Top 10 hangover foods

Realbuzz

http://www.realbuzz.com/ 

Marmite

One reason many of us feel so bad the morning after a drinking session is because alcohol depletes your system of essential nutrients, including B vitamins. A lack of B vitamins can cause anxiety and depression, so try munching on Marmite - a rich source of the vitamin B complex - to lift your mood. As an added benefit, Marmite has a high sodium content which can help replace the salts lost through drinking alcohol. Try the savoury spread on toast for an added fix of carbs.

Watermelon

Not only does alcohol deplete your body of nutrients, it can also lead to low blood sugar levels, which may leave you feeling weak and shaky. To counteract this, try snacking on watermelon, which is not only high in fructose but is also water-rich to boost hydration. On top of this, watermelon is high in many essential nutrients, including vitamin C, B-vitamins and magnesium.

Ginger

If too much alcohol has you feeling queasy, ginger is the perfect food to help settle your stomach and relieve nausea. While you may not feel much like chewing on the food in its original form, you could try adding some grated ginger to hot water for a ginger tea, blending into a fresh fruit or vegetable juice, or snacking on ginger biscuits for a stomach-soothing treat.

Eggs

Scrambled, fried or boiled, eggs are a popular hangover breakfast, and the good news is they are a great choice for beating the nastiest of hangovers. Firstly, eggs are extremely rich in protein, which helps raise mood-boosting serotonin levels as well as helping to reduce nausea. Furthermore, eggs are rich in an amino acid called cystine, which helps fight against the alcohol-induced toxins that contribute to your hangover.

Bananas

Bananas are packed with potassium and magnesium, two of the minerals often depleted in our bodies when alcohol is consumed. A lack of potassium in the body can lead to nausea, weakness and tiredness, so stocking up on bananas can help reduce these classic hangover symptoms. As an added bonus, bananas are natural antacids so great for reducing stomach acid, and are good for providing a boost of energy if you have a busy day ahead.

Soup

One of the most important steps for beating a hangover is getting your body rehydrated, and this can be done through what you eat as much as what you drink. To up your fluids and sodium levels and get a shot of nutrients all at once, try some health-boosting vegetable or miso soup. As an added benefit, soup is easy on the stomach so good if you're feeling a bit queasy.

Oats

Due to the diuretic effects of alcohol, the body loses many essential minerals and vitamins during a heavy drinking session. Luckily, oats can provide you with many of these nutrients, including B vitamins (good for the liver and mood) and essential minerals magnesium, calcium and iron. On top of this, oats can help neutralise acidity levels in the body, cleanse the liver, absorb toxins and slowly raise blood sugar levels, making a bowl of porridge the perfect hangover breakfast.

Fruit juice

If you're feeling a bit queasy at the thought of food, then this is the cure for you. While it's great to line your stomach with food if you can, to replace lost vitamins, raise blood sugar levels and rehydrate your body, you can't do much better than a glass of fresh juice. Not only is juice good for immediate relief, the fructose will also help speed up the removal of alcohol from your blood.

Sardines

If you're craving something savoury, sardines on toast could be the perfect morning-after breakfast. A major cause of hangovers is an imbalance of electrolytes, and sardines are rich in many of these vital minerals, including sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium and calcium. In addition to this, sardines are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which are great for protecting the liver as well as lifting the mood.

Coconut water

Many hangover sufferers swear by sports drinks as a way to hydrate the body and help rebalance electrolytes. However, sports drinks are often carbonated, which can irritate the stomach, and packed with refined sugars. For a natural alternative to sports drinks, try sipping on some coconut water, which contains essential electrolytes (including calcium, potassium and magnesium) to boost hydration, and is also soothing for the stomach.

How to extend your smartphone’s battery life ??

By Tecca | Today in Tech – Tue, Dec 20, 2011

 

Tips and tricks to make sure your most necessary gadget keeps going as long as you do

No matter what type of smartphone you have, the device can serve as your MP3 player, digital camera, gaming system, and even your TV while you're out and about — as long as you have battery power. If it seems like smarter phones are getting less life out of their batteries... you're absolutely right. Smartphones can help you get a lot done while traveling, but if you're doing a lot on one in a day, you're apt to see your screen go dark long before the sun goes down.

Watching out for a few small things during your day, however, can help extend battery life on your trusty device and make sure you've got enough juice to make it all day and well into the night.

Mixed signals
It takes extra juice for your smartphone to search for a data connection. If you're somewhere where you won't get a signal, like an airplane or subway, putting your phone in airplane mode or turning it off altogether will prevent it from draining your battery. Turning your phone on does require a bit of extra power, so it's best to save shutting it off for times when you plan to leave it off for a while, rather than something like a 20-minute subway ride to work in the morning. Thinking of it as car mode or subway mode instead of airplane mode might just be the mental trick you need!

Likewise, turn off wifi when you don't need it. When it's active, your phone scans for available wifi connections constantly, which kills battery life. If you're using the wifi in a coffee shop or bookstore, remember to disable that connection when you're done to avoid draining your battery while you're on the road.

Your battery bleeds faster when you're inattentive

Focus on the task at hand
Sure, you can have your email open, search for directions to a local restaurant, watch a video on YouTube, and play Angry Birds at the same time — but chances are you're really only focused on one of those tasks. Everything you have open on your phone is using some amount of battery power. Try to focus on doing just one thing at a time on your phone, and close unnecessary applications to keep them from draining your battery.

Things like your GPS and the bluetooth connection you use to connect to your hands-free device in the car gobble up a ton of battery power and are of no use to you unless you're doing a few specific tasks. 

Bright future
Bright screens look great but are a huge drain on your phone's battery. To stretch your phone's life, go into the controls or settings and dim the backlight or brightness of your screen. While the dimmest setting might be difficult to read (especially if you're somewhere brightly lit), something toward the middle will extend your battery life without putting too much strain on your eyes. If your phone has an auto-brightness option, using that can be a one-step solution to balancing battery life and ease of reading.

Along those same lines, try to avoid using animated backgrounds on your phone. Remember, the less you ask of your phone, the less it draws on your battery.

Bad vibrations
It takes more battery power for your phone to vibrate than it does to ring. While you absolutely want to have your phone on vibrate (or turned off) when you're at a movie or in a meeting, keeping your ringer on at other times can help extend battery life.

Mandatory nap time
Just as you would with a toddler, the easiest way to make sure your smartphone's battery lasts all night is to give it a nap at some point during the day. If you're headed into a meeting for a few hours, turn off your phone and leave it in your desk. Likewise, if you're out to dinner with close friends or on a date, turn off your phone and focus on your companions. Not only will you look like a better employee and friend for focusing on the people around you in real life, you'll also save that much more juice for later.

Still having trouble?
If you still find yourself running out of battery life before the end of the day, plug into a charging bag or use an external battery pack such as Morphie's JuicePack to strap on some extra power for the road.

Review: It's not an iPhone 5, but so what?

By RACHEL METZ - AP Technology Writer |

Related Content

• Enlarge PhotoIn this photo taken Monday Oct. 10, 2011, Siri, the new virtual assistant, is displayed …

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — To some people, Apple's new iPhone 4S isn't the overhaul they have been hoping for. Its model number, which doesn't include a "5," stinks of the status quo.
That's ridiculous.

Sure, the 4S doesn't render the iPhone 4 obsolete, and on the surface they're nearly identical. But with a faster processor, new software, a voice-activated personal assistant and a souped-up camera, it's a major improvement.

The 4S will be available Friday in black or white. It will cost $199 to $399, depending on storage space. It requires a two-year service contract with Verizon Wireless, Sprint or AT&T.
If you have an iPhone 4, you may want to hold on to it for now. But if you're sporting an older model such as the 3GS or considering making the leap to an iPhone from another type of handset, it's an excellent excuse to buy one.

The coolest new feature on the 4S is Siri, a software-based personal assistant who responds to your voice in a somewhat robotic, yet soothing female tone.

Siri can do all sorts of things, from setting your alarm clock to finding a good local sushi joint to playing DJ with your music. She can't bring up websites, but she can search the Web for pretty much anything.
Once you let her know who you are and where you live, she can even do complex tasks such as reminding you to call your boyfriend when you get home, helped by the phone's location technologies such as GPS. She can understand conversational English, which is great because I was able to speak as I normally would (though I did have to enunciate well). This means you can say things like, "what's happening today?" or "what's going on today?" and she'll let you know what's on your calendar.

She's also a dictation dynamo, transcribing emails and texts much better than a phone running Google Inc.'s Android software. It would be awesome if she could intelligently insert punctuation marks, but she does get them if you tell her "period" or "exclamation point."

For a particularly difficult test, I read a random paragraph from a copy of "The New Yorker" to the 4S and to an Android smartphone. Siri didn't get all the words correct, but she overwhelmingly beat the competition.
Of course, after spending all this time together, I wanted to know all about Siri. I asked her a bunch of personal questions, with mixed results. Her favorite color is something she doesn't know how to say — "sort of greenish, but with more dimensions." She changed the subject when I asked if she was seeing anyone.
Note for foul-language fans: Siri understands profanities, but she may chastise you. She did this to me, so I asked whether she had a problem with my language. She told me to get back to work. I apologized.

Beyond Siri, I was happy to see a better camera on the 4S, which has an 8-megapixel lens compared with 5 megapixels on the iPhone 4. My shots had sharper details as a result. The new camera can also take pictures faster, and a new lens gathers more light so pictures shot in dim lighting look better.

The addition of a camera icon on the phone's lock screen makes it easier to start snapping. Just double tap on the "home" button when the phone is asleep to bring up the icon, and tap that to open up the camera. Also, there's finally a physical camera button on the iPhone as the 4S's volume-up button does double duty.
You can even record high-definition videos in 1080p on the 4S — the best resolution currently available on a consumer camera.

The iPhone 4S has the latest version of Apple's mobile software, iOS 5, which seems geared toward making the phone even easier to use.

One of the best additions to iOS 5 is iMessage, which lets you send texts, photos or videos to other Apple devices over Wi-Fi or your wireless carrier's data network. That makes it easier to send texts to iPads and other devices that aren't phones. It also saves you texts, if you're not on an unlimited text plan.

With the iOS 5 upgrade, swiping the top of the screen now brings up a handy notification page, which shows you things such as appointments, reminders, weather and stock quotes.

IOS 5 also gets points for allowing you to step away from your computer: You can set up your iPhone and receive software updates on the device itself, without plugging it in.

In addition, it includes Apple's new iCloud content-syncing software, which can store your content online and push it wirelessly to your devices. If you buy lots of digital content from Apple, you'll like how it can automatically add songs, apps and e-books from Apple's iBookstore to all your iCloud-connected devices. Unfortunately, it doesn't do this with TV shows or movies, so you'll have to go into iTunes on the device to download them or sync the content from a computer.

The iPhone 4S's performance is noticeably bumped up by a new dual-core A5 chip, which is the same processor in the latest iPad. With this chip, the phone can process graphics and complete other tasks much faster. Web pages, especially graphics-heavy ones, loaded faster than they do on the iPhone 4
Call quality was decent over Verizon Wireless' network, though it sounded a bit flat. Calls are supposed to be improved on the 4S with the inclusion of two antennas that the phone can use to receive or send data.

With location services on and using a combination of Wi-Fi and 3G cellular service, I got about six hours of copious texting, websurfing, video-watching and calling out of the 4S before the battery needed recharging. Given this, it should hold up fine during a day of normal use.

If you have an iPhone but don't want to trade up to the 4S, you're not entirely left out: iOS 5, which includes iCloud, will be available Wednesday as a free update for the iPhone 4 and 3GS, both iPad models and later versions of the iPod Touch.

If you don't have an iPhone, however, the 4S is a great one to get, even if its name doesn't include a "5."