WIP Mom — life under construction

Bar soap has been sitting next to my washing machine for three years and I only just understood why

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Bar soap — specifically Zote or Palmolive bar — works better than liquid detergent on grease, grass, and mystery stains because of how surfactants behave when applied dry and concentrated directly to fabric.
The method: wet the fabric, rub the bar directly on the stain, let it sit 5–10 minutes, then wash normally. That’s it. No soaking. No special products.
Hot water before soap on protein stains (blood, egg, sweat) sets the stain permanently. Cold water first, always.
It doesn’t work on everything. Ink and red wine have their own rules. Pretreating old dried stains needs more patience than I usually have.

I just wanted to back up my photos. Three months later, I have a working batch script and opinions about Windows networking.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Immich is a self-hosted photo backup tool — open source, runs locally, looks and feels like Google Photos. I wanted it on my home machine without paying for cloud storage forever.
Installing it on Ubuntu in WSL2 was fine. Getting Windows to actually see it from the rest of the house was not fine.
WSL2 assigns a new internal IP every single reboot. This is a known thing. I learned it the hard way.
The fix: a batch script that grabs the current WSL IP and sets up port forwarding every time. It works. I run it manually. That’s where we are.

I went looking for a quick parenting tip and ended up in a 25-year longitudinal study

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

The “Harvard study on chores” all over Instagram isn’t really a Harvard study about chores. The real longitudinal data comes from the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Marty Rossmann followed 84 kids from preschool into their mid-20s. The strongest predictor of adult success in the dataset was whether they started household tasks at ages 3–4. Not 8. Not 10. Three.
A 2014 Braun Research survey of 1,001 adults: 82% had regular chores growing up, only 28% require their own kids to do them. I’m in the 72%. Cleanly. No defense.
Mechanism is executive function — working memory, impulse control, sequential planning. The exact stuff that makes someone good at school, work, and not losing their keys. I had not connected those dots.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What this place is

WIP Mom is a notebook, not a portfolio. I write up the projects I’m working on while I’m working on them — the shelf that’s almost straight, the script I’m still debugging, the drawer I’ve fixed for the third time. I post the messy middle, not just the after photos, because the middle is where everything actually happens.

How I got here

I work in software by day and fix things at home by weekend — sometimes well, sometimes with a confident shortcut that becomes a future problem. Writing things down turned out to be the cheapest way to remember what I’d learned, and the most surprising way to discover what I actually thought.

Everywhere I Make Things

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000