Skirting close to your account limit in Gmail? Want to take some rocking holiday photos? Impress the in-laws with your tasty homemade bread? We're back with another installment of Lifehacker Labs to show you how to do that and more.


Lifehacker Labs is a chance for us to show you how we've used tips and tricks from Lifehacker, revisited old ones, and even improved upon them in the process. This week we're back with four more ways we've culled tips from the Lifehacker archive and put them to work in our own homes and offices.


We get an enormous amount of email here at Lifehacker, so inbox maintenance is a must. Even with a tidy inbox, however, if you have a ton of email in your archives with large attachments the space vanishes quickly. Adam recently noticed that he was creeping mighty close to the limit of his Gmail account, despite keeping a tight reign on his actual inbox. The problem of course was all the various attachments lurking in his saved emails. He followed the advice we gave in our previous guide on how to free up space in Gmail, with emphasis on the third tip in that guide—search for emails with emphasis on file types that are typically larger like pdf files, mp3s, and movie files. Check out the full article for a bunch of great tips or jump right into hacking your inbox down to size with the filename:.ext search parameter, where .ext is the extension you're looking for (e.g., filename:mp3 , filename:pdf ).

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Everyone loves bokeh, the soft out-of-focus creamy lights that appear in the background of photos. Why limit yourself to lovely circles? With a little creativity, you can make the bokeh any shape you want. We shared a tutorial last January on how to make your own bokeh. The trick is to cut out a piece of card stock the size of your lens and then cut a small design into it. You can make just about any design: squares, snow flakes, and other patterns are quite suitable. I decided to try out it this holiday season since Christmas lights make such a great background for a nice interesting bokeh.


In the above photo you see a bottle of gin sitting on my workbench, with a strand of white Christmas lights hung from a hook on my pegboard organizer. The photo on the left shows the naked results from my Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens with nothing but the Christmas lights to illuminate the scene. The photo on the right shows the same, except I put a small cardboard disc in front of the lens with a "plus" symbol cut into it. It took me about 30 seconds to make the cardboard cutout, I skipped making the full cardstock lens-hood like they did in the original tutorial—I just wanted to see if it would work the way I wanted before jumping into building a full model. It worked and the results were awesome. Here's a pro-tip for cutting out the cardstock: use the cap of your lens to trace the circle with a marker to make a perfect template.


This spring we shared a method for ensuring you always had fresh homemade bread on hand. The promise was fresh bread every day with only five minutes of work. The promise wasn't far off... other than the once a week 10 minute setup, you really can make fresh bread every day in around 5 minutes. I've been making fresh homemade bread for six months now using the awesome recipe from that article. I even went on to buy the book which is filled with a ton of variations on the recipe, although you certainly don't need the book to get started.

The photo above is bread fresh out of my oven. It's simple, it's fast, and it's some of the best bread I've ever had. You can try it with stuff you have around your kitchen, but even if you had to go buy all the ingredients right now $10 would get you enough for several weeks worth of bread. Check out the full article for the back story and additional tips.



In the fall we shared a bunch of tips for saving money on your winter heating bills without breaking the bank. Kevin found himself with a faulty thermostat and needed to replace it. What better time than right before a cold New York winter to put in a fancy new programmable thermostat, right? He picked up a Honeywell multi-day programmable thermostat and has been extremely pleased with it. He can set the temperature he needs based on the time of day, the day of the week (and whether or not it's the weekend), and as an extra bonus he can even force it to cycle X number of times per hour—a great feature when your thermostat is located in a warm room, like a living room with a fireplace, and you're worried about the temperature dropping too low in distant parts of the house. I can vouch for Kevin's experience with the thermostat, having installed one of my own several years ago. It's extremely convenient to have your thermostat take care of raising and lowering the temperature of your house for maximum comfort while sleeping, getting up in the morning, and returning from work.


That's it for this week's Lifehacker Lab, but don't let us have all the fun. We have a Lifehacker Tips Tester pool on Flickr for you to show off your your favorite Lifehacker tips, tricks, and hacks in action. If you've used a tip from Lifehacker, we'd love to see photos of your results in the tester pool!