est. quietly · 2024 issue № 042 tuesday, slightly tired

wipmom

life under construction

A blog about half-finished projects, working code, lukewarm coffee, and the stubborn act of showing up anyway. Welcome to the workbench.

currently on the desk
building
This site, hehehe
fixing
Online Piano classes set-up
reading
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
drinking
Cold coffee. again.
the big one this week

What you'll find here

Three drawers. Mostly organized. (mostly.)

Home Hacks

0

small fixes, systems, and renter-friendly wins

Organizing, admin, and low-commitment improvements for a rented house. No drills through load-bearing walls.

browse the drawer →

Tech

1

code that runs · scripts that don't

Home automation, side projects, the smart-bulb saga. Mostly Python, sometimes feelings.

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Journal

3

small things, written down

Notes from a Tuesday. The coffee, the kid, the thought I had at 11pm. Less project, more pulse.

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More recent rambles

see the whole archive →
Bar soap has been sitting next to my washing machine for three years and I only just understood why
home-hacksJournal Jul 5 · 5 min

Bar soap has been sitting next to my washing machine for three years and I only just understood why

TL;DR

  • Bar soap — specifically Zote or Palmolive bar — works better than liquid detergent on grease, grass, and mystery stains because of how surfactants behave when applied dry and concentrated directly to fabric.
  • The method: wet the fabric, rub the bar directly on the stain, let it sit 5–10 minutes, then wash normally. That’s it. No soaking. No special products.
  • Hot water before soap on protein stains (blood, egg, sweat) sets the stain permanently. Cold water first, always.
  • It doesn’t work on everything. Ink and red wine have their own rules. Pretreating old dried stains needs more patience than I usually have.

I just wanted to back up my photos. Three months later, I have a working batch script and opinions about Windows networking.
TechJournal Jul 5 · 7 min

I just wanted to back up my photos. Three months later, I have a working batch script and opinions about Windows networking.

TL;DR

  • Immich is a self-hosted photo backup tool — open source, runs locally, looks and feels like Google Photos. I wanted it on my home machine without paying for cloud storage forever.
  • Installing it on Ubuntu in WSL2 was fine. Getting Windows to actually see it from the rest of the house was not fine.
  • WSL2 assigns a new internal IP every single reboot. This is a known thing. I learned it the hard way.
  • The fix: a batch script that grabs the current WSL IP and sets up port forwarding every time. It works. I run it manually. That’s where we are.

I went looking for a quick parenting tip and ended up in a 25-year longitudinal study
ParentingJournal Jun 24 · 8 min

I went looking for a quick parenting tip and ended up in a 25-year longitudinal study

TL;DR

  • The “Harvard study on chores” all over Instagram isn’t really a Harvard study about chores. The real longitudinal data comes from the University of Minnesota.
  • Dr. Marty Rossmann followed 84 kids from preschool into their mid-20s. The strongest predictor of adult success in the dataset was whether they started household tasks at ages 3–4. Not 8. Not 10. Three.
  • A 2014 Braun Research survey of 1,001 adults: 82% had regular chores growing up, only 28% require their own kids to do them. I’m in the 72%. Cleanly. No defense.
  • Mechanism is executive function — working memory, impulse control, sequential planning. The exact stuff that makes someone good at school, work, and not losing their keys. I had not connected those dots.

this is almost me, a SVG image made by an AI inspired on myself - Very minimalistic me
about the person on the other side of this

Hi, I'm Jazz.

I’m a mom with a masking-tape in one hand and a lukewarm coffee in the other. I work in software, fix things at home (sometimes), and write here when the house is finally quiet.

This blog is a notebook, not a portfolio. The shelves are almost straight. The code mostly runs. I post the messy middle, not just the after photos — because the middle is where everything actually happens.

if it’s useful to one tired person at 10pm, it was worth writing.

read more about me
№ 042
letters from the desk

A short note, every other Sunday.

One project I'm working on, one thing I've learned the hard way, and one small thing that made the week feel less heavy. No spam. No funnel. Just a letter.

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