Lee.org

Fun and  Free: Crucible Open House Sept 9, noon to 5pm

There’s always lots of fun free demos and presentations. Build real things!

EmoniNail is a new topical nail fungus treatment.  Only, it isn’t. It’s a scam.

Why do I think it’s a scam?

1. Their website is vague about its (common, inexpensive) ingredient list, and  about how it works.
2. The website makes vague but compelling promises that not even the best doctor and medical treatment could keep.
3. It is expensive enough for you to hope that it might work but not break-the-bank expensive.
4. The company has created a bunch of fake review sites saying how great their product is, trying to hide critical reviews like mine.
5. Their web design looks so much like many other scam anti-fungal treatments that it is clearly the same bad people trying to market the same bad product under a fresh name. Similar scam products are Funginix, and Zeta Clear.

Do not buy EmoniNail. For more information about nail fungus products that work and don’t work, read my blog posts about nail fungus.

Here is a short summary of all my blog posts on the subject of nail fungus:  the over-the-counter topicals at your local pharmacy ($20) sometimes clear up nail fungus. It appears that is what’s in Emoninail (undecylenic acid). Lamisil (generic terbinafine) topical ($30) or oral ($2000) is one drug that has better than average results. Going to a podiatrist and getting drugs, or your nail ripped out, or both ($50-$3000) might work. Sadly, modern science doesn’t have a guaranteed cure for nail fungus. Don’t believe anyone that says otherwise.

Dr. Zarkov! There’s no sun! It’s 8:24 in the morning, and there’s no sun!
Happy Solar Eclipse!

Megan loves her Contigo mugs for drinking coffee in the car every day. I’ve been hand-cleaning them for a while and the insides kept getting more and more brown despite scrubbing. An abrasive pad and a lot of elbow grease worked well enough but I wasn’t keen on doing that again. So I tried soaking the mug in Oxi Clean for an hour and it worked super duper great! The inside of the mug got to sparkling silver clean! Actually, it worked too great, the little bits of Oxi-Clean that spilled over to the outside made the paint bubble off the mug! As a last ditch effort, I used Oxi Clean to remove the paint completely and it actually looks pretty cool.

The best part is something I just read from Contigo…

Contigo travel mug lids and any unpainted stainless steel bodies are top-rack dishwasher safe for a quick, easy clean. Painted stainless steel bodies are hand wash only.

The mug is now fully dishwasher safe! Woot!
In the image, notice the last remnants of the purple paint embedded in the word “Contigo” on the one on the right.

Today I tried to install an EPUB reader to read my friend TJIC’s new books.  After more than an hour of trying this has stopped being fun. I just want to read a book and I’ve wasted a few hours pushing buttons. This is why paper is not dead yet. Or maybe this is why single-purpose Kindle readers are a good idea.

I have an  Amazon Fire HD 8 (5th Generation) and it continues to be a a pain in the ass. Every time I try to do something that isn’t akin to watching television on it, I get sucked into this vortex of things that don’t work. Here was today’s adventure:

I went to the Amazon Appstore and installed eLibrary Manager, which is billed as being “actually free” from Amazon. It worked OK but the default font is a horribly bland san serif font and the option to change the font didn’t work! Not happening.

I tried Overdrive, which has lots of tie-ins with public and university libraries. That seemed like a safe bet. But I couldn’t figure out how to get the book into into the app! How it’s supposed to work is that I install Adobe Digital Editions on my computer, link my account to my computer, and move it over to my Kindle. I spent 15 minutes wrangling with Adobe and some insane user registration system. Then I couldn’t get Adobe Digital Editions to see my Kindle when I plugged it into USB. I gave up.

Calibre Companion (demo version). After 15 minutes I figured out that it isn’t an ebook reader, just a way to move ebooks around. It works great, it just doesn’t do anything. Ugh.

Aldiko seemed like a really good bet. Super pretty. But I can’t create an account with the app. This is likely because the Amazon Appstore gave me a version of the software that is 3 years old and I’m not able to update it. I wrote to customer support. (update 9-1-17: they never wrote back :-(  )

Blah!

I hear that avocado toast is why I can’t afford a mortgage. To that I say “Yum!”

Studying for my occupational therapy board exam at Philz Coffee, drinking high-test and eating like a millennial!

[update 2020: read this post!]

I’ve been using a CPAP for mild obstructive sleep apnea since January 2015. It definitely helps me get a good night’s rest and keeps me from snoring which helps Megan sleep. I still take it off in my sleep most nights. Megan prods me and I put it back on (update December 2017: I wear all night most of the time now! Hurray!). Here is a list of hints, most of which I’ve tried, to keep my mask on. Do you have any tips to add? Email or comment!

– keep a log of good and bad nights and what I’m doing about it
– Set an alarm in the middle of the night to put it on
– cough syrup (helpful when I have a cold!)
– antihistamine pills (when I have a runny nose or cough)
– nasal allergy spray… Flonase, saline
– turn the temperature up to 80 degrees (didn’t help me)
– use distilled water in the humidifier (I don’t usually use the humidifier but the chamber potentially won’t get as much crud in it if I use distilled water)
– higher pressure… ramp pressure from medium to higher (waiting for the doctor to change the settings is for chumps. I fiddled with the settings a little and it helped. Just 1 small change every 2 nights and a log book helped dial it in for me!)
– Set a timer when going to bed so I don’t forget (I wait til I’m almost asleep to put it on. I sometimes fall asleep forgetting. So I set a 10 min timer when getting into bed for a while)
– Chin strap (didn’t help)
– shave before bed for a smooth face (helps! I do it nightly now)
– wash the facemask every few days with soap and/or isopropyl alcohol (if I don’t, I have to keep pulling it tighter to keep it from leaking… wash every week. My masks have lasted 3-12 months)
– rinse my nostrils with water and blow my nose before bed for clear nose.

I went to a few doctors to try to help improve my sleeping with it. Every time, they’d look at the CPAP’s computerized log, ask some obvious dumb questions and say, “I dunno. Keep trying, you’ll get it.” and charge me a hundred bucks. Every time, I left the office MUCH more discouraged than when I went in. Most recently at an office visit, I asked to try some different masks. I tried 3 masks in the office and ended up with a size Large instead of the Medium that I previously had. That has helped!

I’m glad I have a CPAP. Good luck to you!

These are the two most seminal comedy shows in my world, and they are (gulp!) 30 years old!
These are just links to IMDB, not the actual shows.

Emo Philips Live  at the Hasty Pudding 1987
I found the LP record of this when I was working at the Tufts radio station and I pretty much memorized it.

A Steven Wright Special  for HBO,  1985
He came to Tufts and completely killed it!

My sister-in-law, Gail got us a 6 quart Fagor Lux Multicooker (model 670041880) for Christmas. It’s great. We’ve used the slow cooker, pressure cooker, and even the yogurt maker settings (the yogurt came out perfectly!). I’m cooking a fancy bean soup in it right now!

Here is a local copy of the manual!  Fagor Lux Multicooker User Manual 2015

Short form:  Dreamhost showed me how to implement a method of decreasing spam at the domain level called SPF. They implemented another domain level method of reducing spam, DKIM, a few months after I showed them that they hadn’t set up their system properly.

Long Form:

Until recently, there was nothing stopping someone from sending email from lee.org illegitimately (called “spoofing” email). A lot of spammers used it to send junk email “from” lee.org. This bothered me because:

1. spam :-(
2. Sometimes I’d get thousands of bounced emails
3. It reduced the assurity that my domain wasn’t hosting spammers, so sometimes real emails I sent would be marked as  spam

I talked to Dreamhost support and they showed me how to setup an SPF record for my domain. See here and here on how to do it yourself.

Dreamhost support also suggested I create the emails postmaster@ and abuse@ because “I have seen some cases even though they are very rare cases in which not having these emails set up can cause some problems with servers receiving email.” Ok, sure. So I set those addresses up.

I created an account at postmaster.google.com to periodically check if Gmail is getting any spam from my domain.

I read up on spam-proofing a domain and realized that Dreamhost hadn’t implemented DKIM. Actually, they set it up for my domain but it was left in test mode. Even in Dreamhost’s DKIM example the test flag was set (see “Example of a DKIM Record, they write: k=rsa; t=y; p=GIMfMA0G…). So I had several back and forths with Dreamhost tech support starting in February and yesterday I got an email, “Our devs finally got around to removing the test flag and now DKIM records are properly being served.” Hurray!

In conclusion, you might want to check the headers on your outgoing emails. Look for the “dkim” header. Previously, when my account was still in “test-mode”, headers looked like “dkim=pass (test mode)”. And now they look like “dkim=pass header.i=@lee.org” :-)