Every time I get a new phone it feels a bit like magic : I no longer need to think at all about battery life. This lasts for a few years, and then at some point my phone doesn't always make it through the day. Some amount of this is normal, but some of it is just bad battery management: new phones should come set not…
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On July 1st I discovered a puddle of liquid mercury in our house. It was the evening before the holiday weekend and I was preparing to do some more demolition for the bathroom I've been working on. I was putting down plastic to make cleanup easier, and when I got to the corner there was a dusty little puddle. That…
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
You famously only need four chords to play everything, or maybe it's only three. But how true is this really? I decided to go look and see what was common. I looked at a large number of transcribed songs, writing down which chords were used. This isn't perfect: some chords are more optional than others, but it's about…
Imagine a high-capacity air filter that is extremely quiet and doesn't get in the way. I think I see how to build one; here's a prototype: By putting a fan on the ceiling you can have very long blades. This is important for keeping noise down: the longer your blades are the more air you move at a given rotational…
I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time, and when I taste one it's already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta. I decided to use Market…
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the…
Content warning: risk to children Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids, eight parents, and ten…
In dry climates it's common for people to use evaporative ("swamp") coolers; same idea as sweat evaporating off your skin cooling you off. The downside is that they increase humidity in the air, and if it's already pretty humid then that can make things uncomfortable. This means evaporative coolers are rarely used…
We just had a huge shift from people eating out to eating in, and now a lot more people are baking, so we and a lot of people I know have had trouble finding grocery stores with flour in stock. The residential supply chain is struggling to keep up with demand. On the other hand, the commercial supply chain is…
Before our kids learned to talk, I would play tickles with them. I would make tickling gestures as I moved towards them, they would start giggling a little, then I would tickle them and they would laugh. We'd continue until they seemed to be done with the game, and then we'd move on to something else. As they got…