691–700 of 1001 posts
Then I realized that I should align its speaker to be right against my ear canal, that is 1-2 cm lower. And now I could hear the other person so much better!
When my then-gf/now-wife and I first moved in together, I got really mad at her because she kept "hiding" my stuff when I left it out for more than a day. I couldn't find anything! At some point, I yelled, "It's like you don't even want to see any of my things when I'm not using them!" Then I stopped for a second. For the first time in my life, it made sense. The whole point of putting things away is to hide them! No…
Cabinets without doors, and shelves without doors are critical too. I'm not sure why but if I do not have regular visible sight of things, they may as well not exist and I will quickly forget that they are there, leading to all kinds of chaos.
Worrying and arguing about things in the future. I wasted so much time and energy on this but as I get older I've realised there is so little of what we can actually control vs what we think we can do. Most of the time just saying Yes and waiting for things to actually happen is so much easier. A lot of time what you worry about never happens and if it does it isn't always as bad as you make things out to be in your…
I argue for the future so much. I hope to be able to at one point get rid of my anxiety about it. But: > Also when you say yes to people, a lot of time the other person never actually follows through the thing you didn't want. Otoh if you would argue or say No beforehand it always has the opposite effect. I recently started doing this and it's amazing. I was the one saying 'no' to so many 'offers' (as a full stack de…
Expecting other people to reach out to me without making any real effort myself. At some point I heard this thought experiment: If you could only have one, which is more important: To love or to be loved? Now I understand that if I want to receive love and connection that I have to be able to give it. This shift has strengthened so many of my relationships and helped me build new ones as well.
Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to be al dente, to absorb and deliver the flavor of the sauce better. Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce; it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool. Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients.…
I usually sauté garlic in oil separately, discard the garlic and then use the oil as a sort of super garlic flavor concentrate.
I used to believe the actual ingredients were ~80% of the puzzle of cooking. I now believe they're closer to ~20% for most cases. The process you follow is way more important than anything else.
Just take a sweet onion for instance. The difference 2-3 minutes makes in a hot pan is incredible. If you simply chopped it up and threw it directly into whatever, you will wind up with something that tastes substantially less flavorful.
Staying warm. In the winter, I used to stay warm by turning up the thermostat. Then I discovered (via HN) the Low-Tech Magazine article, "Insulation: first the body, then the home." [0] The article argued that it's much more efficient to focus on heating yourself rather than your whole living space. I invested in high-quality wool clothes that I wear in layers and warm slippers. Now, I keep my home about 5 degrees F…
I just moved and now renting a place with electric water heater with pump moving that heated water around via radiators. It is quite large apartment with shitty, to be honest, insulation. The difference between "I put several layers of clothes on" and "I am wearing a t-shirt" is about 600 kWh per month. The same amount of energy is needed to prodice 30 kg of aluminium or run a single rack in a datacenter for just 2 days.
Never in your life your energy consumption can be compared with industrial usage. Likewise, never in you life your water consuption can reach a visible fraction of agricultural irrigation. Stop listening to coprorate PR.
When my then-gf/now-wife and I first moved in together, I got really mad at her because she kept "hiding" my stuff when I left it out for more than a day. I couldn't find anything! At some point, I yelled, "It's like you don't even want to see any of my things when I'm not using them!" Then I stopped for a second. For the first time in my life, it made sense. The whole point of putting things away is to hide them! No…
ADHD weaker object permanence means that lots of people need to see their stuff to keep it in mind. “Hiding stuff” is problematic (and so is clutter).
My father said to me: "I like a shower better than a bath, but ugh, that first blast of cold water when you turn it on is always a bit shocking." Me: "Why don't you turn on the shower, wait for it to get warm, then get in?" Him, realizing he'd been using a shower wrong for over 6 decades: "... huh."
The Superman method: put your hand up to block the blast.
The Spiderman method: jump to the opposite side of the shower to avoid the blast.
The clever method: turn on the shower and wait outside.
I apparently hold chopsticks incorrectly. I am a white guy so it’s not like this is my culture—I just started holding them the way I do as a kid in sushi restaurants and no one ever corrected me. I found out when I married my wife, who is from Taiwan. Here’s the kicker though: I’m more dexterous with chopsticks than even she is. I can pick and place a single grain of rice, or hold the most slippery noodles with ease.…
Do you hold the moving one like a pencil and let the other one rest on your ring finger? I had always done this and was eventually told that you're really supposed to use only three fingers. But after trying it that way for a while, I found it limited my dexterity quite a bit, and went back to the pencil method. Surprisingly, I did it in China for a month-long work trip and nobody batted an eye.