Protips

  • Very hot water stops itch. Itching due to an immune reaction--bug bite, allergies, poison ivy / poison oak--is caused by histamine. Heat makes histamine release quickly. So if you have an annoying itchy spot, go to the sink and run the water very hot. Don't burn yourself, but it should be really hot; hot enough that you can be okay with it running over your skin, but only by easing the cold water down gradually so the water gets hotter and hotter. If the itch feels weirdly intense, even pleasurable, like you're scratching all of it all at once, you're doing it right. Once the histamine is released, it should stay non-itchy for a while, like an hour or two or three. If the itch is in an inconvenient spot, e.g. face or neck, use a hot water bottle or in a pinch, ziploc bags. Works even for terrible poison ivy / poison oak rashes; it's way more effective than topical steroids for itch relief.

  • When you can't find something and then you find it, after you're done with it, put it back where you first expected it to be. Next time you want it that's where you'll probably expect it to be.

  • To avoid forgetting your keys when leaving, put a little hook on or over your doorknob, so that you kind of have to notice them when leaving. I use a little cable control clip.

  • If you're going to do something that's going to block your activity while your computer works, and it displays a bunch of passing text, e.g. if you run a program that processes GBs of data and prints a lot of stuff on the way, or copy-pasting an enormous file, put on Scatman and dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8

  • If you're pacing in a smallish space, pace in a figure 8, which has index 0 (you turn left the same amount as you turn right), to avoid overworking one part of your feet.

  • Screens burn you out if you're not doing something that involves long timescales (work, reading, movie) because you get stuck with high stimulation from the light, but no real reason to be stimulated, so you reach for something with short timescales to meet your stimulation.

  • If you sometimes get a sore throat in the morning, you might have acid reflux at night. If you have acid reflux at night, you can put the head of your bed on blocks of wood to make the acid not go up.

  • Cable guiders make desks less cabley.

  • You can put tape on the lights of your appliances so they don't distract you. Unless you want the tape to be there permanently, painter's tape / masking tape is better than electric tape, which is better than duct tape, because only painter's tape is designed to not leave residue (though it requires multiple layers; you can put one layer of painter's tape and one layer of electric or duct tape).

  • You can maybe 80/20 diet by just stopping eating eating stuff with a bunch of added sugar.

  • You can buy red lights that automatically turn on when it's dark, so you can see enough to walk around but don't mess up your body's night mode (night vision, circadian rhythm).

  • If you don't want your sleep to be disturbed by sunlight from windows, double up on blackout curtains and use curtain rods that curve around at the ends so the sides are covered.

  • If you have hearing loss or discomfort from ear wax, try Equadose ear washer to shoot water into your ear. It's uncomfortable but it works. A bit of hydrogen peroxide plus warm water works for me.

  • Many academic books are on ZLibrary / LibGen, currently at https://booksc.org/ or http://libgen.rs/. On LibGen, search is finicky; try variations, and if the title is long try deleting the end. To get most academic papers bypassing journal paywalls, use sci-hub, currently at https://booksc.org/ or https://sci-hub.se/. Pasting the url of the publisher's website page for the paper is convenient and often works. Sometimes that doesn't work, but inputting the full title or the DOI does work. Booksc.org has better search; I've found at least one paper that's findable by searching the title on booksc.org, but not by inputting the title or the website to sci-hub.se. Note that booksc.org might throttle downloads. Archive.org sometimes has works not on LibGen or Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/. You can bypass many archive.org pdf restrictions by making an account, "borrowing" a book, and then using Calibre to import the "locked" thing "temporarily" unlocked by "Adobe Digital Editions". If all else fails and you buy a physical book, and it's not immoral to steal it (e.g. it's an academic work funded by the state and written by someone's who's dead, or it's permanently out of print), please use a scanning service like https://www.blueleaf-book-scanning.com/ to scan it and then upload it to LibGen.

  • If you like metal clips e.g. for holding closed half-used bags of stuff, stainless steel clips or aluminum clips shouldn't rust (the clips I got were supposedly stainless steel but still rusted some, though less than normal clips I tried).

  • To understand a math thing, understand things that are almost that thing, but not that thing. E.g. what's a group except it isn't closed under the binary operation? What about a group that doesn't have a unit? Or that isn't associative?

  • Two Good yogurt is reasonably good; 2g sugar, pretty tasty (though it has artificial sweetener which I think gradually turned me off of it).

  • Be careful about giving yourself multiple separate inputs at the same time. E.g. listening to music while working, or listening to a podcast while playing a game. Can cause burnout. Also listening to audio constantly can cause burnout. Try detoxing.

  • If you fantasize about X but don't want to, try fantasizing about fantasizing about X, without at the same time fantasizing about X. That might make X less appealing to have / might make fantasizing about X less appealing to do; it gives your fantasizing machinery a chance to update your desiring machinery, by showing the desiring machinery that it doesn't want to fantasize about X.

  • Frozen fruit is delicious. Blueberries, bananas, red grapes. Tastes almost as good as ice cream, and feels better. (Drink milk to satisfy wanting cream.) Peel bananas before freezing, wash grapes before freezing. Buy already frozen blueberries (I prefer wild blueberries).  Proprotip: microwave a bowl of blueberries for 15 to 40 seconds before eating, it makes them soft and tasty.

  • Never ever put blueberries on mint ice cream.

  • If you have something with a pull-y string running through it, like sweatpants or a hoodie, and the pull-y string is at risk of getting pulled so that one end disappears into the item and you have to painstakingly cinch-pinch the end back out, then, to stop that, tie knots in the ends of the pull-y strings. That makes the ends bigger so they can't get pulled through the string hole. One or two basic knots per end usually does it.

  • If you like using an e-reader, try the Onyx Boox https://onyxboox.com/. They have 10.3" e-ink screens with a warm-ish color backlight, running some kind of Android. (Not sure which model to recommend; I got "BOOX Note Pro 10.3 E-Reader, Front Light, 4 G 64 G" which I'm happy with, but they have new models now.)

  • Always buy unscented trash garbage bags. Never buy scented trash bags because they eventually become smelly all by themselves.

  • Sometimes drinking just hot water is nice. Or ginger tea. Hot water with a bit of salt is sometimes nice and doesn't mess up your brushed teeth.

  • If you want to avoid microplastics, heavy metals, and other contaminants, maybe use a carbon block gravity filter such as Alexapure Pro. (I'm not sure it matters, but supposedly it does.) (If you get one of these, this spigot is nice instead of the plastic one: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VG34VNT/) I also use a steel bottle to avoid leeching from a plastic one, though IDK if that matters. I like https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B071CJW525/ (beware that some steel bottles have or previously had the metal lead on the bottom for some crazy reason). Get the double layer sealed version if you want to use it for hot liquids.

  • If you lay on your back with your legs crossed on the wall, and throw a ball up towards the ceiling against the wall, it's like you're sitting on the ground with your back to a wall and the ball magically comes back to you.

  • To wrap cables so they're compact and won't get tangled, try the figure 8 method. To wrap a thin, shortish cable, use pinky and thumb like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PicTsgj5lA. To wrap a thicker or medium length cable, like a laptop cable, I use the same general method but with one thumb from each hand instead of pink and thumb from the same hand. I didn't find a video of this, but it's kind of like what these guys do, but with thumbs instead of whole hands, and each loop is maybe 15-25cm: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AiYo7iUGQ5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVLo6OwpfCA&t=30s

  • If the non-wrapped part of cord is dangling from your right hand, reach your left hand over and down to the right hand and hook your left thumb under the cord, 15ish cm below your right thumb, then bring your left hand back up and to the left; repeat with your right hand, back and forth. Wrap the final end of the cable around the waist of the 8, and/or put a scrunchy around the waist.

  • If a song or something is stuck in your head, it might be because you like it in some way. Or, you can't complete the pattern. Try listening to a recording of the song. Or try listening to, or singing in your head, another song you like.

  • To get stuff (goo, fluid) out of a container, centrifugal force is sometimes very effective. E.g. to get some juice out of a marker, or to get tomato sauce out of a jar, or ketchup out of a bottle: make sure the top is on tight, and then shake the container by holding your arm straight and waving it up and down or in a circle, with the opening of the container pointing out, so it's on the outside of the circle your hand is making. Careful, this can be too effective; some containers have tops that don't withstand much pressure even when closed (there's still a few tiny flecks of mustard on my kitchen cabinets). Can be very entertaining with markers, outside, at a piece of paper.

  • If you're doing stuff that involves fine manipulation and flexing your fingers, such as typing, when it's very cold and the synovial fluid in your joints is viscous, fingertipless gloves can keep your joints warm while letting your fingertips feel their way and without making them bulky and blunt.

  • If you have poor circulation, low-dose aspirin can alleviate discomfort when you're forced to sit like on a plane or in a car. It can also make you feel alert.

  • If you're uncomfortable sitting on an airplane, you can stand in the aisle for most of it. Sometimes they let you stand in the flight attendant chamber, which might be more out of the way.

  • Blogger lets you use javascript for free, unlike WordPress and Wix.

  • For poison oak / poison ivy: Take a cold handwash and cold shower first because hot water opens your pores; abrasion and ordinary soap is probably necessary and sufficient to remove what can be removed. Wash clothes. To extract what urushiol has already bonded to your skin, maybe try Zanfel (I haven't confirmed that it works; it's the only thing I know of that claims to actually get rid of already-bonded urushiol). For itch relief, use the hot water method. Topical steroids can be helpful because they're convenient, but they're not as effective as very hot water. Hot water doesn't turn down your immune system though, if you're having a systemic reaction get prednisone from your doctor.

  • When you have RSI, pay attention to what activities, what exact motions, make it painful. That makes it easier to notice, in the future, when you're doing stuff that's ramping up to be RSI.

1. October 2022

  • When I do pushups, I do more if I count like so: I verbally (in my head) count "1, 2, 3, 4, 5", and I visualize a number that counts how many sets of 5 I've done.

  • To not neglect the passage of time, try weekly marking a 10-year calendar. I've kept a 2020-2029 calendar for the past year (yours doesn't have to be marked with grim red Xs):

  • "Magnetic charging cables" are cables that have a magnetic band around the charging port, and a magnetic band on the attachement that plugs into the thing to be charged. That does two things: it makes it easier to plug them in to charge, because you don't have to worry about the orientation and it plugs itself in if you get it pretty close (never needing two hands), and it decreases the risk of damaging the difficult-to-repair charging port of the device to be charged. Beware though that some of these chargers have Amazon reviews saying that they destroy some devices. I'm using the brand KUULAA, which seems to not have a bunch of reviews saying that.