Sometimes, when you’re out and about in the world, you may find that it would be really helpful to have a tape measure.

If you're like me, fascinated by home improvement and tools, you really want your kids to be as interested as you are and benefit from the many life lessons working with tools can impart. Or maybe you're nothing like me & you don't care much about tools or carpentry beyond just thinking that making a treehouse would be wicked cool. No matter your orientation to home improvement, you want your kids to learn how to use tools. But what tools should you get for them? Which ones are safe?

Have you ever encountered a bolt that doesn't quite fit your wrench? Of course you have. No matter how much pressure there is to conform, hardware bucks expectations. Here's what to do when you don't want to buy yet another special piece of equipment just to dismantle a bookshelf.

If you're not taking screenshots of your computer screen much, remembering which key combos to hit might be more confusing than convenient. If you hate keyboard shortcuts, Mozilla's new Firefox Quantum browser makes it incredibly easy to capture what's on your screen thanks to its built in Firefox Screenshots service. It syncs wherever you use the new browser, and is smart enough to help you figure out what you're actually trying to capture.

Windows has been knocking around in some form or another for a grand total of 32 years now, and in that time it's amassed a lot of features - not just the newest bells and whistles but long-standing features you might have forgotten about or never even discovered in the first place. Here are 10 really useful tricks that Windows 10 is capable of that you might not know about, but should definitely know about.

Anybody can spew out some half-arsed apology to save face, but a real apology takes serious introspection and sincerity, and focuses on helping the victim heal. It isn't easy to do, but this simple interactive tool can help if you're struggling. "It's good that you're here," the first screen reads when you load it up. It is good.

If you're doing some home renovation work or hanging something up, you'll need to know where the studs in your walls are. But you don't need a fancy stud finder device - a magnet will do just fine.

Unless you are some sort of hyper-organised Kondo type, it is likely your kitchen has a "junk drawer" and, among the tomato sauce packets, that there are a few pairs of chopsticks in there. It's time to fish them out, friends, for chopsticks are an infinitely useful kitchen tool that can be used in almost every stage of making a meal.

We've come a long way from when men were terrified to carry a bag, which might be mistaken for a handbag, which is what women wear, and therefore bad. But we have one important step left: Stop juggling names for your satchel, your "bag", your man-bag, your murse. Just call it a handbag.

Eric O'Neill was once a counterterrorism operative for the FBI, where he played a major role in capturing the spy Robert Hanssen (his boss at the FBI, whom he was hired to spy on -- for more on that, check out his Wikipedia page). His role in capturing Hanssen became the subject of the movie Breach (2007), starring Ryan Philippe as O'Neill.

Temperature is probably the most important variable in cooking, but it can be hard to control if you don't know what it is. Sure, there are various tests you can employ to test "doneness" of various foods -- the ol' palm trick for steaks; the toothpick inserted in a cake -- but these only give you approximations. If you really want to cook your meats, cakes, and candies perfectly every single time, you need a thermometer.

Naming things is hard, especially if the name needs to be unique. Over the years I've worked for sites named Urlesque (rhymes with burlesque, it's about memes), Slacktory (it's a factory for slacking) and Valleywag (which came scarily close to being called "Boomshank"). I always loved the evocative site names of the Gizmodo network. Sploid connotes splatter, tabloids and explosions; Deadspin promises ESPN with an unexpected angle; Kotaku puts the slightest spin on the Japanese term for obsessive nerdy interest. More famous names like Instagram, Medium and Upworthy also compactly convey multiple meanings. The same approach is popular for fictional character names: Darth Vader, Voldemort and Ebenezer Scrooge read immediately as bad guys.

If there is one kitchen tool that can improve the quality and consistency of your cooking, it's the digital scale. Unlike measuring things by volume, weighing out your ingredients eliminates any doubt you may have about whether you're "doing it right."

Aurelia Moser is a developer, teacher, author and also a bit of a cartographer. She works at the Mozilla Science Lab with researchers to collaborate on open source projects, and is also a mentor at Girl Develop It.

There are a lot of fancy kitchen toys out there -- some of which are more useful than others -- but there are some things that can't be improved upon even with the latest technology. The mortar and pestle is one of those things, and your kitchen needs one.

A circular saw's large blade and loud sound can be intimidating to the newbie DIYer, but don't let that scare you away from one of the most useful power tools in any workshop.

Whether you're working on a big presentation for work or school, interactive visuals always help win over an audience. Loopy, a free tool for making simulations, is perfect for that.

There are a ton of ways to get a rusted, stuck or jammed nut or bolt out of a piece of furniture or another object, but the folks at Make Magazine run down several methods -- each a bit more destructive -- in this great rundown. Our favourite though, is the nut splitter, an affordable tool worth keeping your DIY toolkit.

David Rees thinks he knows how to sharpen pencils. He says people have entrusted 1500 pencil points to his sharpening business. I know a little something about working with sharp pencils, and let me tell you, if you send your pencils out for sharpening you're an amateur.