Try some exergaming
Motion sensor games are a fun way to get in some exercise. A large range of games, some specifically designed as exercise programs, will get you moving. If you have an older system, try a dancing game that uses a large mat controller.

Mix up the exercise videos
Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer thousands of exercise videos piped straight to your TV or computer.  It’s a great way to try out a new exercise routine without the commitment of buying a DVD.

Lift weights
Adjustable hand weight sets are fairly inexpensive and the right set can continue to serve you for a good long time as your strength increases. Hand weights and strap-on weights can be used for full body workouts or be lifted when you’re watching TV or listening to music.

Climb stairs
If you have access to a staircase, grab your mp3 player and do some stair climbing… the old fashioned way!

• Interact with other users. This is really the core of any social networking experience, but it’s vitally important on Twitter. Use @ replies and direct messages to answer questions, offer comments and more. If you’re lucky, they’ll be retweeted and replied to, gaining you followers.
• Explore other user’s follower lists to find people with similar interests to you. Twitter also suggests recommended users to follow, many of which are worthwhile. Don’t be fooled by the sponsored placements in this category, though.
• Take part in trending topics and other Twitter memes. These will expose you to users you normally wouldn’t interact with. Follow Friday is one of the most useful tools, and you can do it every week.
• Upload media with your tweets. You don’t have to add a photo to every entry you make on Twitter, but it doesn’t hurt to add some visual interest every once in a while.
• Tweet when people are most active – this is usually in the early afternoon, when office workers are returning from lunch, but in some cases it can be other times of the day. It’s much easier to network and hold a conversation during these peak times.

Mummer's Parade, January 1, 2012

A Philadelphia tradition, old men in elaborate costumes sit in small go-karts and whiz around the streets along with bands and other festivities. It's supposed to be linked to Celtic customs, but mostly it's a raucous good time.

Story Slam: Daily Grind at World Cafe Live, January 9, 2012

In the new year, make your new favorite hang out the Story Slams at World Cafe Live and L'Etage. Twice every month real people pour their hearts out about a selected theme. You can also compete with your own five minute tale of humorous woe.

City Food Tours, ongoing

Philly's foodie scene is thriving and City Food Tours is offering a fun, social way of experiencing it through restaurant crawls. Look out for special tours like Craft Beer and Artisanal Cheese or Decadent Gourmet.

Jerry Seinfeld at the Academy of Music, January 14, 2012

The original funny man comes to the Academy to talk about nothing. Really. But he'll probably include a few topical quips about the city and his act's guaranteed to be a good time!

• In The Consolations of Philosophy de Botton argues that the teachings of the world's most important philosophers concern the day to day business of living in the world. In a tour of philosophical history, de Botton shows how works by great philosophers can help readers overcome everyday difficulties like frustration, heartbreak, and unhappiness.
• How Proust Can Change Your Life, similarly, presents Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past as a peculiar sort of self-help book. De Botton culls a number of aphorisms and parables from Proust and presents these lessons in his characteristically witty style.
• De Botton's book The Architecture of Happiness explores the usually unnoticed (yet often quite deep) ways the spaces human beings inhabit affect our emotional lives. This book will change the way you see the physical world.
• A Week at the Airport issued from time de Botton spent as writer-in-residence at England's Heathrow Airport. De Botton sees the airport as a uniquely modern space that concentrates human beings' arrivals, departures, beginnings, and endings in a way made possible only by the miraculous fact of airplane flight. Movingly written and beautifully illustrated, this short book is perhaps the best introduction to de Botton.
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work surveys the strange and wonderful world of work. Offering the book as an investigation into a realm that claims itself as one of the principal sources of life's meaning, de Botton turns an anthropologist's eye toward enterprises like logistics, accounting, cookie making, career counseling, and inventing. Listen to an extended interview de Botton gave about the book here.

De Botton also runs The School of Life, a private school based in England that hosts classes, dinners, and a series of "secular sermons." The sermons often reprise de Botton's great theme that philosophy can help human beings with the business of living. View some of these sermons online here.

99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars, 99% Invisible bills itself as "a tiny radio show about design." 99% Invisible episodes spend 5-10 minutes looking closely at otherwise invisible features of our physical world: for example, the peculiar layouts of check cashing stores, the feedback sounds of tech devices, and the look of municipal flags. Be sure to listen to this episode on Soviet Era Design.

RadioLab
RadioLab host Jad Abumrad recently won one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants." Listen to RadioLab and you'll understand why. Abumrad and cohost Robert Krulwich spend each hour of RadioLab investigating topics philosophical and scientific, like "Time" or "Loops" or "Stochasticity." Yes, stochasticity. It means "randomness" and RadioLab's great production values — and dare-we-call-it-genius writing — help make the topic compelling.

Transom
Transom is a showcase and workshop for new public radio. Its site offers tips and tools for producing radio documentaries along with a selection of shows. Transom's podcasts typically present stories that experiment with documentary form. Transom's experiments are interesting even when they aren't successful.

Re:Sound
A weekly radio show and podcast produced by the Third Coast International Audio Festival, Re:Sound gathers some of the best short-form audio pieces. The Third Coast Festival's website also features a library of short documentaries, including contemporary radio plays, documentaries, and stories.

The Sporkful
Selected by iTunes as one of the Best New Podcasts of 2010, The Sporkful's a show about food that insists "it's not for foodies, it's for eaters." Each week, cohosts Dan Pashman and Mark Garrison ruminate on the minutiae of food. Check out The Sporkful Test Kitchen blog.

Each podcast is available for download in Apple's iTunes Store.

-          Chocolate is an awesome trifle base. Start with lush, creamy brownies, layer them at the bottom of your trifle dish, and then layer coffee-flavored pudding on top. Add chopped chocolate and toffee to finish off the trifle.

-          Angel food cake is a traditional trifle base, and pairs perfectly with fresh berries. One classic trifle uses interspersed layers of cake, fresh whipped cream, blueberries, and strawberries.

-          Bananas make a great trifle base as they retain their shape well when layered. Pair them with coconut macaroons ground up and formed into a cake layer, and then top with whipped cream.

-          Using crumbled graham crackers as the base of a trifle can make it a delicious down-home treat. This pairs exceptionally well with blueberries and fresh cream, as well as melted chocolate.

-          Caramel apple trifles are a great autumn dessert, with crisp, fresh apples cooked with walnuts and maple syrup to make a delicious filling and served over caramel cream cheese and poundcake cubes.

Chili, obviously, is named after the spicy peppers that give the dish its trademark heat. The best way to get the most out of your chiles is to mix them. Using just one kind of pepper will make the dish taste one-dimensional. Combining jalapeno, serrano, and other peppers in moderation will vastly improve the dish.

Meat is the core of a chili dish, and many regional styles such as Texas chili don’t use beans at all in the preparation of the meal. Before you add your meat to the pot, brown it in a pan first. That will help release essential flavors and keep the meat from getting too mushy. I prefer using roughly-cut strips of steak, but ground beef works fine. Turkey is good for a more heart-healthy dish.

Use fresh vegetables and good quality meats. Chili was originally invented as a way to disguise the flavors of substandard ingredients, but in the modern world there’s no reason to eat bad food. The better the ingredients, the better your pot of chili will be!

Taste the pot frequently as you’re cooking to adjust the consistency and spice blend. Keep in mind that heat will develop slowly as you cook it, so don’t add more peppers unless you’re sure that it’s not hot enough.

Bloktoberfest – On October 15th from noon to 8 p.m., South Philly’s premiere block party returns and it's bigger than ever. Three blocks on South Street will be filled with great food and live music during an event that benefits education initiatives tied to the area’s schools and students.

Philadelphia Film Festival – Starting on October 20th, the Philadelphia Film Society celebrates 14 days of independent, feature length, and documentary film during the Society's 20th anniversary.

Haunted Houses – With Fright Factory, Terror Behind The Walls, The Bates Motel & Haunted Hayride, Sleepy Hollow Hayride, Lulu’s House of Horrors, and more, Pennsylvania is filled with plenty of places to experience thrills and chills during Halloween season.

Apple Picking, Pumpkin Patches, and more – Fall is the perfect season for picking apples, getting pumpkins, and harvesting a variety of other fruits and vegetables. There are also plenty of great places for picking up other fall goods like apple butter, pumpkin bread, and canning supplies. For an extensive list of farms around Pennsylvania, click here.

Craft Beer Express – Climb aboard on November 12th as a special party bus shuttles you back and forth between 12 of Philadelphia’s best craft beer bars as they host a plethora of special theme events.

First off, get a recipe and follow it. Baking is very difficult to improvise within, so following a simple, understandable recipe to the letter is vital in getting your basic skills where they need to be. It can often be instructive to try to make the same recipe multiple times to polish your results.

Prepare your ingredients ahead of time. When baking, unless noted, all ingredients should be at room temperature. Adding hot or cold liquids to doughs and batters can make them set differently. Pre-measure everything in advance before you start mixing anything – since baking is very time-sensitive, rummaging around for ingredients can throw you off.

Making sure you have the proper pans and baking sheets is also essential. Different sizes and materials can greatly change the consistency of your end product when it comes out of the oven. Do not substitute baking pans unless you’re ready to deal with the problems it might create.

Don’t open the oven door often! Keeping a consistent temperature inside the oven and protecting your cakes from shocks is vital in ensuring that they cook through and do not fall.

Let your final product cool completely before tasting or cutting it. In many recipes, the last stage of baking happens after the cake is removed from the oven, giving it time to bind together. Cutting too early can result in flimsy, crumbly baked goods.

Maryland has a reputation as one of the best places to eat crabs in the country. If you want them fresh from the water, you’ll find them down at the shore. Some of the most delicious crabcakes you’ll ever eat are here. Maryland borders the deep south, so you’ll find culinary influences from all over on the menu.

One of the most popular destinations on the Shore is Ocean City, Maryland, a year-round resort that offers ten miles of gorgeous, sandy beaches for swimming, surfing, and boating, as well as a bustling boardwalk and amusement park. There's so much recreation here that it boggles the mind. Golf courses, water slides, outlet malls, and much more are just minutes away.

The best way to appreciate the Chesapeake Bay is on the water. Chartering a boat will give you the experience of a lifetime. Whether you’re fishing for striped bass and perch or just enjoying a laconic sail, you won’t soon forget your day out on the Bay.