home-hacksJournal
Jul 5 · 5 min
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.
TechJournal
Jul 5 · 7 min
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.
ParentingJournal
Jun 24 · 8 min
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.
