the eXternal mind

After much research at Caltech, I’ve recently made two important discoveries:

1. In order to keep shirts from coming out of the dryer from being wrinkly (and thus causing people to think that you sleep in your clothes all the time), I realized that one must: (1) Use less detergent. (2) Use less fabric softener. (3) Put a smaller load into the dryer (so that the clothes come out fully dry). (4) When you load the dryer, try to pack it by clothes density type. This means putting the jeans, rougher stuff, and wrinkle-okay items (like socks, boxers, etc.) towards the back while putting the shirts closer to the dryer door. The result is less folding and distortion of the shirts. (5) When you unload the dryer, put the jeans, rougher stuff, and wrinkle-okay items in the hamper first. Then put the shirts on top (sometimes, it’s good to even to a semi-quick folding of the shirt). This minimizes compression on the shirts.

   Now I am finally able to get wrinkle free shirts.

2. Dust wipes commonly sold under names like Swiffers or pledge wipes are just made to be disposable microfiber cloths. Well, the companies seem to want you to throw out the cloths after using them so that you can continue buying from them. However, there’s no reason to suggest that they cannot be reused. And thus, I’m here to report that they can be reused!

   The trick, I think, is to use hot water and soap/detergent to wash the cloths. The heat is necessary for the microfibers to expand (hereby releasing the dust and other stuff trapped in there).

   I tested this idea on a very small piece of dust cloth (like 2 in. by 3 in. area), and I reused it 4 times before I decided to just throw it away (mainly because the fibers in the cloth were becoming scratched up). The dust trapping ability doesn’t seem to decrease much at all in between washes. I daresay that one can reuse such cloths for >10 times if one is careful with it.

One thing I really dislike is people who message me online and then either don’t say anything or don’t get to the point until like 30 minutes later. I sometimes know what you are trying to get at, but I don’t really feel like trying to guess at what you are going to say during that 30 minute silence. Additionally, I dislike if I respond to something you say right away with a simple question, and it takes you 30 minutes to reply to me. Also, if you want to continue a conversation, don’t end your statements with a period all the time and expect me to pick up the slack since I usually don’t feel like doing so (you’re the one who is messaging me, after all!). I finally felt annoyed enough to post this on my blog.

Sigh, I spent a lot of time yesterday and today writing a file monitoring script in python that was tailored towards my computational (chemistry) simulations on large clusters. Then after I finished the glorious script, I realized that I didn’t really need the monitoring feature if I had a way to copy files from the node in one command. Well, I wrote one line of bash code that allowed me to do the file copying. So I just spend a lot of time coding this elaborate script for nothing.

On the bright side, I did learn a lot more about python.

Folks, I am about to inform you of something indescribably amazing: the pillows, a japanese rock band, will be returning to the US this month for their second ever US tour!

Their delicious label website has more information on the shows, but the awesome news is that they will be visiting LA on March 13th! I discovered this two days ago and was extremely excited (I normally don’t get this excited). All I could do was think about this live show.

Why? Because the pillows are one of my favorite rock bands. Even though they sing mostly in Japanese (I don’t understand a thing), their songs are very fun to listen to and play. Whereas new rock is dying in the US (commercialized punk and emo), the “new” sounds of rock are flourishing in Japan, and the pillows are one of these Japanese rock bands who are experimenting with and creating new rock sounds.

When I became a fan of them in 2006, I narrowly missed their first US tour (I learned about it 1-2 months afterwards) and was sad that I couldn’t see them. I vowed that I would make my best effort to attend their show the next them they tour the US.

My barrier to the show was transportation (need a car to get to LA), and I was wracking my brains trying to figure out some solution. I found a few (like <5) people at Caltech who were also interested in the pillows on facebook so I was going to email them about the show.

As it turns out, a person who I was working with Ch 121 problem sets with is an anime fan and has a car. So I convinced him to go to the show :). So now, for all purposes, I’m going to the pillows’ LA show! Too awesome!

There are cases when you can’t connect to a VNC server because it’s behind a NAT router (or some similar reason). Well, a cool trick you can use is to have the VNC server connect to the VNC viewer (which is set up in listener mode). This way, since the server initiates the connection, the NAT router can successfully pass the connections through.

To make this even simpler, you can generate a single-click VNC server using UltraVNC SC service. It’s a little tricky to use, but lifehacker explains it fairly well. Then you can just give the other person this .exe and have him/her double click it to set up the VNC session (make sure your computer is running the viewer in listener mode first though!).

This saves you either trying to run someone through router port forwarding (a complete horror) or doing the whole Hamachi + VNC thing.