If you're out of non-stick spray or just want to go a more organic route, you can use certain vegetables or a lemon to stop lean meats from sticking to your grill.
It's warming up outside and summer is just around the corner, which means it's time to fire up the grill and have a backyard cookout with your closest friends and family.
If you've ever cooked lean meats on a grill, you know they're more prone to sticking than your more fatty meats. To make your grilling experience a little more enjoyable this year, here's an easy, no-cost trick that will keep your salmon unstuck.
How to make your grill non-stick
If you forgot to pick up some non-stick spray at the store, don't worry. If you want to prevent food from sticking to the grates of your grill, you just need a potato and a fork. Here's how it's done:
Heat the grill to your desired temperature.
Slice a potato in half.
Skewer the end of the potato with a two-prong meat fork (a dinner fork will work just as well), leaving the inside of the potato exposed.
Raise the lid on the grill and rub the exposed center of the potato on the grate. Make sure to cover the entire cooking surface.
This process, as explained by YouTube user JohnsonInc999, releases the starches in the potato, creating a barrier between the grates and the food.
If you don't have a potato on hand, it will also work with an onion or lemon. But keep in mind that this will have a more obvious effect on the taste of the food.
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LG G7 ThinQ will come with dedicated Google Assistant button
It’s the first phone to have a physical button that calls up only Google’s digital assistant, and it follows Samsung's own Bixby button on the Galaxy S9.
The supposed LG G7, revealed in a tweet by proficient leaker Evan Blass.
@evleaks
The upcoming LG G7 ThinQ smartphone will have a unique, physical connection to Google Assistant.
The flagship phone, slated to be unveiled in a New York event on May 2, will sport a dedicated hardware button specifically for Google's digital assistant, according to people familiar with the smartphone. The Google Assistant button will be on the left side of the phone, while the power button is on the right. The fingerprint reader remains on the back.
The G7 ThinQ is the first smartphone to commit a physical button to Google. It follows a similar strategy employed by Samsung, which placed a specific physical button to call up its Bixby assistant.
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The easy access to Google Assistant is part of the broader push by LG to sell artificial intelligence as a bigger differentiator. The use of AI has been a key theme for LG this year, from the integration of Google Assistant to its televisions, to the use of AI to recognize images shot by the V30S ThinQ's camera.
It's not the only one -- touting artificial intelligence capabilities has been the trend du jour of the tech world. Companies like Huawei and Samsung talk about AI in their products, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed during his Congressional testimony that AI would help rid his social network of fake and harmful content.
Like the V30S, there will be unique custom LG commands that you can ask of Google Assistant.
The G7 ThinQ's Google Assistant button can't be reprogrammed to call up another app, similar to the Samsung Bixby button. That will likely irk users who prefer to choose which app that extra button can activate.
An LG spokesman declined to comment on the story, only pointing to the teaser announcement for the phone.
Google Assistant has long been a core part of many Android phones -- you typically long press the home button to call it up. But this marks a more aggressive push to get people to use the digital assistant. You could also squeeze the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL to call up the assistant.
Google is in a battle to make its assistant a key part of our lives, pushing it in televisions, smartphones and its Google Home family of smart speakers. On the other side is Amazon and its Alexa assistant, found in its Echo speakers and a host of products ranging from cars to refrigerators.
LG, meanwhile, is in a war for relevancy. The predecessor to the G7 ThinQ, the G6, was a flop in the face of the redesigned Galaxy S8, and LG badly needs a phone that can turn some heads. The company has shifted its strategy to include more moderate updates like the LG V30S ThinQ.
A leak from mobile tipster Evan Blass shows a smartphone that emulates the iPhone X notch, like so many other Android phones this year. At least with the Google Assistant button, there's one trait that lets it stand out from the pack.
The story originally ran at 5 a.m. PT.
Update, 1:35 p.m. PT: To include additional background on the Pixel and an LG response.
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Tribeca Film Festival has everything a geek could wish for
The festival is packing in more VR than ever, many of its traditional films have a geeky bent, and even HBO's Westworld held its second-season premiere here.
Evan Rachel Wood, who stars in Westworld, attended the show's second-season premiere Thursday at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Critics who say VR has hit a brick wall aren't making it to the film-festival circuit much.
The Tribeca Film Festival, which kicked off in New York earlier this week, unveils its VR-heavy Immersive program to the public Friday. And it's the biggest one yet.
"We have 33 [projects], two more than we've ever had, and that was not intentional. I was going for less," Loren Hammonds, one of the curators of the festival's Immersive program, said in an interview this month. "But there's so much good work."
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Tribeca's Immersive program has 33 pieces this year, the most ever.
Sarah Tew/CNET
When we talk about VR's challenges, the scarcity of quality content is a persistent issue. VR has been one of the buzziest tech areas in the last five years, as giants such as Sony, HTC, Samsung, Google and Facebook-owned Oculus have poured resources into launching head-mounted devices that transport viewers into a digital world. But investment in VR media has been more limited. Premium VR experiences, especially compared with gaming, are harder to make, harder to fund and harder for people to find.
Still, VR's unique storytelling capabilities have led to a renaissance of creativity among artists and filmmakers. As a result, the most compelling VR -- rather than ending up on your living room headset -- has tended to land in museums and film festivals.
That means regular people -- and even tech diehards -- are often missing out on the best VR has to offer.
"We're finally at a space in VR now where it's sophisticated enough so ... an artist's vision can be seen and can be made," Yelena Rachitsky, executive producer of experiences at Oculus, said in an interview Wednesday.
In addition to virtual reality, the Tribeca Film Festival has a high number of film screenings likely to appeal to tech geeks. And they aren't all dystopian nightmares for once!
As in the past, Tribeca will pack VR and mixed-reality experiences into a space the size of a basketball court at its hub in Spring Street Studios. Its "Virtual Arcade" lineup includes 21 world-premiere VR and augmented-reality exhibits, as well as five "Storyscape" experiences in the festival competition.
The festival is adding a new VR element this year called Tribeca Cinema360. You can get tickets to four synchronized-start curated collections of 360-degree mobile pieces, and watch them all together while seated in a theater. It's an experiment that tries to tackle a few of the main practical problems of film-festival VR exhibits: the background noise and the time you spend waiting in line to try one of the experiences.
Chalkroom flies the viewer through words, drawings, and stories written in chalk by artist Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang.
Sarah Tew/CNET
This year's Tribeca has a rising flow of well-known names from traditional film and art. Legendary director Terrence Malick and The Hills Have Eyes director Alexandre Aja both have experiences at the fest (Aja actually has two), as does artist Laurie Anderson, who brings a piece called Chalkroom.
High-profile actors are lending their voices to a number of pieces, including Lupita Nyong'o in an animal-sanctuary documentary, My Africa (where you get to feed a baby elephant); Alicia Vikander in Arden's Wake: Tide's Fall, an expanded version of Penrose Studio's post-apocalyptic fairy tale that premiered at last year's TFF; Rosario Dawson in punk-rock adventure BattleScar; and actual punk-rock goddess Patti Smith in Spheres: Pale Blue Dot.
Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has also collaborated with VR heavyweight Chris Milk of Within on a social, interactive experience that lets you create music in a farcical land of percussive lemmings and cows that fart guitar-solo rainbows. Look for the people in white coveralls by the project titled Lambchild Superstar: Making Music in the Menagerie of the Holy Cow.
My Africa takes viewers to an elephant sanctuary for play with a baby elephant.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Two projects incorporate interactive experiences and live humans. Jack is a collaboration between VR animation powerhouse Baobab Studios and Mathias Chelebourg, whose previous project Alice generated buzz at the the Venice Film Festival for incorporating live theater actors into an immersive fable. I'm putting my chips on Jack as the piece at TFF that's hardest to get into, followed closely by Hero, a piece that premiered at Sundance earlier this year to acclaim. Tribeca installed the project -- which recreates a town-square bombing -- on a separate floor from the rest of the Immersive program to accommodate its large scale.
Westworld, HBO's returning sci-fi series, enjoyed a glitzy red-carpet premiere of its second-season opener episode at the festival Thursday, three nights before it airs. The event brought out stars Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Thandie Newton and James Marsden, as well as creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.
Martin Freeman stars in a Netflix zombie-apocalypse movie Cargo.
Matt Nettheim/Netflix
Cargo, a zombie apocalypse movie starring Martin Freeman, also premiered Thursday to a red-carpet opening. The film will be released by Netflix in theaters and online. But unlike Westworld, which will available for one and all to see this weekend, Cargo won't be widely available for another month. People near New York can still try for rush tickets at one of its three remaining screenings.
Starting Friday, General Magic brings some old-school Apple credibility to Tribeca. The film is a documentary about a company with the same name as the title, which spun off of Apple in the 1980s. Bringing together some of the brightest tech minds of that era, General Magic shipped its first handheld wireless personal communicator in 1994, and it was a complete failure. The film should provide plenty of sidelong glimpses at Apple back in the day.
In Braid, a psychological horror flick, technology doesn't have much of a role to play -- except when it comes to financing. Braid was funded by a equity crowd sale using cryptocurrency, allegedly the first feature-length movie to raise money that way. In addition to screenings of the film, the filmmaker will join a panel discussing blockchain and cryptocurrency in film financing
American Meme, which premieres late in the festival on April 27, is a documentary about social media stars' lives when they're not pimping themselves out. Apparently the Fat Jew maybe hates his life.
Tech and geek potpourri
Finally, a number of films deal with subjects that might hold some special appeal for the techy or geeky. Netizens is a documentary about three women -- Tina Reine, Carrie Goldberg and Anita Sarkeesian -- who are fighting online abuse and harassment. Mary Shelley is a "lush Gothic period piece about the author of Frankenstein and what led to the writing of the novel. Jonathan is a sci-fi movie with dreamboat Ansel Elgort playing twins, and The Bleeding Edge is a documentary about crazy medical technology that may make you cringe (in a good way).
Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.
Blockchain Decoded: CNET looks at the tech powering bitcoin -- and soon, too, a myriad of services that will change your life.
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Be respectful, keep it clean and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion.
Be respectful, keep it clean and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion.