Every time you watch a video, YouTube shows you a dozen more in the sidebar, most of them weirder and worse than what you're watching. They're obnoxious and distracting, they can lead kids to inappropriate videos, and according to a Wall Street Journal test, they tend to get more extreme the more you click. Here's how to hide them.

When we rounded up our staff's Weekly Upgrades last Saturday, our editors were giving in to the pull of Glossier, revisiting the Snuggie, cutting back on booze, and boosting our home Wi-Fi.

The holiday season can be a saccharine overload - consider the case of heiress Sunny von Bulow, who fell into a comatose state from which she'd never wake following a 1982 Christmas celebration. Authorities accused her husband Claus of attempting to murder her by injecting her with insulin. Claus maintained that Sunny had, like so many of us during the holiday festivities, merely overindulged - in her case with an eggnog/barbiturate cocktail.

One jury found Claus guilty. Another found him innocent. Sunny died, still in a coma, in 2008. A very good movie, Reversal of Fortune, was made about the whole thing. It's a much better movie than Love Actually, Miracle on 34th Street, or any other Christmas movie I can think of except maybe Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

Everyone has that one friend that can tell you bands you'd like once they hear which ones you already dig. If you don't, Gnoosic fills the void. The service asks for three bands you like and returns one artist recommendation.

Web: If you want to know which books should be on your reading list, then sign up for The Fussy Librarian. Set up your preferences and you will get daily emails with recommendations for books, along with links to buy the ebooks on a number of stores.

Finding a new book to read isn't always as simple as it sounds. After all, you have millions to choose from on any given topic, and Amazon's recommendation system only goes so far. BookRx is a web app that scans your tweets and looks at who you follow to recommend books.

If you're having trouble finding a gift for someone, GiftMating can help you narrow down the list. The web service uses Amazon's recommendations database to help you choose something appropriate.

Yelp can be a great place to research restaurants and other businesses, but the reviews you see on a page aren't the only reviews for that business. Yelp's hidden some others away, and sometimes they can help you make a more informed decision.

If you're a beer fan, you know there's a wide world of craft brews that span styles, flavours and brands. While most of us have one or two go-to brews we enjoy whenever they're available, if you want to expand your horizons, Goodbrews is a service that makes it easy to tick off the beers you already like, and get recommendations and ratings for ones you might like.

Want to travel but not sure where to go? PixMeAway is a web app that simplifies the decision by recommending destinations based on photos that appeal to you the most, your "travel type" and trip requirements.

iDreamBooks is a new web app designed to help you find the best books to read by aggregating book reviews by professional critics. Self-dubbed "the Rotten Tomatoes" of books, iDreamBooks makes finding your next read pretty simple.

Dear Lifehacker, I've been browsing Google News for a long time now, but my recommendations seem to have strayed over time to things that I'm not really interested in (not to mention a few things I don't want others to see when Google News pops up on my screen). The same thing is also happening with sites like Amazon. Is there any way to "reset" my recommendations for a site and start from scratch?

It makes sense to learn as much as possible about a new place before you visit, but Anthony Bourdain says that if you'd like to find the best place to eat in a new town, the trick is simple: incite a kind of "nerd rage" among the local foodies, and get them fighting over which local eatery is the best in any given category.

Whether you're planning a dinner and a movie with a special someone for Valentine's Day, or you just like to read up on what's worth seeing before you spend your hard-earned cash on a theatre experience, you have plenty of options to find out what's new in theatres or what's worth seeing before you go. Here's a look at five of the best movie recommendation and review services, based on your nominations.

You can now find personalised recommendations of places to visit on Google Maps, based on your Google Places ratings.

The web is a large and wonderful place, but it's difficult to track interesting articles you might be missing. Sitesimon cures that problem by recommending sites based on your browsing history.

If you're looking for a recommendation or an answer to a question for just about anything, Jig is a new website where you can try to find an answer. The site lets you post any kind of need to the world and also suggest solutions.

Startup webapp Mind the Book is a book discovery platform that gives recommendations based on questions such as "How to Learn Ruby on Rails?" or "What is Important in Life?" Users can ask a question and see what books are recommended or search by the book and see what questions the book should answer.

Chrome: Many of your favourite sites have their own Chrome extensions that offer offline browsing, powerful searches, or other features. There's a Web App for That is a Chrome extension that, once downloaded, gives suggestions for future extensions based on the sites you visit most often.