Clean your grill in your oven

Reader Lochlan writes in with this end-of-summer tip:

Fall has arrived here in Madison, Wisconsin, and it’s time to clean a summer’s worth of goo from my outdoor grill. I have a propane model with a bunch of small parts, in addition to two grates. I scrape the big clumps off (otherwise when you cook it you get a lot of smoke) and then I put all the parts in my oven and set it to the magical “self-clean” setting. The oven bakes everything at a really high temperature (900 degrees on mine) until there is nothing but carbon lightly clinging to your grill parts. Let everything cool down and Voila! Clean grill (and oven).

Having done a less-than stellar job keeping my grill spick-and-span after a summer’s worth of grilling, the notion of tossing my grill’s grates into the oven now is an inviting alternative to the scraping and washing by hand I did at the beginning of this summer. — Adam Pash

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One phone number to rule them all

GrandCentral is a brilliant new web app that lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring. And then it gets interesting.

If you don’t want every one of your phones ringing each time someone calls your free GrandCentral number, you can set rules by friends, family, work, and others, defining where the calls should be directed. When a user leaves a message, you can listen to it online or directly on your phone. The remaining set of features on GrandCentral are a little mind-blowing, in that “I’d never thought of that, but how am I now living without it?” sort of way.

When you pick up a call that’s been forwarded with GrandCentral, you can choose to answer it, send it to voicemail (which will be done automatically if you don’t answer), or send it to voicemail and listen in on the message as it’s being left in real time (just like you’re listening to someone leave a message on an answering machine). You can interrupt a “ListenIn” message at any time and join the conversation by pressing star (*).

If you’re on a call and you decide that you want to record your conversation, just hit 4 at any time. You can also record personalized greetings based on contact groups and upload your own MP3s to be played in place of your ring.

All of this can be done with GrandCentral’s free account, though there are a few limitations to the free account (none of which severely hinders the service). As you can tell, after spending the morning playing around with it, I’m pretty impressed with this service. The only problem I’ve had with GrandCentral so far is that making calls from the online interface (which, similar to Jajah, connects to your phone, then the phone of the person you’re calling); it seems like a simple part of the functionality, but who knows – maybe I’m doing something wrong (I’m not).

I’m not ready to tell all of my contacts to start calling my GrandCentral number just yet, but I may in time. If you give it a try, let us know what you think about it in the comments. Thanks Nick! — Adam Pash

GrandCentra [via TechCrunch]

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