All posts by nouyang

Gardening

Sterilizing potting soil in the oven

Recently I bought some potting soil from a hardware store. When I opened it, I discovered that there were small insects (perhaps fruit gnats?) in the soil. Since I was already having problems with spider mites (grr) on my indoor roses,

roseI decided to sterilize the soil.

It turns out to be very easy, although it requires a bit of patience. Essentially, you put the soil on a cookie tray (probably on aluminum foil). You moisten the soil (enough to be damp to the touch but not runny or squishy), then cover the tray with aluminum foil. As the soil heats, the steam from the water sterilizes the soil. When you open the aluminum foil (carefully away from you!), steam should come out. If it doesn’t, then the soil hasn’t been sterilized.

soil
people kept asking me if these were brownies

The internet say maybe 1.5 or 2 hours was enough, but I found that my oven always took something closer to 4 or 5 hours to steam the soil… :/ 180F I think is the max the internet recommends (something about releasing toxins at higher temperatures).

osil2

It’s also possible to microwave the soil in a ziplock bag with the top open for 2 or 3 minutes, or alternatively in a tupperware with a few holes in the lid for 1 or 2 minutes. I think I will definitely try this next time — the oven took HOURS.

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Add Extra Hard Drive using a CD ROM Caddy (3rd drive in Thinkpad W530!)

I’m currently using a Thinkpad W530. It came with a 512GB  spinning disk hard drive, which I augmented with a 256 GB solid state drive in my mSATA slot.

Recently I decided I wanted even more space. How to add yet another hard drive to my laptop? Answer: using a “caddy” adapter that slots into where the CD drive is!

Get a normal sized (2.5”) hard drive, plop it into the caddy adapter (~$10), and stick it in your laptop where the CD drive used to be.

The caddy is *really* easy to take out on the thinkpad. No screws are involved in taking out the CD drive or putting in the new caddy — just two sliding buttons. Slide the “lock-unlock” tab and then push on the bigger tab, and the CD drive should pop out.

cd_drive_buttons_w530The one thing I struggled with was how far in to to push the hard disk into the caddy. I did need a screwdriver as a pushing tool here, and in the end the strategy was to “wiggle” the drive back and forth, by pushing on the left side with the screwdriver, then the right, and so on until it was almost flush (can barely see the connector). This should leave an opening on the back end about a finger-width wide. I filled this with a bit of foam.

cd_drive_foam_w530When the drive is pushed in far enough, there are four screws which can now be screwed through all the way in the caddy into the hard drive.

Below: one of the screws going from the caddy into the matching hole in the SSD.

cd_drive_screw_w530Below, two of the four screws that go through the caddy.

cd_drive_unscrewed_w530The screws should screw all the way down, when the hard drive is at the proper place in the caddy (holes should line up).

cd_drive_screwed_in_w530 Finally, my host is Windows 10, so I just opened “disk management”, right clicked on the new drive (if it doesn’t show up, in my case it was because I hadn’t properly pushed in the SSD all the way into the caddy), then add partition or somesuch — click  through the defaults (use format NTFS) and voila new drive.

newdiskVoila

Specificcd_drive_screw_w530s:

  • “SSD Hard Drive Caddy Tray Replacement for Lenovo Thinkpad”   for ~$10 on amazon prime.
  • “Silicon Power 512GB SSD 2.5″ 7mm (0.28″) Internal Solid State Drive”, for ~$100 on amazon prime.
  • “Samsung 256gb SSD MSATA” for ~$70 on ebay.
  • Lenovo W530 for $515 ($500 + $15 shipping) on ebay (Yes, it always says “last one available”, ignore that)
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Bulk adding videos to youtube playlist (well, at least adding them faster)

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I’ve occasionally wanted to add a lot of videos at once to a youtube playlist.

Usually, this is super annoying since it takes a bunch of mouse presses to just added one video, and you can’t even used keyboard shortcuts (like hitting TAB and then enter).

https://www.youtube.com/view_all_playlists

Add videos -> URL -> enter URL -> Add video.

Repeat for each video, and every single one of those requires you to move your mouse around. You have to wait a bit each time too as the page reloads with your new video on it.

I found a shortcut so that it’s annoying, but slightly less annoying. In this method, you open the modal to add a video, then instead of opening and closing the modal, you can just copy-paste-click to add all your videos. Specifically, this adds them to your “watch later” list. Then you can go to your watch later playlist, click “add all to playlist”, and add them to your desired playlist.

A bit convoluted to explain, but really easy in practice, and so much faster than the old process.

Open up the playlist editor as usual, then entire a URL. Click the “clock” icon.

youtube-1The “clock” should change into a “check mark”. Then you can paste in the next URL (without having to exit the modal) and proceed to add all videos.

youtube-2Finally, go to your “watch later” playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL

 

Note: If your “watch later” list already has a bunch of videos that you want to keep,

  •   you can create a temporary playlist “temp playlist”.
  • Then on your “watch later” list, click the three dots, and add all of the existing videos to the new “temp playlist”.
  • Then, go to edit the “temp playlist” and click the three dots, then click `add all to` and un-check the `watch later` playlist. this will remove the videos from your `Watch Later` playlist

youtube-4After you are done bulk-adding videos to your other playlist (say `cool playlist`), you can uncheck playlist `Watch later` from “add all to” list. This’ll remove the new videos of your list from the `Watch Later` list and leave it empty. Finally, go back to your `temp playlist` and click “add all to” `Watch later`.

Wow, that was a mouthful, but hopefully it should make sense.