Hacks And Gadgets, Part 2: Some Weird Stuff Out There

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 31, 2025]  2025 

In Part 1 of this series, I explored some of the mysteries of internet hacks that seem to show up on my Instagram account even though I have never posted and follow exactly 1.25 people. But it has opened up a whole new world for me.

I cannot help but observe in all these hacks that logic is sometimes in short supply. For example, dumping out an entire liter of soda (shown on the video) so you can use the bottle makes no sense to me.

Another cleaning recipe calls for Expired beer? Who has that? Not my house! Should you let a bottle of beer go flat just to use in a hack that could probably be purchased at the hardware store for less than the cost of the beer? Other cleaning hacks required fresh (unbrewed) coffee grounds, or lots of toothpaste, or tons of aluminum foil, or Cascade dishwasher cubes. Hard to imagine cost savings using any of those.

Some of these hack videos go by a warp speed. It's a puzzle, trying to connect a tomato, drain cleaner, and aluminum foil into the same hack. Is this a test? Is it one hack or ten?

A lot of these hacks will start with: "my grandmother taught me this"  or "a plumber taught me this."   Frankly, grandma was an idiot, and you ought to fire the plumber. Some examples:

Learned this from a plumber: Wrap aluminum foil around a faucet then squirt Meyers soap on top and turn on the faucet. What exactly does this do? The soap is on top of the aluminum foil.

Learned this from my dad. He s a genius! Rubbing a sanding block over a $100 bill. Verify its authenticity? I'd be afraid of shredding it and the bank not being willing to let me trade it in for another one.

Always do this before travel: Wrap car and house keeps (including fobs) in aluminum foil and put in freezer. (Can this be good for the electronics in the key fobs?)

Most people don't know this trick: Put a can of (unopened) garbanzo beans in the dishwasher. (Is she then running it?) Absolutely no idea what this is supposed to do for either the garbanzo beans, the dishes, or the dishwasher itself. Does whatever it is still work if the beans are canellini?

Then there's a whole class of hacks that to me just seem, well, flat-out weird. Some examples:

Cut a tomato in half horizontally. Insert gold jewelry between the two halves of the tomato to polish/clean it. Hopefully you can sneak the tomato halves into your kids sandwiches afterwards so as not waste the tomatoes.

Get rid of musty odors on clothes by spraying them with vodka. They used a men's suit jacket as an example. Yup, definitely need to go to work reeking of vodka. Sure hope those European alcohol tariffs don't go into effect because this could be an expensive hack!

Dumping something blue (what?) in the toilet then sticking your bare muddy foot in the toilet and flushing for an "instantly clean foot."   Doubt this really works unless you have one of those old toilets that actually power flushes. And how did you even get into the bathroom without tracking mud all over? And eww.

Rubbing raw egg whites on leather boots to clean and shine them. (How does this not end up with boots smelling like rotten eggs?)

Take an avocado pit from an avocado and cut it into pieces. (Machete required?) Put it in a jar with Coca-Cola, wait 24 hours, then rub the avocado pieces with some of the Coke in the jar on stiff muscles and joints. Try not to attract ants. OK, that last part was mine.

One hack I tried that did not work as well as I hoped was to put a wooden spoon over a pot to keep it from boiling over. It boiled over.

The hack I am always looking for is the one that purports to remove hard water build-up on glass shower doors. Even though Olof and I are religious about squeegee-ing the doors after every shower, hard water has built up that has defied every commercial cleaning product on the market, never mind epic amounts of elbow grease. Even an Amazon product called Shower Door Cleaner didn't touch it.

But ever an optimist, I have mixed up every concoction the Instagram hackers have touted. It worked so well on their shower doors. Maybe they don't live in a place with hard water like we do. Or it's had less time to build up. At this point, the only conclusion we can come to is that we'll just have to replace the shower doors. But they'll likely just end up looking the same again. Fortunately, by then we'll be dead and whoever ends up with our tiny built-by-the-lowest-bidder-after-the-war-with-all-non-standard-parts-cottage will raze it and build a McMansion on the lot with hopefully a soft water system.

Stay tuned next time for Part 3: Amazing and horrifying gadgets.

In spite of the wooden spoon, the pot boiled over.

 

Hacks and Gadgets: A Whole New World: Part 1

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published March 24, 2025] 2025

I'm not on any social media except for an account on Instagram so that I can follow 1.25 family members (one who posts all the time, and another who posts rarely). I've never posted myself.

So, I'm puzzled as to why Instagram is constantly sending me videos of recipes, products, and particularly, hacks.

Now, everyone loves a good hack. They used to be called household hints and were generally found in a newspaper column by a mother and daughter duo named Heloise. (They were both named Heloise.) I think they're dead.

It was my experience that the Heloises'  hints only worked about 70% for me. Maybe they had a different brand of oil on their driveway than I did that would respond better to eradication with kitty litter. (Maybe it was my brand of kitty litter?) Maybe their kids were less sloppy eaters. But even though they promised that with their hint that the stain will be gone, it somehow never was.

But the Instagram version has actual videos. The one thing I can conclude with all the Instagram hacks is that there is nothing that cannot be cleaned with a combination of baking soda, white vinegar, blue dish detergent and toothpaste, often all four at once. Coca-Cola is another frequent cleaning product which makes me wary about what it might be doing to the lining of my stomach, if it is that good at melting baked-on grease off one's stove vent.

Having now been sucked into endless Instagram feeds of household hacks, I've been able to make several observations.

Some, of course, do work, even for me. But in the spirit of the Heloise columns, never as well as they work on the Instagram video.

A number of these hacks require serious power tools, never mind sharp objects like knives to cut off the tops (or bottoms) of plastic water bottles. I would be more likely to sever a digit in the process, making my hospital co-pay for surgical re-attachment waaaay more than whatever I was saving with the hack.

Some of these are ridiculously time consuming, measuring and mixing big batches of frankly suspect cleaning products. For example: Squeeze juice from three oranges and do something else with the juice. Take the peels and grind them up in blender with water and two tablespoons salt. Strain. Pour the strained liquid in a dispenser bottle with one tablespoon baking soda. Use it to clean the toilet bowl. Or buy Ty-D-Bol?

A good number of them use so many products you already have in your home that you could buy this solution's twin on Amazon for a lot less.

The preponderance feminine hygiene product hacks deserves a section all its own.

If I could add two provisos to this category of hacks, they would be "discretion"  and "aesthetics."   Maybe also "judgment."  Also, "WTF"??? It's one thing to infuse a panty liner with some essential oil and tack it mostly out of sight on the back of your toilet base. Ditto for using a panty liner as an emergency bandaid on your heel (minus the essential oil).

Taping panty liners to the bottom of your kitchen mop as a substitute for Swiffer pads, as several videos suggested, could work in a pinch.

I'm fairly dubious, however, about panty liners soaked with Pine Sol and stuck inside lamp shades (presumably meant to be emitting Eau de Cheap Mountain Cabin?)

I'm marginally OK with a scented panty liner stuck inside the lid of your kitchen trash bin, as one hack suggests, but worried about putting them as room fresheners on the top of blades of ceiling fans. I'd be afraid they'd fly off in inopportune (would there be opportune?) moments. Who'd want to get hit in the face with a Pine Sol-soaked maxi pad?

Some of these hygiene product hacks truly crossed the line. Like taking an extra-long panty liner and sticking it to the driver's seat back of your car. Is it supposed to absorb sweat? Regardless, it just looks wrong. So wrong. A puzzled observer of this hack could only speculate how this product got from Point A (where you'd expect it) to Point B? Should they leave a note on your windshield? This is definitely not a hack for anyone who does car pools or is in real estate. Or wants to continue in either.

But the absolutely worst one was the video of three tampons, their little strings tied neatly together, swimming in a fry pan of ground beef to soak up grease. I can't un-see this. This might be one hack you don't want to use if you want anyone, including and especially your husband, to ever eat at your house again.

Next week, in Part 2, I'll elicit readers'  help in trying to figure out what, exactly, a lot of Instagram hacks actually do. Someone posts a video with no sound or explanation which ends with the poster doing a thumbs up. Like it's supposed to be obvious. Seriously, it's keeping me up at night.

For example, there s a frequent hack that shows someone putting Scotch tape over the keypad of one's microwave, then peeling it off. No idea what this does.

Or: melting a bunch of (expensive) dishwasher pods in a fry pan. (Why?????)

Or: Taping a large cabbage leaf to the knee with adhesive tape. Medicinal? Or just because you can?

Or: Taking a plastic supermarket veggie bag, adding small balls of wadded-up aluminum foil along with coins (quarters, it looks like), filling the bag with water, tying it closed, and hanging it outside on the porch. What does this do? Clean the coins? Ward off evil spirits?

I'm already thanking you in advance!

 

 

Dealing With The Contagion Deniers

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 17, 2025] ©2025

We’re all familiar with the common fibs people tell – “It’s in the mail,” “I only had one,” and “No, I haven’t had Botox, I’m just really relaxed.”  But this time of year, the one that really gets me is “I’m not contagious.”   The speaker invariably has a hacking cough reminiscent of Greta Garbo dying of consumption in the last scenes of Camille.  (Since not many people will get this reference, Camille was a 1936 movie about a beautiful Parisian courtesan who dies a very dramatic premature death of tuberculosis which wouldn’t even be a movie plot today because of antibiotics. 

Let me say up front that I am hardly a germaphobe.   (One look at my house would convince you.)  But some of the worst illnesses I’ve ever caught have been from people who “weren’t contagious.”  Fortunately, neither Olof nor I get sick all that often but when we do, we tend to get afflictions that take up residence in our obviously weak lungs and refuse to be evicted. So we do our best to avoid them.

There are no lack of virulent organisms floating around this time of year, including the ever-present Covid.  Everything you touch is a source of some pathogen (including and especially the keypad at your local pharmacy) but other than washing your hands a lot and getting flu and Covid shots (we’ve now had seven), you just have to hope your immune system is up to the challenge.  But why dare it by inviting plague into your house? 

Several weeks ago, some friends we hadn’t seen in a long time arrived for dinner, the husband recently returned from a trip through what I call the Ebola airline hubs in Europe (Heathrow anyone?) where the world’s grodiest germs have a chance to mix and match.  The first thing I noticed was that this guy was exhibiting the Green Snot Sign.  There are few microbes I hate more than green snot microbes which from my personal experience are pernicious and have a door knob life span of decades.  Further, the Manual of Mom Medicine, paragraph six, article two, clearly states that yellow snot is your standard basic cold but green snot requires antibiotics. If you’ve ever had a toddler in nursery school or day care, you know this well.

As if on cue, our guest croaked from his severely laryngitic throat that he had started antibiotics approximately five seconds before so not to worry, he was “not contagious.” 

I immediately considered letting our guest eat alone out on our uncovered patio in the rain where his illness might progress to pneumonia to which he would hopefully succumb before I had to let him back in.  Olof, a frequent international business traveler before he retired, would come back from those same airports with some seriously nasty stuff. (Green snot from an Ebola airport probably IS Ebola.)   But I was overruled by my kinder gentler Other Half, who thinks it’s not polite to be mean to people one has invited over even if they are attempting to kill us. 

Our guest not only coughed and sneezed pretty much non-stop but kept repeating, probably in response to my cringing looks every time he blew Snot Verde across my dinner table, that his doctor told him that once he started taking antibiotics he wasn’t contagious.  He said they’d thought of cancelling but didn’t want to disappoint us.

Please.  Disappoint us.

Let me just say I have no medical background whatsoever, other than having been previously married to a physician, including the medical school years, which makes me among the most medically dangerous people on the planet.  But I would still like to officially challenge every law of contagion ever put out there.  According to the Dr. Inga School of Unsubstantiated Medical Facts, if you are even remotely sick, you are contagious.  So when you say “my doctor says I’m not contagious” (like I believe you, or him, or her), I think it’s only fair to ask for his or her number because I think they ought to be willing to treat me for free when I get sick from you.  I’d also like affidavits of non-contagability, lab results not more than two hours old indicating the absence of a single shedding rhinovirus, recent articles from The New England Journal citing conclusive evidence that contagiousness can even be quantified, and a Hazmat suit for the guest (and maybe even the host) to wear.  Let no one say I am unreasonable. 

But meanwhile, while the flu/Covid season lasts, I’m hoping you’ll give me a head(cold)s up.  My aging immune system thanks you.

 

 

 

Languages I Don't Speak, Part 3: Light Bulb Edition

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published March 3, 2025] 2025

This is Part 3 in my series of Languages I Do Not Speak: Light bulb edition. I mentioned the light bulb issue in a previous column about my other language barriers (Spoken Coffee, Remotes, Grandchildren, iPhones, etc.) but they merit a column all their own.

It used to be that light bulbs for home use came in three denominations: 60, 75, and 100. They all used the same base, and you knew how much light you'd get with each of them 

Now it's as if they suddenly switched us to metric. (And don't even think it.)

Even bringing the box that held the former bulbs to the hardware store with me, I need human assistance to find the same ones. I have enough techno-stress in my life without light bulb anxiety.

A while back, we had some Edison light bulbs strung on our property to add additional lighting in an otherwise dark area. As always, I bought a few extra bulbs for replacement. But now, alas, those bulbs have been used up and I was tasked with finding some of the same size, brightness, and base. This has taken hours upon hours of my time. If the bulb isn't exactly the same as the others on the string both in size and light emission, it looks really odd. I think I have looked at least a hundred Edison bulbs on every site that sells light bulbs, including Amazon.

Since I didn't have the box, I got out my magnifying glass and was able to determine that the teeny-weeny numbers on the base of the bulbs read: 120v 60H 0.01 0.9. 

Optimistically, I tried to Google that combination and came up with ... nothing.

It turns out that with LED bulbs, watts don't mean much. They pretty much belong to an ancient dialect called "incandescent". It all lumens now. 

Unfortunately, like many people in my age group, I do not speak lumen; I speak watt. You need to translate watts into lumens if you are buying an LED bulb.

And then, there s a whole new language of bulb bases. I was searching for bulb with an A19 base but all I could find anywhere were LED bulbs with E26 bases.

We will not even go into light bulb bases. You don t have enough time and I don t have enough column space.

But the short answer is that almost all A19 bulbs are E26. This means that if you have an A19 bulb at your house, it definitely has an E26 base. However, you can't say its the other way around. That's because bulbs with E26 bases come in all different shapes and sizes, not just A19.

Are you still reading? If so, I'm impressed. (And worried.)

So I did eventually find some bulbs that would work and carefully noted everything it says on the box which is: LED String Light 70 lumens. Clear. 11-watt replacement (replaces an 11-watt incandescent bulb) S14 - Soft White - 2700K - 1 Watt - Standard base.

Oh, you wanted dimmable? That's a whole other variable.

As if lumens weren't bad enough, now you're getting into Kelvins which refer to color temperature. Warm white bulbs have between 2,700-3,000 Ks (Kelvins) white the soft whites are more in the 3,500 K range, and the cool whites in the 5,000 K range. As I understand it (and I really don t), higher K numbers are not brighter, merely whiter but in higher numbers will eventually start to look bluer (just to make you really crazy).

We have an entire huge drawer of specialty light bulbs for all the different indoor and outdoor light fixtures in our home, all personally labeled so that we could ever figure out what fixture they belonged to. 

When we remodeled our kitchen back in 1999, I had them put in under-the-cabinet lights and eight can lights in an 11x11 space, plus seven more can lights in our small adjoining dining space. Honestly, turn them all on at once and it looks like a nuclear blast. Having spent decades in a kitchen with a single 100-watt light bulb, I wasn't taking any chances.

But as those 15 incandescent can lights have burnt out, they've been replaced with LED bulbs which don't match the light on the previous ones at all. Ultimately, they will all match but in the interim, it's a very weird look.

And now my wonderful desk light is starting to flicker. Except it doesn't even have a bulb. At least not one that mere mortals could access. It's in a "head " I queried the company who makes it on their customer support line yes, you have to replace the whole head ($298) or the whole lamp. But a light that flickers while you're working is a light that is tempting one to rip it out of its base and throw it in the pool.

And then, to add insult to electrical injury, my long-time beloved halogen standing reading light next to my reading chair finally crumped. My requirements for a replacement fixture were simple: it had to have an actual changeable light bulb. This bulb also had to be something standard that you could get at Meanley's, or even on-line without searching through hundreds of light bulbs as I did for my Edison lights.

Annoyingly, most of the standing reading lamps I looked at had heads just like my desk lamp that was giving me problems. Fool me once. 

Checking the tag on the reading lamp that seem to fit my criteria, it said no more than 60 watts but that's only if it's an incandescent bulb. Apparently for an LED bulb, you can use any wattage you want in it. (Disclaimer: if your house burns down, this was what I was told by the lighting store person. So sue HER.)

Just to clarify, a 60-watt incandescent bulb is a 7-9 watt LED bulb and is 730-800 lumens. Did you ever want to know all this? I sure didn't. But now, alas, I do.