Category: Life Hacks

We all suffer some tough stains at home. There are a zillion expensive products out there to clean them, but these are usually repackaged, basic, chemicals. So you just need the chemicals. Understanding what’s happening helps you take the correct action to get rid of stains.

Continue reading “7 Genius Hardcore Cleaning Hacks”

I just got (another) uninterruptable power supply (UPS), and it didn’t work.  The fix was the replace the battery.

Continue reading “Save Money on UPS Batteries”

Danger – this is a potentially dangerous cleaning hack, but it works. If  you have a sticky, greasy material that’s like the flypaper schmutz on your plastic products, and it doesn’t seem to come off with soap and water, try this crazy technique.  Be careful, because it can burn your hands.

Continue reading “Cleaning Sticky Residue and Rubbery Paint Off Plastic”

There are a number of ways to learn, but I think videos on youtube are the best.

This tutorial won’t get into using one of those diamond edge tools where you slide the knife forward and back across the diamond surface, which is mounted in a slot.  Those things are pretty good, if you don’t want to learn the freehand method. I don’t own one, but I did like using one.

Stones

I would start out with a cheap $5 stone from the dollar store, and a sturdy, but low-end, stainless-steel knife with a flat, not serrated, edge.  These are the hardest to sharpen, but also the most plentiful, and cheapest.

If you have a good, high carbon steel knife, you’re lucky.  You can invest in a better stone of 1000 grit or finer, and keep that knife sharp. These stones are $35 and up. I like 1000 grit because it’s a medium coarseness, and takes off very little metal. I don’t have a finer stone, and I’ll explain why later.

I’d recommend getting the cheap stone.  We all have some annoying stainless knives, and you really need to be able to scrape the hard steel to develop an edge.

This dude here uses a cheap stone:

The 19 Degree Angle

You usually hold the knife against the stone at a 19 degree angle.  That’s around 1/3 of a 45-degree angle, or slightly less than 1/2 of a 45-degree angle.

If you have a well defined bevel, you can copy that angle. You’ll feel it.

Pushing or Pulling

There are two motions: pushing to grind down the metal severely, and pulling to more gently grind the metal and form an edge.

If you have an extremely dull knife, you will need to use the pushing motion, where the edge of the knife pushes into the stone.

For a very dull knife, you will need to spend a lot of time grinding. Follow the video, and note that he does five strokes on one side, and five on the other side.  You need to use and equal number of strokes to make sure you remove an equal amount of metal from each side.

Repeat that 10 or 20 times, and see the effect on the knife.  A dull knife will start to cut, roughly.

Once the knife is cutting roughly through paper, you can change your motion to a “pulling” motion, where you drag the edge over the stone. You might also start using the medium grit side as well.

Pulling is just more gentle than pushing. It removes less metal.

What’s Happening to the Blade

The edge of a knife isn’t smooth: there are tiny microscopic “teeth” on the edge, somewhat like a saw.  The coarse grit side of the stone leaves large teeth.  The medium grit side knocks down the high spots and turns them into many more, smaller teeth.

These smaller teeth feel “smoother”, and are also “stronger” because they’re shorter and less prone to bend and flop over under pressure.

This video shows some chipped and rolled edges under a microscope:

Here’s a video where they play with the “burr”.

When you sharpen the knife, it redefines the edge so it’s like a tiny saw. Sharpening also produces a “burr”, which is the metal that’s coming off the knife. You need to remove that burr by grinding the edge a little more, and then “stropping” the knife.

Stropping is usually done on leather strips embedded with a polishing compound, but you can fake it. Just use a piece of corrugated cardboard, which has clays embedded in the paper.

Pull the knife across the corrugated cardboard, like you did across the medium grit stone. You can also cut into the edge of the cardboard to remove the burr and polish the edge.

This guy is stropping on cardboard:

These videos show guys using diamond hones. I haven’t used diamond, except in those easy-to-use sharpeners, but I don’t really like diamond. It’s an extremely hard material, and will grind away a lot of the metal.

I prefer the regular aluminum oxide stones. That material is also hard, but not as hard.

Finding a Better Knife

The easiest knives to sharpen are made of “high carbon steel” or “carbon steel”.  They may be stainless and called “inox”, or they may stain.

Stainless steel is tougher, and also bends. Carbon steel is harder, and chips.

In a knife, you want that chipping quality, because it helps you create a better edge.

Carbon steel knives at a kitchen shop tend to be expensive, but you can find them for as little as $15 each online. They aren’t as fancy, and the metal isn’t as good, but it can be sharpened, and can perform well. It’s far better to have a knife that’s easy to sharpen than one which holds an edge for a long time.

Another way to find a good knife is to look online and buy a used knife.  Most people with nice knives just don’t use them too much. They may not bother to sharpen them.

I would just look for some common, popular brands, like Sabatier four star elephant (there are multiple, different Sabatier companies), Henckels, Wusthoff, Global, Mac, Victorinox, Dexter Russell, EKCO, Forschner,

You can also find them at a thrift shop, but that’s going to be difficult, because there are fifty crap knives there for every one good knife.

I pulped paper, and then made these balls of pulp.

I was hoping that this would be more secure than shredding, but I’m not sure it is. There are still some large bits of text visible in the balls.

Early in the process, I figured that if I couldn’t get the balls safe enough, I could burn them.  So, I dried them off a few weeks, and then used several to start a charcoal fire.

It worked pretty well.  The main problem with pulp balls is that they take a while to light up. Once it’s going, though, it burns pretty hot, and the first ball can be used to ignite more. These, in turn, can be used to ignite charcoal, which burns slower.

Comparing Pulp Balls to other Methods of Starting a Charcoal Fire

My normal recipe is some sheets of paper, some twigs of wood, preferably greasy, and charcoal.  I light the paper to start the wood, which is eager to burn. Then the wood lights up the charcoal.

I found it easy to start a charcoal fire with pulp balls.  You just pinch out a wick, light it, get a couple balls going with a little fan, and leave it.  It’s almost as easy as Match Light charcoal, which is infused with oils and waxes to burn easily.

The only “trick” is to pile up the paper balls, and then pile the charcoal on top. Expose one part of the paper mound to the air, so it’ll burn.  This is all pretty basic.

We live in an era of identity theft, and one way people can mess with you is by reading your garbage. I don’t mean the stuff you post online, but the pieces of paper that go into your trash recycling bin. Avoid risks of identity theft by thoroughly destroying your documents with personal information.

If you don’t have a shredder, or don’t like standing over the shredder for half an hour to cut up papers, pulping papers can be a reasonable alternative.  What’s pulping? Pulping is breaking paper down into a mixture of paper fibers and water. Pulp is a material that’s  used to make paper, artwork, sculptures, or other paper-like products.

To pulp papers, you need a bucket.  I used a 3-gallon bucket, but 5-gallon used buckets are cheaper.  Fill it 3/4 full of water, and then add your plain white paper.

Be careful about what kind of paper you pulp. I pulped some carbonless NCR paper, the kind used in checkbooks with duplicate reciepts, auto repair invoices, and other receipts, and got a little sick, probably because pulping released formaldehyde into the water.

The easy way to soak your papers is to put the papers in vertically:  capillary action will pull water upward into the stack. Let the bucket and paper sit for one day, then tear up the paper into smaller pieces. Try to submerge all the paper under the surface of the water.

If there’s too much paper in there, remove some. The paper needs to be able to swell up with water, expanding and loosening its fibers, and then disintegrate into pulp.

Submerge your paper, loosely packed, and wait for three days. Time allows the paper to self-disintegrate to some extent, as random vibrations from the ground and air agitate the water. The papers should be soft after three or four days; reach into the water and agitate it, and break up the paper into smaller bits. They should disintegrate pretty easily, and feel like soft, overcooked food.

Once the bits of paper are small and mixed up, your information is effectively gone.

Using the Pulp

Three ways I’ve come across are:

• Making paper
• Paper mache sculptures
• “Bricks” to burn

I made “briquettes” or “turds” of pulp, dried them out, and intend to use them as starters to ignite charcoal, for outdoor grilling.

 

I had a fairly large quantity of paper with personal information on it, and wanted to dispose of it. Initially, it was shredded, but that was taking too long, so I decided to try and pulp it.

I put it into a bucket of water. A few days later, it was still sheets of paper, but I could tear it up.  A couple days after that, it had started to pulp, so I formed them into balls for drying.

Since this first try seemed to work, I found another batch of papers, and put them into the bucket.  After three days, the paper was soaked, and I could start tearing it up. This time, the water smelled like rust.

I assumed that some paper clips had rusted.  But, after an hour of breathing this stuff in, and then sitting at the computer a bit, I started to feel sick. Nothing severe, but a bit of a nauseated feeling.

So I looked up what I thought might be the issue: dioxin poisoning. I knew white paper contained it.  Well, it didn’t seem to be dioxin, but some articles said that some paper products contain formaldehyde.

The smell of formaldehyde is like pickles. That’s what this water smelled like. Formaldehyde is used in carbonless NCR forms.  I had some of those in there. It’s also used to “toughen up” papers, and there were some tough sheets in there that didn’t disintegrate easily.

Not only that, but the symptoms of formaldehyde poisoning are irritation. Yes, I did feel some irritation in my eyes.  I treated it by washing my hands and arms, which had contacted the smelly water.

So, conclusion: pulping can work as an alternative to shredding, but do not pulp anything but plain white paper, and toss the carbonless forms into the shredder.

The life-changing magic of tidying up, by marie kondo, is the latest is a slow stream of decluttering and hoarding recovery books, and probably the most successful one so far.

You can pick it up used for around $8 on ebay (buy my copy here).  The general method described is to discard everything, except the things that give you joy. The tactics are rigid, but that may work for many people.

Objects are classified into categories: clothes, books, papers, objects, and sentimental objects. There are also subcategories, which is detailed in the book. All the objects of a category are gathered, and placed in a pile on the floor, and then each is held. If it brings you joy, you keep it.

Kondo goes into her philosophy, and I won’t get into it here, but by the middle of the book, you’ll know what “joy” means, and what it means for each category. It’s as much a literary device as a decision-making technique, because an torn pair of pants may give some people joy, but Kondo would disagree. Into the disposal pile it goes. No joy for me, but “joy” it is.

Each object that’s kept is then put into it’s place, and folded or arranged as prescribed by Kondo.  Again, she goes into detail about this.

Kondo’s focus on getting rid of things is the main genius of this book. Too many books and articles are about organizing your objects so they can be enjoyed. She advises that many of the objects should be eliminated.

In one short chapter, she dismisses “storage experts” as “hoarders”; she’s correct, because organizing storage enables hoarding, but neatly.

Throughout the book, there’s a strong leaning on intuition, rather than numbers. You keep things that make you feel joy.  You stop disposing when you feel you’ve reached the right amount. What’s clever is that the process of working through the book is supposed to help you develop this intuition.  It’s intuition grounded in practice, and the practice is the process; Kondo claims that this is a once-in-a-lifetime process, where you dispose of many things once, and then, after that, you’ll be clutter free.

Maybe it’ll work for you.

Criticisms

• Kondo assumes you can afford to toss everything, and buy things as needed again. If you don’t have much money, this may not be an option.
• Japanese homes generally have clean floors because they either walk barefoot inside, or sit on the floor. Americans should probably dump the objects on a table.
• I think this method would fail for hoarders, because one of the characteristics of hoarders is a difficulty categorizing objects, and getting “joy” from hoarded objects.
• Some people point out that there’s a lot of Shinto going on here.  It made me think of this song: