• Life

    How to Fix “VLC Pauses Playback Randomly” on a Lenovo Computer

    I was using VLC media player recently. It kept pausing playback. It was on a Lenovo laptop, and this potential fix for this VLC issue on specifically Lenovo computers solved my problem: This “Zero touch video playback” is supposed to stop things from playing when your computer thinks you are not presently using your computer. I am glad the setting is easy to disable.

  • Life

    How to Trade Gold for Gold in Taiwan

    Before we begin, when we talk about gold here, we are talking about 24k gold specifically. Taiwan, being part of Asia, prefers 24k gold. There is often a cluster of gold shops in larger cities in Taiwan. They will display their gold buying and gold selling price prominently. I think it is per gram, but I have forgotten for the moment. Any gold piece in a gold shop has two numbers: a gold value listed as weight and an artisan cost in Taiwanese dollars. Because the cost of gold fluctuates day to day, they multiply the listed weight and the…

  • Life

    How to Clean Chocolate Off a Carpet

    I was very disappointed when I pushed a sweater aside to discover chocolate clumped on my carpet. For one thing, my daughter should have told me that she dropped chocolate from her ice cream instead of playing with a sweater, tossing the sweater on the stain, and wandering off! (I suspect that was the sequence, because the chocolate was not on the sweater at all.) For another thing, why was she in my nice music room with a chocolate-coated ice cream bar in the first place?! Fortunately, having handled similar situations— usually because of Small Sophie— I knew what to…