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Flipping through The Manual: Oak bottles, upcycled leather, meat from a truck

Burned out on apps, keyboards, and screens? Improve your analog life this weekend! Digital Trends’ brother site The Manual exists to give men straight-up advice, from unspoken suit rules you need to know to the latest in fashion, food, drink, travel, grooming, and culture. Here are a few of our favorite stories to appear on The Manual lately.

Looptworks and Langlitz Leathers waste not, want not

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Looptworks doesn’t harvest its materials from the Earth or from beasts of the field; rather, they get their materials from the scrap piles of classy brands.

Read the full story on The Manual

Forget barrels; age your hooch in small batches with the Oak Bottle

Forget-barrels;-age-your-hooch-in-small-batches-with-the-Oak-Bottle
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Oak barrels are magical. Put something inside of them, and with a bit of patience they spit out something drastically better. The only problem is that aging is traditionally done in 55-gallon oak barrels — unless you’ve got an Oak Bottle

Read the full story on The Manual

Seriously concentrated serums

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Boost your moisturizing game and hydrate your skin with these concentrated serums.

Read the full story on The Manual

A man’s gotta meat

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Men, if they’re like most men (and aren’t vegetarians, who are still men, but who may want to go ahead and click on over to another article…), like meat. And if my calculations are correct, more meat is better than less meat. So I really think you should meet a strangely charming company know as Zaycon Fresh. Because oh man, do they know how to meat.

Read the full story on The Manual

Fall Festivals: Oyster cook-off and craft beer at The Hangout

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An awesome festival of oysters, craft beer, and music at the Hangout in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Read the full story on The Manual

Learn everything about tacos from Tacopedia

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From the history of the taco to where to get the best ones in Mexico, Tacopedia goes over everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the taco.

Read the full story on The Manual

Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
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A lot of folks may feel that a smart thermostat device is just a gimmick for the lazy that lets you control it remotely, but there are actually quite a lot of good things when it comes to smart thermostats. Depending on which model you buy and how much money you spend, there can be some significant savings, especially if you spring for the kind that learns your patterns and adjusts the temperature to eat up less electricity. Some thermostats even know what time of day electricity is expensive and adjust to use less of it to help bring your costs down.

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Just like you probably enjoy getting to choose your own path in real life, you want to have the same freedom in your favorite video game. Open-world games like The Division 2 have only continued to grow in popularity since their release. 

While this genre of gaming can be a little intimidating for anyone without tons of experience in gaming, there are plenty of great open-world games to chose from. Ranging from first-person shooter games to RPGs and action-adventure titles, our list will have something for everyone.

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HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a TV spec you've undoubtedly seen in your TV's settings or while shopping for a new TV, and we're willing to bet that if you're here, you're wondering what the heck HDR is. HDR can be found in pretty much all of today's best TVs, from 8K to 4K to HDTVs, and in TVs across a wide range of price points -- HDR has become standard in most new mid-range and high-end televisions.

But what is it? When viewing TV, movies, video games, sports, or other content displayed in HDR, an HDR-capable TV will deliver extra-brilliant brightness levels, ultra-rich colors, an expanded color palette, and higher contrast.

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