  Disappointing. 2.5 stars
  
  
  
• 
  Julie Bestry

  If you're the savvy sort of person who lives on the web, knows to check Snopes and not believe what random unverified people say on Twitter, and are generally teaching the people around you how to make their lives better, then this book may only rate two or three stars for you. If you wander around the world wondering why everything is so hard, or if you've never heard the term "life hack," then you're probably going to find this book a five-star revelation. I fell somewhere in the middle.
  
  I love Pogue's computer hacks, so I was curious what life hacks he could bring to bear. Some of these things that I thought were obvious (things I was taught in driver's ed, or in third grade, or whenever) aren't so universal, as I found by asking random friends if they knew, and they were mystified. That the gas pump indicator icon on your car's instrument panel tells you which side of the car you'll find the gas tank -- good for when you are driving a rental or a friend's car -- might be something all drivers don't know was a shock to me. On the other hand, I haven't used Netflix since the days of DVDs and didn't know the secret keyboard shortcuts, so that was nifty.
  
  There were a few places Pogue just completely missed the boat. He offers some ways to keep the hotel room curtains closed so the room stays dark, but completely misses the best hack -- using a skirt hanger to clip them closed. His idea to keep flip-flop plugs from popping out by securing a plastic bread wrapper between the shoe and the plug is novel -- and stupid. Think what it's like if you get a tiny piece of gravel stuck in the bottom of your shoe -- imagine the noisy lumpiness of a piece of plastic under your shoe! And his advice to pick up friends arriving at the airport at departures, rather than arrivals, is selfish. If someone has been flying all day, lands, schleps all the way to baggage claim to pick up their bags, and then has to traverse the whole airport to get to YOU so you can more easily park curbside at departures, that's not a hack, that's a rude inconvenience to your arriving friend! But Pogue's otherwise a good dude, so we'll blame his lack of imagination rather than assuming he's a jerk. ;-)
  
  Pogue's expertise lies in the tech-related areas and the stereotypically "dudely" ones for cars, tools and electronics; most of the rest of these are things that have been in the public domain for a while (like the tabs at the ends of boxes of plastic wrap and aluminum foil). Oh, and as much as I don't want to get a splinter, I'm eager to try his glue-related advice!
  
  This is an easy read -- and a fairly fun one, because you can feel superior about the things you DO know, be charmed by the things you don't know, and read various things aloud to anyone in the room to see whether they know what Pogue knows. This would be a good graduation present, or a good gift for someone recuperating from an illness or injury, but for yourself, you might want to just pick up a library copy.
• 
  Cheryl

  So many cool tips in here! A lot I knew, but many I did not and wrote down for future use.
• 
  Cheryl

  There’s actually some good tips in here. B&W images often illustrate the hack and puns are sprinkled about. I’ve noted several chapters, but the cleaning really stands out, along with cell phone tips.
• 
  Christian G.T.

  A great book for skimming, I found a few noteworthy tips, and some of the tech tips hold up even after 6 years. Who knew that you could press 3 to rerecord a voicemail?
• 
  Colleen

  This is just one of those fun books that you can read in an hour. Some of the tips aren’t that useful and many you’ll already know, but there actually are a few quirky gems in it. Who knew that if you hold your car’s remote control fob against your cheek, you can lock and unlock your car doors up to 90 feet further away than its usual range? Or if you can’t find your reading glasses and you want to quickly read, say, the small print directions on a medicine bottle, you can look through a tiny hole that you form with your fingers and suddenly, you can read without glasses. (Yes, really, I tried this and it actually works.)
  
  A quick, fun read with some tips that are actually useful.
  
• 
  Samuel

  This is a book of lifehacks, little tips to make everyday life easier, split into chapters by subject. It distinguishes itself from other collections of lifehacks, such as the internet, by guaranteeing that they actually work. It also includes a final chapter listing several commonly reported lifehacks that do not in fact work.
  
  Some of these I already knew, some I don’t expect I’ll ever have a use for, and some were totally new information or never occurred to me. I won’t use nearly everything suggested in this book, but I likely will keep some of these tips around.
• 
  Lisa Dickson

  You've seen some of these featured ideas on the internet, and you probably do some already in your own life (like keeping a paper clip at the end of your tape roll as an opening tab or pulling open your paper ketchup cup so it holds more volume). Yet you are likely to learn a few new tricks from this thin volume. Good for a stocking stuffer or waiting room, this is easy to read at random.
• 
  Carter Hemphill

  I'm a fan of life hacker tips and this book is a good compendium of such productivity tips. Likely less bang for your buck compared to his first book on technology hacks, but overall a fun and light read. There are a few gems that will be fun to use and impress others!
• 
  Cari

  Good followup to the tech one, but I already knew many of the tips from my years of being a reference librarian!
• 
  Sabina Kelly

  this would have been 4 stars like his tech version, but alot of the stuff i already was aware of - couple of good gems though, that made it worth while
• 
  Karthik

  Breezy read. Interesting life hacks.. Am pretty sure to use some of these. Pogue is a tech commentator that I respect a lot
• 
  Siskiyou-Suzy

  I bought this book at a thrift store and was (and am, maybe) very excited. This is the sort of book I want to write, I think. I get really frustrated when I don't know things -- when I learn things later and think, wow, my life would've been a little different if I'd learned this earlier. And even though, in this case, these things are rather small (e.g., understanding that the side the exit number is on is the side the exit is on), I still think they're important to know. But collections of this sort are usually let-downs. Generally, there are things I already know. Lots of them. Then there are things that are not actually useful to me or simply seem un-useful in general.
  
  Pogue here makes a lot of proclamations about how good his tips are. He insists they will all work, they won't be tacky, they won't be ridiculously obvious and they won't be dumb, they will work for most people most of the time, they are provable and they are somewhat surprising. They'll be "hidden features" and clever, unexpected and useful tips. I mean, he's just asking to be torn down here. This is an impossible book he claims to have written. But I tend to take people at their word.
  
  So at least for some of this book, I'm going to be journaling it.
  
  1:
  
  Chapter one is the car. Okay. Maybe not my favorite thing, but I've always gotten a sort of surge of excitement at the idea of being able to care for a car properly, if that makes sense. One of my weird quirks. The idea of taking a car to get its oil changed every so many miles and then putting a certain type of gas in it and getting it washed once a month, or whatever. I love care plans, even if I'm not great at sticking to them.
  
  - The air-conditioning question, answered at last
  
  I am positive I've looked this up in the past because this answer was very familiar to me. I don't know if I can remember off the top of my head that 40 mph is the magic number, but I do remember that fast = roll the windows up because of wind resistance or whatever.
  
  Obvious? I don't think so, and I think the fact that there's a point where it changes (40 mph) makes it less obvious. You have to know specific information, you can't really just guess.
  
  - Secret meaning in highway exit signs
  
  Consistently useful? Sort of, but GPS makes it obsolete. And when you're not using GPS, it's usually because you're familiar so you would already know.
  
  - extend your key fob's range
  
  Does it work? Not for me! I have a BMW. The other day I was walking away and tried to lock it. It didn't respond. I held it up to my chin and tried again. No respond. Took a step forward and tried to lock it, not held up to my chin. It locked. Took a step back and tried both again. So, even though this apparently is a real thing or whatever, it did not help me. Which is annoying because I like to walk obnoxiously far from the car before locking it and my BMW is relatively new to me so I keep having to go back to lock it. Maybe my head is just too dry.
  
  - nail polish to id different keys
  
  Tacky? YES! They make things for this! First of all, keys do tend to look different. But they also make key tags, stickers, etc. for this exact purpose. Putting a splotch of nail polish on it is not somehow nicer looking.
  Obvious? Yes! The concept of ORGANIZING KEYS if KEYS NEED ORGANIZING seems super obvious to me. Like, if you have similar keys and are frequently using the wrong key or spending excess time fumbling through keys, marking them in some fashion is incredibly obvious. This exact tip isn't, but this tip is not specifically useful because . . .
  Consistently useful? I hate tips and life hacks that require that you purchase something not specifically for what you're buying it for and then . . . not use all of it. So okay, I do own nail polish. But I haven't always. And there are going to people reading this book, living this life, that don't own nail polish. So they could buy an actual key marker. Or they could buy multiple bottles of nail polish to use one swatch on a key. This tip is awful and this is the first tip that I felt like was something I'd see on some stupid click-bait-y article. No, it's not totally useless, but it doesn't fit the parameters of this book!
  
  - self-pumping gas
  
  Obvious? This was taught to me, so it was super obvious. But I'm assuming it's not for everyone. I don't think it's marked anywhere?
  
  But -- you are NOT SUPPOSED TO LEAVE GAS PUMPS IN USE UNATTENDED. There are signs for that everywhere! You are also not supposed to re-enter the car while pumping gas. Regardless of if you've used that. Right? I mean, I like to obey signs. So I always stay with the pump. I've never deserted a pump! It bugs me that this book is telling you to break the rules without even addressing that the rules are a thing. Like, nobody involved in the making of this book was like, "Hey, but the general advice is you don't leave gas pumps unattended, so maybe don't tell people to do that?" Obnoxious!
  
  - an essay on windshield defogging
  
  Right. So my question here is, do I understand what air conditioning is? Is blasting the heater the same thing as blasting the air conditioner on high heat? Otherwise, impressively (or maybe not), I'd already figured this out. I'd already figured out that the condensation was because it's cold outside, hot inside. So I would always blast hot air on the windshield. But I always was a little unsure if perhaps plasting cold air would work better. So maybe this clears it up. But like, I guess I got confused about the air conditioning. I just feel like this tip was written for a slightly different reality. One I can understand, but one that isn't about the world I know. A world with heaters and a world where blasting cold air from outside is not a proper solution to de-fogging because the cause of this is being warm inside and people WANT TO BE WARM INSIDE. Like, being cold inside is not a solution.
  
  Consistently useful? No. Just the way this tip was written annoyed me, the way he doesn't address (really) the fact that we want the air inside to be consistently warm. That is a part of all of this. And then telling us to put the AC on but make it warm. I just don't understand that. Will somebody explain, please?
  
  - windshield frost
  
  Obvious? Some, but not the putting a towel over because that was a new tip for me and a good one. Though does the towel ever freeze TO the windshield?
  
  - trash can
  
  Tacky? Potentially. The tips in here aren't great, I think -- a plastic cereal container? I bought a bag that hangs off the gear shift. It's pretty.
  Obvious? Well, my boyfriend made fun of me when I bought the garbage bag for my car. So apparently he doesn't think so. But I agree with Pogue -- it's insane that cars don't have built in little trash containers. I mean, do they and I'm just unaware somehow? Cars should be equipped with a trash receptacle!
  
  - let your phone remember where you parked
  
  Obvious? YES PEOPLE KNOW THAT APPS EXIST. I hate this. Because there are SO MANY little useful apps that do little things, like timing apps and apps that track your sleep and apps that you enter ingredients and it tells you what to make with them and you can't fill a life-tip book up with apps. Also, I'm guessing that most people don't get terribly lost in small parking lots and we're talking more the ones that have lot markers. A much more convenient solution: take a picture of where you parked. There. You didn't even need to download an app.
  
  - Secrets of the VIN.
  
  Consistently useful? Who is in a situation where they have the VIN and can somehow recall all of this information but has no other access to the car but needs a bunch of info about it. Like I just don't understand where this specific knowledge would be applicable outside of a specific industry in which you would, inevitably, already know this.
  
  2:
  
  - Meet arriving passengers at departures.
  
  Consistently useful? No. This advice specifically only works for some people some of the time because if everybody did this IT WOULDN'T WORK. Seriously, breaking rules in order to avoid difficulties imposed by others following the rules is not advice to put in a book. It cannot be consistently useful to everyone if everybody following it will render it useless.
• 
  Neil Pasricha

  Did you read Life’s Little Instruction Book when you were younger? We always had it lying on the coffee table. I still remember some of the advice. Always overtip the breakfast waitress. Know how to change a spare tire. I was excited about David Pogue’s book because I thought it was going to be like that. And some of it was. Freeze clothes to get off chewing gum. Put nail polish on keys to tell them apart. Press K to pause YouTube videos. There’s even a little writeup on our old friend The Gas Arrow. But the problem is those entries have, you know, entire paragraphs explaining them when they could just be headlines. But they’re also wedged between meatier and more editorialized “tips” like “How not to raise an annoying dog” and even “How to be happy.” I feel like this book could have been much better edited. He has a lot of wisdom but it’s buried inside and it’s a lot of work mining it out. My wait continues for a better Life’s Little Instruction Book.
  
• 
  William Schram

  Pogue's Basics: Life by David Pogue is a collection of Life hacks and easy shortcuts that you might or might not have heard before. I am taking at least one piece of advice from this book and that is this; if you are in a car that is unfamiliar to you because you are renting it or something, use the little arrow on the Fuel Indicator to tell you which side the gas tank is on.
  
  There are a number of other handy or nifty little tricks in here, many of which are helpful. David Pogue tends to shoot a scattershot and hope that some of them stick, quantity rather than quality. Though that isn't to say these pieces of advice are bad, far from it. It's just that a lot of these are things you heard of before or things that might not apply to you.
  
  I guess I am glad that I paid a reduced amount for it since I found it at a Used Book Store.
• 
  J

  A lot of interesting ideas and tricks but only a few really impactful ones. With that said I found it useful to know how to opt out of automatic calls and some emails, and some mail. Driving tips were interesting, who knew that the arrow on the gas tank on the dashboard points to which side of the car has the fuel tank?!
  
  Overall I liked it, but not really an essential book.
• 
  Sunit Jain

  Every once in a while, I pick a book to learn something profound which would probably stick and then keep it in my bookshelf.
  
  This one went straight to the dustbin. However, I'd give the author 3 stars for the effort. Probably I wasn't the right person for the book's target. Nevertheless, I wasted some hours here to know what not to read in the future.
• 
  Chelsey Cosh

  Pogue's Basics offers some of those lifehacks that everybody goes crazy over. While a great deal of it is common sense that most people already know (at least most people I know), there are a few hidden gems in here. For anyone who likes reading about tips and tricks, this book is for you.
• 
  Tracy

  Lots of these weren't super helpful or I had already heard about but there were some good ones regarding when to buy plane tickets and keeping food fresh I thought were helpful. And it was a very very quick read
• 
  Erikka

  A bit shorter than the first book and, again, a lot of things I already knew, but I liked it still. I heard him discuss this book on the Something You Should Know podcast and immediately requested all three books from the library. These are honestly just really great resources.
• 
  Carly

  Great book! It was a quick read with interesting life tips. I will probably go back and use this book as a reference for a few scenerios too. I will never peel a banana the same way. Adding holes to trash cans was interesting as well.
• 
  Ray Nessly

  Loved this. Can't wait to obliterate the next rock-hard plastic package I get with a can opener.
  Will have to check out his other collection of electronics tips, though by now it might be a bit dated here and there.
• 
  Jennifer

  So many useful tips!
• 
  Leslie Rusch

  Really light and uninformative.