Make Use of Your Leftover Matzoh After Passover

Even if you don't purchase matzoh for Passover, households and grocery stores have leftovers they aren't quite sure what to do with. It's actually a versatile platform for cooking sweet and savory dishes, so with the right recipes, you can make some good stuff.

Instead of letting this plain flat cracker sit on the shelf until next year, Whole Foods has a collection recipes for using leftover matzoh after the holidays. The link they offer includes both sweet and savory options as well ides for substituting matzoh into other recipes.

Pick up a few boxes as they go on sale in your grocer's clearance section, or use whatever you have left when Passover ends. It's not the only way to use that leftover matzoh, but it's probably the most practical.

Loving Leftover Matzoh | Whole Foods Market

Photo by JAFI Israel.

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In Digital Health, Does Nike Have A Path To Victory After Fuelband?

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor at Haystack. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This past week, conflicting reports about Nike leaked, suggesting either big changes or outright abandonment of its high-profile Fuelband line. For those focused on the intersection of digital health, wellness, mobile startups, and wearable technologies, a move by Nike, one of the world’s most iconic brands and visible companies, will be examined under the microscope.

With the news swirling about the future of Fuelband, chatter has focused on the prospects for wearable hardware moving forward and what moves Nike makes as a result. Will they acquire a new team to rethink Fuelband? Will Nike instead attempt to connect items that they already sell? Will they just focus on mobile software, and if so, how will they get the data and distribution? The answers to these questions may help us all sort through how technology startups in this space may best position themselves moving forward.

As reports conflict with company statements so far, I’ll lay out their two scenarios and briefly discuss what options could make sense:

Keep The Fuelband, Change The Team: To Nike, having user data is important, so there’s a decent rationale here. Well, good luck. There are very few teams in the world that can build fully-integrated hardware and software products, and this is in part why Google shelled out over $3Bn for Nest and wired about $1Bn of that directly to Tony Fadell, who had learned his craft under Steve Jobs at Apple. Companies like Jawbone have now reached an orbit and breadth of offerings which would make an acquisition difficult to swallow for Nike. Smartwatch makers, like Pebble, likely have too much upside ahead of them to concede at this moment.

Abandon The Fuelband, Focus On Software And Services: Makes sense on the surface, but I’ll contend again that Nike needs to access user data in order to provide these services. The Fuelband was their data capture vehicle, so without that device, Nike could either (A) build out its own branded software-focused products across iOS and Android, focused on the application layer, but there they’d be competing with (B) a number of health and fitness apps which already have distribution, consumer attention, communities, and data. (For more on this and the startups in this space, click here to see a great Twitter conversation I had this morning with Barry Graubert and Arjun Ram.)

These aren’t the only scenarios for Nike, a $65Bn company. Back in December 2012, Nike announced a partnership with TechStars to leverage the company’s existing technologies. It’s very possible Nike had already considered these scenarios years ago in inking such deals, and those relationships likely provided the insights to eventually plan for a mobile software-focused strategy. If eventually Nike moves away from hardware (which I think they will), it will have started out with an Apple-like strategy of being vertically-integrated between its own hardware and software offering and potentially will end up with a Google-like approach focused on mobile software and services.

Additionally here, Nike can take advantage of the onslaught of off-the-shelf sensors hitting the market and mobile hardware advancements (like Apple’s M7 motion sensor in the iPhone) to create the next great mobile health and wellness service. Or, maybe Nike will elect to eventually take a Facebook-like portfolio approach and focus on buying products to access user data? It’s no longer a crazy idea.

While all of this is easy to chart out on the whiteboard or a blog post, an ominous storm looms over the horizon for Nike and their desire to crack this space. While they were figuring out Fuelband and investing in the startup ecosystem via TechStars, a handful of small, scrappy, focused startups (isn’t this always the case?) have been aggressively building health and wellness mobile products and communities for the mass consumer market. in the context of user data and graphs, startups like FitBit, Jawbone, Runkeeper, Fitocracy, and others have a terrific chance to own the space inbetween the consumer and his/her data.

For instance, Runkeeper, a startup focused entirely on building software products for the running community, has been one of the first teams to take advantage of the M7 sensor in the iPhone and deliver more value to its loyal base — and this week, they announced yet another app to their suite, Breeze, which tracks a user’s steps. It sounds cliche, but small, dedicated, driven teams focused on these seemingly narrow challenges and opportunities are more likely to find the speck of white space to leverage current technologies and build incremental value for their users.

And, if that is an immutable law of small teams versus big corporations, in the world of consumer health and wellness, Nike is presented with a complex challenge in order to preserve its self-proclaimed association with victory.

Photo Credit: Vernon Chan / Flickr Creative Commons

After massive delays, Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition finally arrives to Android

Back in January of 2013, Beamdog revealed they had run into a snag with the Android version of Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition, leading to a delay. And that was pretty much the last we heard about the whole effort, until today.

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition has finally arrived to Android, priced at $9.99. While this is a pretty hefty cost for a game that was released in 1998, it’s worth it if you’re at all a fan of the series or enjoy roleplaying games. Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is more than just a straight port of the original, bringing a large number of improvements to the interface, high-resolution fonts, dynamic zooming, and several other tweaks.

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition has finally arrived to Android, priced at $9.99

As for the content? There’s at least some new elements here as well. In addition to three new hero characters that can join your party, there’s also two major expansions that enhance the original 60-hour game. The expansions are “tales of the Sword Coast” and “the Black Pits”. For those looking for even more content, there are also some in-app purchases present. I know, IAP on a $10 game might sound like a bit of a turn off, but remember none of these purchases are required to fully enjoy the game.

According to the game’s app description, the following content can be purchased from within the game:

• Brothers Lost: Lend your aid to Rasaad yn Bashir, the Sun Soul monk, as he scours the Cloud Peaks in search of his lost brother.
• Neera and the Red Wizards: Save the wild mage Neera from the cruel machinations of Thay’s dreaded Red Wizards.
• Path of the Bloodied: Join the blackguard Dorn Il-Khan in taking revenge against those who betrayed him in Luskan.
• Gallery of Heroes: Reimagine your character with eleven never-before-seen character portraits from acclaimed Icewind Dale artist Jason Manley!
• New professionally recorded voice sets to choose from to further customize your character.

Is Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition really worth your time and money? Yes and no. If you thoroughly invested in the original PC game, keep in mind that largely it’s still the same experience as you played all those years ago — just enhanced and somewhat expanded.

In other words, if you don’t like ‘re-beating’ games, you might want to pass. For those that love the nostalgia that comes with giving a game another run through or who never had the full opportunity to check out the game, you’ll absolutely want to consider picking this one up.

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition should play nicely with just about any Android device running ICS 4.0 or higher, though a larger screen is recommended. Those with 5+ inch handsets should be able to get by okay, though a tablet is preferable.

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Samsung’s no-cost ad-free Milk Music isn’t ad free after all

A month ago Samsung introduced its own radio streaming service powered by Slacker, under the odd name of Milk Music. At the time it was announced as an ad-free experience with no subscription costs and the ability to skip up to 6 songs in hour. The only catch was that the service was only compatible with a few select Galaxy devices.

Fast-forwarding to today, Samsung has apparently changed its mind on the whole ‘free’ part. While the service will continue to be offered, Samsung isn’t giving it away for nothing anymore, and has formally announced its plans to bring ads to the service.

Let’s be honest, this is an annoying move, especially since the service was only announced a month ago. Of course, we can’t say we are surprised,offering free unlimited radio with no ads seemed too good to be true at the time — and we were right.

For those that don’t mind putting up with ads, Milk Music is still free to use and could possibly be worth keeping around. For those that can’t stand ads? Samsung will offer a $4 monthly subscription that removes the ads and is said to bring a few premium features, though Samsung hasn’t specified what exactly. Hopefully the subscription at least gives us unlimited skips.

Anyone currently using Milk Music? Will Samsung’s addition of ads and a ‘premium’ subscription drive you away?

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5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Google Play Weekly

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HTC One M8 gets a new software update on Verizon’s network

After Killing Intro For iOS, LinkedIn Gets Deep Integration On Mobile Via Samsung Partnership

Score a small victory for Android users. Earlier this year, LinkedIn killed a clever app called Intro, which used an engineering hack to inject information from LinkedIn and its Rapportive service into your iOS emails. But the service was deemed too risky for the way it intercepted emails on behalf of users before augmenting them with the additional data, and was later shut down.

Today, however, select Android users will have access to similar functionality, the company says. Those who buy the newly released Galaxy S5 smartphone will have the ability to access LinkedIn data from not only their email, but also their calendar and contacts applications.

In a blog post announcing this news, LinkedIn touts this as a “first-of-its-kind integration,” explaining that they’ve teamed up with Samsung to make this possible. Unlike on iOS devices, where LinkedIn had to hack its way around the fact that Apple doesn’t offer an extensible framework, the partnership with Samsung means that, this time around, LinkedIn no longer needs to intercept your emails in order to inject its code.

To get started, Galaxy S5 users will need to download the LinkedIn application to their new handset, then authorize the native applications to sync with their LinkedIn account. After doing so, they’ll then be able to view the same sort of profile data Intro once offered iOS device owners, including LinkedIn users’ profile pictures, job titles, and work experience.

But instead of only appearing in the email client, this data is also available in the Calendar and Contacts app, too, allowing you to pre-brief yourself or refresh your memory about those you’re soon meeting with, or get an update on your contacts’ latest news from the native Contacts app.

We’ve asked LinkedIn if it’s working on any way to bring this functionality to a wider number of Android users through additional integrations to be rolled out in the future (Samsung or otherwise), but haven’t yet heard back. We’ll update with that info, as provided.

More here.

Gawker France Bans Work Email After 6 p.m. | Jalopnik Guy Doesn't Realize His Girlfriend Fell Off Hi

Gawker France Bans Work Email After 6 p.m. | Jalopnik Guy Doesn't Realize His Girlfriend Fell Off His Motorcycle | Jezebel Heads Up, Men: You Have No Secrets| KotakuThe 12 Best Games on PC | Kinja Popular Posts

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9 Tips To Help You Keep Your Windows XP Safe After End-Of-Life

Microsoft Windows XP will no longer be receiving anymore security updates beyond April 8, 2014. What this means to most of us who are still on the 13-year-old system is that the OS will be vulnerable to hackers taking advantage of security flaws that will never be patched.

According to Net Applications, 30% of the world’s PCs are still running on Windows XP. That is a huge bulk of the market, a portion that cannot be neglected. Microsoft and other security vendors have been actively encouraging users to migrate to the latest OS, where security updates are regularly issued, but for some people, this is not possible.

No matter what their reasons are, even though they may run into security risk because of the ended support, there are several ways to mitigate most of risks and to reduce the chances of being attacked. Here are 9 tips to help you survive the end-of-life for Windows XP.

Recommended Reading: Planning a Successful Migration From Windows XP

1. Back Up Everything, Every time

Not a tip specific to Windows XP but a valuable one nonetheless. It should be emphasize that although the tips here will help you mitigate risk, they will not eliminate them and therefore, having a regular, working backup is crucial in case anything goes wrong.

Make sure you back up what you cannot afford to lose, properly and securely if case your XP machine runs into an exploit that could corrupt your data. XP doesn’t come with its own backup tool but there are multiple ones available online.

Read Also: 20+ Data Backup & Synchronization Tools For Hard Drives

2. Keep Your Antivirus Updated

XP may not be getting any updates anymore but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be getting antivirus updates. The majority of security vendors will still be providing update to their software running on XP, including Microsoft’s own Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

This won’t help you if an exploit targets a vulnerability in the operating system but will protect your system from day-to-day malware.

3. Don’t Use Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 8 was the last version of IE to be released for Windows XP. The OS never got a newer version of the web browser so XP is stuck with an outdated and unguarded attack gateway via browser.

If you are on Internet Explorer, but have the option to change to another, more modern and secure browser, consider changing to browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Unlike IE, these browsers are still being maintained for XP and will be for the near future.

4. Remove Java, Adobe Flash and Reader

Many security breahes nowadays use third-party plugins as an attack vector, with Java, Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader being the usual suspects. If you are not using any of them on a regular basis, remove them completely and you will remove the biggest attack vector on your computer.

However, if you still need them because of the good work that they do, compromise by installing only the Java functions you need; opt for HTML5 or use click-to-flash add-ons to replace Adobe Flash and do consider third-party PDF readers that are available for free online.

Read Also: Mastering PDF – 80 Free Tools, Tips And Resources

5. Choose Your Software And Keep It Updated

Installing third-party software will always introduce a new attack vector into your PC so choose what you install carefully. Remove those that are no longer being used. Also, make sure you keep those programs updated as developers will always add in bug fixes and patches with the latest updates.

6. Always Scan Your USB Drives Before Connecting

Perhaps the most common way to spread malware is via the unassuming USB drive. Computers you find in colleges and cybercafes are common victims of USB-transmitted malware as they are passed around unawares by one user to the next. If you have no idea where that USB drive has been, always scan it before using them with your XP machine.

Read Also: 10 Tools To Protect Computer From Infected USB Flash Drives

7. Use A Limited Account

A study done by Avecto states that 92% of severe vulnerabilities reported by Microsoft can be mitigated by removing admin rights from your account. An attacker can only execute an exploit if they can get the access to do so and using a Limited account is the easiest to block them.

Consider creating a Limited account (find out what a Limited account is here) for your day-to-day activities as most of the time you will only be using your admin rights to install or update programs on your computer.

8. Use XP In A Virtual Machine

Here’s another reason many users are reluctant to upgrade their Windows XP to a newer OS version – they lose out on the third-party software that they are using on their Windows XP because a newer version is not available on the latest OS; or they have to repurchase a newer version.

(Image Source: Ars Technica)

If this is the case with you, consider running third-party software on a virtual machine. This will put the OS in its own self contained system within your computer. Microsoft provides a free "XP mode" for those who have Window 7 Professional and above. If you don’t have the version required, try VMware Player, which is free for personal use (you will need a copy of XP to install).

Read Also: Wine + 6 Other Apps To Run Windows Programs On Other Platforms

9. Disconnect From The Internet Completely

When all else fails, and you are bent on keeping your XP machine unchanged, consider cutting off all connection between your computer with the World Wide Web. If you take this route, you can ignore the majority of the tips mentioned above. If the only reason you are running XP is to support legacy software or hardware and you don’t need the internet, simply disconnect.

(Image Source: digitalprotalk)

This will remove virtually all the ways that an attacker can exploit your computer. If they can’t reach it, they can’t attack it.

Conclusion

By following these simple tips, you will be able to reduce the risk of your XP machine being compromised. However, the best way to be safe is to move on to a modern operating system. If the newer Windows isn’t to your liking, consider switching to a Linux distro as they have advanced a lot when it comes to ease of use, plus they are generally safer than the Windows family.

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Samsung Gear Fit will support both vertical and horizontal display orientation after all

After Samsung unveiled the latest members of the Gear family at MWC, there seemed to be a large number of folks that genuinely were more interested in the looks and even feature set of the Gear Fit over the Gear 2 or the Gear 2 Neo.

Part of the appeal of the Fit is that it has a much more attractive design than many smartwatches and even quite a few existing fitness bands. The Fit also has a fairly impressive looking display for a smartband-type of device. On the downside, the display did have a major flaw when we first saw it at MWC.

The Fit was meant to be worn on the wrist, but at MWC we learned that the device only displayed content horizontally, making it difficult to read when actually wearing the device. This seemed like a pretty odd design move, and one that could prove bothersome to future Gear Fit owners. The good news is that Samsung has apparently issued an update to the Gear Fit that resolves the issue by adding a portrait orientation, as you can see in the picture above.

Considering the Gear Fit patch was just issued and the device is already about to hit retail stores, we imagine that the vertical viewing mode won’t be available right out of the box. Of course it probably won’t be too difficult to patch the device for those that decide to pick up the watch.

What do you think, interested in picking up the Gear Fit — or does another smartwatch or fitness band catch your eye, instead?

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Impossible Road arrives on Android after long iOS exclusivity

The intense and addictive, iOS-exclusive action game Impossible Road has finally arrived on Android. The game hit the Google Play Store last Monday and can be bought for $1.99.

Impossible Road involves guiding a white ball, also known as “the Vessel,” along a blue, descending, infinite, and winding road. The player must guide the ball through these winding tracks without falling off. Think of the ball as the car on a roller coaster track but with the car not securely attached to the track. If you have played Mario Kart, playing the game will remind you of the stressful and frustrating Rainbow Road track.

You can keep the ball on the track by tapping the left or right sides of the screen. A good strategy is to keep the ball on the track at all times. You can also let the ball jump off the track and take a shortcut, but be sure to bring your ball back on track. Staying too long in midair will end the game.

Points are earned by passing through checkpoints in the track. There’s a secret way to earn more points in the game. Developers even urge players in its Play Store page to find the secret trick and earn higher scores.

The game was released last year exclusively for iOS and has gained popularity among Apple users since its release.  It won an award as one of the year 2013′s best apps in the Apple App Store.

But Android users can now also join the Impossible Road craze.  The game has earned a 4.6 average star rating since its release in the Google Play Store and has been receiving mostly positive reviews. Some users called for gyroscope support, which will allow the ball to be controlled by tilting the Android device.

Have you tried playing Impossible Road? What’s your highest score?

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T-Mobile CEO Fires Back After Losing BlackBerry Sales Arrangement

An Open Letter – and Offer – to BlackBerry Loyal
By John Legere, President and Chief Executive Officer

April 3, 2014

Being America’s Un-carrier is simply this. It’s about listening to and advocating on behalf of US wireless consumers. That’s it. The simple act that first ignited this Un-carrier revolution – and set T-Mobile apart from the entire US wireless industry – was that we listened to the customer. And that changed everything.

And, of course, that goes for the BlackBerry loyal, too. We hear you and stand with you. We always have and always will. So, obviously, we were disappointed in BlackBerry’s decision this week to end their agreement with us.

But here’s what really matters most for BlackBerry owners. Whether you’re an individual customer or business customer, nothing changes. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

If you’re already with T-Mobile, you can continue to count on us for the great service you’ve come to expect, the regular OS updates, and, of course, America’s fastest nationwide 4G LTE network. None of that changes as far as we’re concerned.

And, if you own any BlackBerry that works on our network and also want the fairness and freedom that comes with being a T-Mobile customer, you can bring in your BlackBerry any time and enjoy Un-carrier benefits like no annual contract, unlimited everything with no overages on our wicked-fast network, no hidden device costs, no upgrade wait – and international roaming at no extra cost. And, don’t forget, you get to enjoy your BlackBerry with all of these Un-carrier advantages on America’s fastest nationwide 4G LTE network.
In fact, to show our appreciation for all current consumers so passionate and loyal to all things BlackBerry, we’re offering a $100 credit toward any new device, including the BlackBerry Q10 or the Z10. And this offer is good through the end of the year. So you can take your time.

One thing you can count on from us: we’ll keep listening to you and finding new ways to meet the needs of BlackBerry users – individuals and businesses – everywhere. But we’re not done. Stay tuned for another Un-carrier offer that gives you more value and even more reasons to stay with America’s fastest growing wireless company.

I’ll always fight for you. And our team remains committed to providing the same great Un-carrier experience to all BlackBerry users. At the end of the day, this has got to be about you – the customer.

HTC One M8 factory resets after 10 unsuccessful unlock attempts

Sterling Keys 2014-04-03T05:00:01Z9 hours ago

Sterling Keys

After finishing his Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Alberta, Sterling made the move to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Within a stone's throw of mountains, ocean, and complete wilderness, he mountain bikes and skis during the day and is hopelessly connected to his phone and computer at all other times. His writing "career" started as he penned about his escapades while skiing and has slowly progressed to freelance marketing and promotion throughout British Columbia. Interested in anything tech and gadget related, he has thoroughly enjoyed his transition of writing for AndroidPIT.

If you’ve ever gone through the pain of trying to get everything restored to your mobile device after having to wipe it clean with a factory reset, you might want to take heed of this “security feature” on the new HTC One M8. If you try to input your lock-screen pattern or password incorrectly 10 consecutive times, the phone will automatically wipe your data from itself. 

Be careful with your new HTC One M8, just just might delete everything on it. / © AndroidPIT

While there is warning and 30 second “cooldown period” provided by the device after unsuccessfully entering in a pattern or password 5 times in a row, it could easily be discarded by someone just playing around with the phone or if your toddler is randomly mashing the screen with their grubby little hands. After that, a message will pop up for each unsuccessful attempt and on the tenth try, all data will be wiped from the device.

Right now, there’s no way for users to disable this setting on the HTC One M8, leaving this feature open to some possible abuse: mishandling by children, practical jokes played by "friends", or just a plan forgetful user who can't remember their exact lock-screen pattern. Check out the following video from the guys over at Phandroid.com for a tutorial on how the wipe actually looks when performed on the device:

One way to prevent losing all the data from your device, just in case this happens to you or you want to avoid all chances that it might, is to store relevant important information and media on a SD card as opposed to internal storage. As well, you could use cloud storage for that important stuff that you want to really make sure you hang on to.

What are your thoughts on this security feature on the new HTC One M8? A little over the top by HTC or some well needed protection?

Via: Amongtech.com Source: Pandroid

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Swish Warm Water to Cool Down Your Mouth After a Spicy Meal

S

If you've just eaten a spicy meal and your mouth is burning, you might think cold water would help you find relief. As it turns out, you want that water to be warm.

How-to illustrator Yumi Sakugawa points out many ways to cool down your mouth—from lemons to fatty milk to honey—but notes that if you don't have anything around, warm water is the best option. You just fill your mouth, swish it around for a little while, and spit it back out. This will help remove the leftover spice from your tongue.

They key thing to remember is spitting. Milk is always preferred because of the casein protein it contains, which counteracts the spicy chemical capsaicin, but any liquid will pick up the spice and move it around. That's useless if you swallow, but if you spit you'll get it out of your mouth and not stuck on the back of your tongue and throat. (More on this at wikiHow.)

9 Ways to Cool Down Your Burning Hot Mouth After Eating Really Spicy Foods | WonderHowTo

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How to Return to Running After an Injury

S

Running injuries can be unfortunately abundant, but it's hard to keep a runner down for very long. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common questions I hear is, "How do I return to running after an injury?"

This post originally appeared on Strength Running.

But it's also an exceptionally complex question and there are always followups:

What type of injury do you have?

Is it chronic or your first time?

Did you run through pain (and make it worse)?

How much time did you take off from running?

So my answers aren't usually the most helpful because I don't know your training background or your level of running experience. Runners that I work with personally will get more specific advice because I know more of their variables and can offer specific solutions.

Recently I wrote about my Achilles tendon injury and how I was back to my pre-injury training volume within a week of being healthy, roughly.

Many were curious how I was able to return to running so soon after my Achilles injury. This post is a case study on how I modified my post-injury training, what worked for me, and how you can apply the same lessons to your running.

Before we get into the exact steps I took, let's be clear that this is a more aggressive approach for two important reasons:

• My training age is 15+ years (which means I can be more aggressive because of my experience level—I really know my body).
• I'm training to run a very competitive marathon in about ten weeks, so it's now or never. I'm willing take risks, though I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.

My comeback will be different than your comeback. My approach is riskier so I don't recommend this same method unless you're experienced and willing to take risks before a major race.

What Affects Your Return to Running After an Injury?

A running "injury" is a nebulous concept and I've written before about how we need to redefine what we actually call an injury. The very nature of your injury dictates whether you need a cautious or aggressive return to running.

It typically depends on four variables:

• The type of injury
• The severity of the injury
• How long you took off from regular running
• The consistency and quality of your treatment approach

These four issues work together to influence whether you're back to running within a week or a month.

Example 1: In 2008 I had severe ITBS and didn't run for six months. Not only was the injury serious, but I delayed my IT Band Syndrome treatment while I wallowed in self-pity. Once I took a more structured approach I finally got healthy, but my return to running took another six months of struggle. It was a long process.

Example 2: My recent Achilles injury was not severe and I caught it early, only running through pain for one short run. It wasn't chronic, my treatment approach was much more aggressive, and my comeback was relatively fast.

That's the type of injury I like to see: one that's resolved quickly!

Runners want to start running as soon as possible, so when I built my injury prevention program, the focus was on preventing injuries in the first place. But if you do suffer an injury, the treatment approaches (for ITBS, Achilles tendinopathy, runner's knee, and plantar fasciitis) are aggressive and designed to get you back to running quickly.

Post-Injury Training: Mileage

Since I'm training for the Boston Marathon, it's more beneficial for me to prioritize mileage than fast workouts. Thankfully, it's also easier to run for mileage after an injury than faster workouts.

Coming back from any injury (or extended period of time off) requires a gradual approach. The first few days of running are simply to establish consistency, evaluate any existing soreness or pain, and get your legs used to running again.

Knowing your "baseline mileage" is helpful here. Increasing your mileage up to your baseline can be done more quickly than the 10% Rule would suggest. Any increases after your baseline must be done more conservatively.

Here's a look at my daily mileage after my injury:

The first few days had low mileage totals—these days were simply to establish consistency. On the first day I ran three miles on the treadmill to test my Achilles. The treadmill provided two benefits: no hills to place extra stress on the tendon and the ability to stop at once if pain occurred.

The daily mileage doesn't always increase though: after seven miles, I cut the next day to five. After my first ten miler, I cut the next day to eight. For the next four days, I tested the Achilles to see if it could handle a normal workload of about ten miles. This is my "baseline" so it's relatively comfortable for me to run this amount.

There's no perfect way to structure a comeback, but my approach includes a few strategies:

• A short test run to see if any pain presented
• 3-4 days of low mileage to establish consistency
• 3-4 days of normal mileage to further establish consistency
• Like Matt Fitzgerald mentions in his book Brain Training, I have a zero-tolerance policy for sharp pain

My goal at first is to simply run every day—the effort on those days is secondary. Once consistency has been established, you can gradually add more advanced training like workouts, long runs, and double sessions.

Just like progression is used to increase training stresses, it should also be used with your return to running.

Post-Injury Workouts

Faster workouts are even less important than overall consistency and mileage when coming back from an injury. My first workout was on the 28th after I had been running slow (except strides) for nearly a week.

I ran four miles of fast work with none of it faster than tempo pace—and three of those miles were at "Goal Marathon" pace or slower. So, not a very taxing workout. Instead, the goal was to simply run fast and see how the Achilles responded.

I followed that workout with a fartlek of 8x30 seconds at about 10k pace. The purpose of this workout was to establish the routine of running faster, twice per week instead of just once. Again, not a very taxing workout.

The pattern of testing each variable is what helps make the process of returning to running more effective.

Run a little bit less than you should. Run a little slower than you normally would. Introduce another training stress (mileage, workouts, frequency of workouts, long runs, etc.) gradually and with a "test" first.

So far, I've run four workouts in the two weeks since my Achilles healed:

• 4 x mile in 6:02, 5:56, 5:54, 5:38, 1' jog recovery
• 8 x 30" at 10k pace, 90" jog recovery
• 4 x 2k in 7:28, 7:23, 7:20, 6:58, 1' jog recovery
• 10' Progression near the end of a 10 mile run

And so far so good! Patience plays a big part of recovery and returning to your normal workload.

Prevention is Easier than Treatment

After an injury, the treatment steps often become means of prevention. Wisely invest 15 minutes a day in injury prevention and I would put cash money on you reducing your injury risk this year by more than half.

A common mistake I see runners make is that they stop all treatment steps after their injury heals. So if the ITB Rehab Routine is instrumental in the healing process, they stop using it while healthy. Big mistake!

Keep integrating treatment steps into your training even after you're healthy. You don't need as much, but a 5k of prevention is worth a marathon of cure. See what I did there?

And of course, if you're like this guy, I offer this coaching advice:

If you think you have no time for prevention work, you'll sooner or later have to find time for injuries.

How to Return to Running After an Injury | Strength Running

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Jason Fitzgerald is a 2:39 marathoner and USATF-certified running coach at Strength Running. Get his latest coaching advice and free injury prevention course here.

Photos and images by Whologwhy, Vestman, Ed Yourdon, Regissercom, and Diamond_Images.

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Andy.

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After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View On What’s Next In Messaging

Editor’s note: Ted Livingston is the Founder and CEO of Kik, a mobile-first company with over 120 million registered users all over the world. Ted started working in mobile in 2007, while he was still studying at the University of Waterloo.

I was driving to a meeting in San Francisco when I got the message: “Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion.” I pulled over and watched as messages started to stream in. Everyone had the same question: Is Facebook crazy? As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S., I gave them all the same answer: “No.” In fact, we had expected something like this for quite some time. And as we’ve now seen with Tango’s $280 million round, led by China’s Alibaba Group, interest in this space clearly isn’t going away anytime soon.

Messaging is a complex topic. It’s also one of the most misunderstood sectors in tech today. What’s the difference between WhatsApp and GChat? Why not just use SMS? Why did Facebook need to buy another messaging app just three years after it had bought Beluga? At the same time, however, messaging promises to be one of the highest-stakes battles in mobile, similar to what search was to the web or what productivity software was to the PC.

So what does messaging mean to mobile?

It’s a question we at Kik have been thinking about for a long time. In fact, given that we launched in 2010, we’ve probably been thinking about it more than almost anyone else. Now, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest purchase, the question seems to be on everyone’s mind. So I thought I’d share with you what I’ve learned over the years. Grab a coffee, because this might take some time.

Advent of the mobile messenger 

This story begins in 2007, when I was working at BlackBerry as one of more than a thousand interns hired each term. The iPhone hadn’t launched yet, and data plans were so expensive that only Wall Street bankers could afford them. At RIM, however, we were all given BlackBerrys with full data plans. We used BBM like crazy. Thanks to MSN Messenger, we were already used to instant messaging – but somehow this was different. It was more immediate, more intimate.

With MSN, you’d always get people who would turn off their computers or leave them at their desks. But now the computer was always with you, always on, and always connected. For the first time, there was no such thing as offline.

Apps such as MSN, Facebook Messenger, and Skype have added mobile access over the years, but their desktop legacies live on: The “offline” setting is always a looming option. With WhatsApp, Kik or even SMS, on the other hand, the messaging communities are tied to the phones. By default, then, there is no such thing as offline – there’s only online, all the time.

So if you’re running five minutes late to meet your friend for coffee, you don’t send them a GChat or a message through Skype. You send them a text. Why? Because you want to maximize the chance they get your message. Only a mobile-only community guarantees everyone will be online, all the time.

If BBM was the first mobile messenger, WhatsApp was the second. It was 2009 and I had just left RIM to build a “Spotify for BlackBerry.” We planned to plug it into BBM to facilitate sharing. But towards the end of 2009, we realized the iPhone was actually going to be a thing, and that our music app needed to be on both BlackBerry and iPhone.

At about the same time, WhatsApp took off. It was basically BBM for iPhone users. Then it turned out they were planning to launch on BlackBerry as well. It was a killer idea. We went to RIM and asked them to launch BBM on iPhone. Not only did we need it for our music app, but we also thought it was the only way to compete with WhatsApp. RIM, however, needed BBM to sell BlackBerrys and chose not to take it cross-platform. We decided to take matters into our own hands and launch our own cross-platform messenger.

Fast forward four years and today the world is a very different place, with thousands of ways to message on a mobile phone. But when it comes to smartphone messengers, there are really only five messengers left in play: WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kakao and Kik. Yes, there are voice apps like Tango and Viber, as well photo apps like Instagram and Snapchat, but when it comes to that base utility of saying “Be there in five,” these are the ones that matter.

These five apps are quite similar, and only differentiate on one of three vectors: identity, region and platform.

Name and place 

For me, the first mobile messenger was BBM, but for most people it was SMS – and SMS worked well. It was mobile only and pre-installed on every phone. The key question for companies in the messaging space was: How do you take users away from SMS? The most obvious answer: make it free.

It’s easy for people in the U.S. to underestimate just how big a deal “free” is, because for most of us SMS is already free. Why would I use WhatsApp when I can just text? Because in most other countries around the world, texting is expensive.

That’s why WhatsApp was compelling: it was SMS, but it cost nothing. There was just one catch: your friends needed to be on WhatsApp, as well.

As a result, WhatsApp spread like crazy. In Asia, some companies reacted quickly and were able to compete. In China, Tencent launched WeChat; in Japan, Naver (actually a Korean company) launched Line; and Kakao sprung up as a startup in South Korea to launch KakaoTalk. For the most part, though, WhatsApp consumed the world. Except the U.S.

Aside from not being free, SMS has another problem: you can’t block people. For most people that’s okay. But there are times when you would like people who encounter you on Instagram, Tumblr, or SoundCloud to get in touch with you privately. Posting your phone number on such services is out of the question, because then you open yourself up to all sorts of spam and calls from weirdoes. Once that happens, the only way to stop the unwanted contact is to get a new number.

We chose to base Kik accounts on usernames, so you don’t have to hand out your phone number. As a result, we’re now seeing people share their Kik usernames to facilitate connections across a variety of services, including social apps, gaming apps and fitness apps.

The companies behind some of these other apps have seen all this activity and tried to build their own messaging right into the product. Take, for instance, Instagram Direct or Twitter’s Direct Messages. So far, those moves haven’t really worked out. People don’t want a messenger for each app they use – they want one messenger for all the apps they use.

Will consumers ever want more? 

I remember being at RIM when they had a simple, singular vision for Blackberry: email on your phone. That was it. And it worked for a while. BlackBerry grew faster than everyone else and became bigger than everyone else. When the iPhone came out, we all laughed.

“Look at how bad the battery is!”

“Look how slow the email is!”

“All those apps! Who even wants apps? They just get in the way of email.”

For a while, RIM was right. Smartphones were a big enough leap that consumers needed a simple value proposition like “email on your phone” in order to understand them. Soon, though, consumers came to understand email on your phone. Eventually, they would have a new question: “What else can I do on my phone?”

WhatsApp feels to be in a similar place right now. The company’s simple “SMS but free” proposition is lighting the world on fire, but at some point will consumers find that offering mundane? Will they start to ask: “What else can I do with SMS?” We’re about to find out.

Each of the four remaining messengers has a beachhead that WhatsApp can’t touch. Line has Japan. KakaoTalk has South Korea. WeChat has China. Kik has cross-app chat. So none of us are going away. But we each want more than that. We’re all hungry to win, hungry to find a way to take users away from WhatsApp. And each of us has settled on the same way to do it: by building a platform.

Platform: Simplicity with differentiation 

A platform lets you maintain simplicity for people who only want messaging, while providing for those who want a little something more. Do you just want to chat with your friends? Okay, just do that. Oh, you want to play a game with your friends? Sure, try this. Want to shop for shoes with your friends now? How about this…

Platforms let us maintain the simplicity of a core messenger while also creating differentiation. On Kik, you can chat with your friends, play Words with Friends, and listen to music with them too. On KakaoTalk, you can sell digital items. On Line, you’ll soon be able to create and sell your own stickers. Using WeChat in China, you can pay for taxis and coffees right from the app.

Once you add developers into the mix, an entirely new computing ecosystem will develop. Thanks to the enormous spread of smartphones and mobile Internet connections — we’re looking at 5 billion mobile phone users by 2017 — it’s an ecosystem that could surpass anything we’ve seen so far, including Windows and Facebook. This is where “messaging apps” are heading.

This platform play has long been the game plan for messengers like Kik whose platform is, uniquely, built in HTML5. We all started off as “SMS but free,” but that meme is fast becoming “SMS but more.” We’ve learned from BlackBerry taking too long to respond to the iPhone that, if the big shift does happen again, for WhatsApp it may well be too late.

Two key questions 

We always knew messaging would be a valuable space, but somehow a $19 billion acquisition has made that all the more real. From here on out, there are only two questions that matter.

1. Will people ever want more from their messenger than just free SMS?
2. What’s the best way to build a platform?

If the answer to the first question is “no,” then WhatsApp has likely already won.

If the answer to the first question is “yes,” then WhatsApp has likely already lost, and it will be up to the other four companies to fight it out.

Then you’re left with the second question, which is the more interesting, and more lucrative, one. WhatsApp doesn’t have an answer for question two, so the answer will have to come from somewhere else. For us at Kik, that’s the really exciting part. That’s the future of messaging.

After Acquisition, OpenTable Plans To Shut Down Ness On April 21

Ness, the personalized restaurant recommendation app acquired by OpenTable last month, now has an expiration date. The company announced that the app would be discontinued on April 21, just a few months after the acquisition first was announced.

OpenTable paid $17.3 million for Ness in early February, as part of a string of acquisitions that also included Quickcue, JustChalo, and Foodspotting. The company plans to integrate Ness’ recommendations technology into its own suite of apps.

According to a post on the Ness webpage, users will be able to export their data, as well as get a copy of ranks and reviews.

HTC One M8 set to drop soon after the announcement on March 25

Anthony Muzonzini 2014-03-20T00:18:29Z2 days ago

Anthony Muzonzini

Currently living out in the East Coast. When not on the AndroidPIT grind you can usually find me turning up or play footie.

The release date for the HTC One M8 has been confirmed by Carphone and Warehouse and it is set to drop on the day the phone is announced which is going to be March 25th. This means the arrival of the phone is less than a week away for those of you in the UK at least.

The New HTC One M8 is set to drop on March 25th / © hamdir, XDA-Developers

The British retailer recently revealed that six Carphone and Warehouse stores will stock the new phone from HTC One as soon as the launch events in New York and London end. This means that they will be available right from the get go.

The press release from the company read:

"Shortly after [the event], the new HTC One (M8) handsets will be transported directly from the venue of the launch announcement to six Carphone Warehouse stores in London, Westfield Stratford, Westfield White City, Oxford Circus, Centrepoint and Tottenham Court Road stores will all be hosting special events celebrating the HTC launch with entertainment and giveaways as well as the first chance for customers to get their hands on the new device.”

Customers can also buy the HTC One M8 over the phone at that time. This is before the phone becomes fully available online, and from all Carphone and Warehouse stores.

A spokesperson for the company then said that the 2013 version of the HTC One was an award winning device that set a high bar for design in 2013. The company hopes that the new HTC One M8 will continue that trend and ensure that HTC remains a heavy hitting smartphone maker.

The retailer from the UK also provided confirmation of the name of the phone in the HTC One M8 although the company hasn’t disclosed how much the phone will cost unlocked as well as on a carrier contract.

We don’t really know whether this is an exclusive although we suspect that other companies will have the phone in stock on the same day also.

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Qik Is Shutting Down In April, Three Years After Being Acquired By Skype

Qik, a company that was very early on in the stream-live-video-from-your-phone trend that popped up and then quickly faded around 2008-2009, is being retired by its parent company, Skype. Skype acquired Qik back in 2011 for upwards of $100 million.

Why the shutdown? To be blunt: Skype got what they wanted out of the deal, so Qik is redundant now. While Skype doesn’t make direct use of the phone-to-web broadcasting functionality that Qik focused on, they say they’ve integrated core bits of Qik’s video messaging technology into Skype.

While Qik as a service never got hugely popular (blasting videos to your friends in real-time is only really fun if all of your friends happen to all be free at the same time), the company built some damned cool technology. These guys were doing video recording on the iPhone before the iPhone even officially supported video recording (remember that?).

If you’ve still got any videos lurking on Qik’s servers, you’ll need to get them off by April. Given that Qik pitched itself as a means of sharing things like your kid’s first steps with friends and family in real time, there’s probably quite a few precious moments still tucked away on the service.

[Personal anecdote: Qik was one of the first startups I ever spoke to when I first started writing for TechCrunch. Seeing them fade away is a bit sad, but I'm sure their 100+ million dollar exit lessens the sting for many who worked on it.]

Leap Motion Lays Off 10% Of Its Workforce After Missing On First Year Sales Estimates

Leap Motion won a lot of buzz early on for its motion controller, which is designed to make it possible for users to interact with their computer through gestures alone. The early buzz and pre-order interest led to a lot of growth, with the company swelling to 120 employees at its peak. But disappointing reviews when the hardware actually shipped took some of the wind out of the startup’s sails. Now, CEO and co-founder Michael Buckwald tells TechCrunch they’ve had to make some tough choices, dig in and prepare for a business plan where success is defined over the next decade, not in a first production run.

Leap Motion has been forced to part ways with 10 percent of their employees, including personnel ranging from telephone support staff to high-ranking executives, in a bid to get to a place where its spend on human resources is more in line with its new fiscal reality, Buckwald explained in a telephone interview. But, he’s quick to stress, none of said employees are on the product, design or engineering teams, and instead are primarily involved in sales and marketing.

“In order for David [Holz, Leap Motion co-founder] and I to feel financially responsible, we were forced to make a difficult decision and cut about 10 percent of the team from the marketing and support side,” he said. “So that we could continue to hire for engineering and product roles as we roll out our version 2 software and as we think about moving into new spaces and new form factors outside of the PC.”

Buckwald called the decision “extremely difficult,” and credited his “amazing team” but also noted that since Leap Motion had anticipated millions of units in holiday sales, many of the roles they’d hired for ended up being superfluous. The startup’s predictions for year one device sales had been on the order of up to 5 million; in the end, the first year for Leap Motion brought in sales of much closer to 500,000 units.

“We really had no idea what our expectations were [around holiday sales],” Buckwald said. “We didn’t know whether we were going to sell 100,000 units or 5 million units, and that was very scary. So we made a sort of best guess and we built up the team around that guess. We still ended up with a number that we’re really happy with and that, from a revenue perspective, gives us plenty of options in terms of continue to expand to new retailers and add new OEM partners, and continue to run and grow the company.”

As for what’s next, Buckwald is seeking more talent on the product side, as mentioned above. And the startup’s main job is to rebound from the perceived disappointment of its early hype to chart a more realistic path to success. Considering the company’s goals, which include reinventing the way we interact with computing devices, that means looking at things with a more long-term perspective than many operating in the startup space might be used to.

“In terms of how we see the technology, it’s always been about a five- or ten-year path to executing on that vision, and the peripheral as it exists now and the v. 1 software is an amazing device for many things, but it’s also the very, very, very first step in that direction,” Buckwald explained. “Both through software updates like our v. 2, and by creating new hardware and moving into form factors outside of the PC, that’s how we realize that vision.”

The version 2 software Buckwald describes aims to answer some early user complaints, in part by offering a continuous visual representation of a user’s hands on-screen while they’re using their Leap Motion Controller across applications, so that they don’t get confused by interface and control paradigm changes. The company has also already released 13 SKUs of Leap Motion-enabled PCs with OEM partner HP, and that partnership is alive and well according to Buckwald, with other manufacturer partners set to come on board soon.

Buckwald is frank and upfront about his company’s early missteps, which mostly sprung out of impossible consumer expectations for a device that looked immensely promising pre-launch, and ended up being well-executed early adopter or niche hobbyist hardware instead of the next mouse or joystick. And while Leap Motion may have suffered some reversals, it also created and continues to build tech that will likely feature significantly in one way or another into the future of computer interaction models.

Twitter Goes Dark In Turkey Hours After The Country’s PM Threatened To “Wipe Out” The Service

After the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan promised that he would “wipe out” Twitter after it apparently ignored court orders asking the site to remove certain corruption allegations, the service has gone dark in the country.

The situation is developing: a site that lets the public track decisions made by the courts over Internet communications indicates that today the “İstanbul Cumhuriyet Başsavcılığı (TMK 10. Maddesi İle Görevli) has been implemented by Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı” — it’s the most recent of four Twitter-related decisions made by the court.

A Twitter spokesperson tells us, “We’re looking into this now.” Twitter’s @policy and (very little used) @twitterTurkey accounts are also providing updates.

So far, that has offered users a way of posting tweets by way of SMS messages:

According to earlier reports, the prime minister has been threatening to go after social media sites in his battle to respond to allegations being made on them — specifically Twitter and YouTube — linking him to a corruption scandal. The comments have become increasingly heated as the country gears up for an election on March 30.

“We will wipe out all of these,” he said at a rally in reference to Twitter and other sites where people have been speaking out against him.

This is not the first time that Twitter has been caught in political crossfire and shut down in the process. It was blocked in Egypt in 2011, Pakistan in 2012, and China in 2009, among many other incidents. In France, the government has been battling long and hard with the site over how much influence it should have in forcing it to take down certain tweets and accounts if they violate French law, which sometimes runs counter to wider freedom of speech arguments.

Ilhan Tanir, a Turkish analyst based in Washington who was one of the first to highlight the block, has also published what he says is a statement from the U.S. State Department over the block:

“As we have previously stated, we remain very concerned by any suggestion that social media sites could be shut down. Democracies are strengthened by the diversity of public voices,” the statement reads. “An independent and unfettered media is an essential element of democratic, open societies, and crucial to ensuring official transparency and accountability.”