Condiment Review: Frank's RedHot | Nashville Hot Wings Sauce

I personally find my food bland and boring, but one can only eat Sriracha hot sauce for so long. Thus, I have amassed a collection of condiments to be added to my food, and this is going to be first of various condiment reviews. 

Frank's Red Hot is a whole family of hot sauces, and this one is supposed to be good on chicken wings. Personally, it goes well on everything. 

From the back of the bottle: "hot 'n spicy with a touch of sweet" and "kicked-up flavor from Aged Cayenne Red Peppers, Mack pepper, and a hint of sweet molasses". According to the ingredients list, the primary ingredient is distilled vinegar, and you do taste the tartness. Next is aged cayenne red peppers, then sugar, canola oil, and water. 

Visually, the sauce is a very orange and thick sauce with a LOT of flecks of black pepper. If you taste the sauce alone, your tongue will feel the tartness of vinegar first, then the individual pepper bits as if you hit specks of sand. THEN the heat of the cayenne pepper hits the back of your throat and tongue. But the heat is relatively subtle, yet it will make you feel you are sweating somewhat, but the sweetness counterbalances the heat. 

If you put it on meat or other food, the thickness of the sauce allow it to cling to various surfaces, which is very helpful in retaining the sauce where they are needed. However, one tablespoon is 30 calories, and 340mg of sodium (about 15% of DV), and you probably need a bit more than that. 

Better than Tabasco or similar type sauces, IMHO. 4/5

App Discovery: Karakeep (aka Hoarder) a web clip manager

If you go on the web a lot, you often come across articles that you want to reference later. So do you bookmark it, email it to yourself, or do something else? (Evernote? OneNote? Obsidian? Pocket?)

I personally had used various services including one called Omnivore, but that shut down a few months back. Then I read somewhere that if you host your own, you don't have to be EVER at the mercy of some other service provider.

As I find clipping to Evernote way too slow (up to 15 seconds per clip), I decided to look for something else. 

Then I found KaraKeep. 

How KaraKeep Works

KaraKeep is both an app and a service. It takes clippings of articles you can transfer to it via bookmarks, Android app, app share, iOS app, Chrome or Firefox extensions, and so on. It will take whatever you sent it (and optionally, run it against an LLM to extract keywords) so later you can go back and browse or search through via regular search and keywords. 

How to Install / Self-Host KaraKeep

What's great about Karakeep: it runs via a Docker Container, so there is minimal configuration if you already have Docker Container all set up. You simply download the whole package, and "run" it. Done. They have documentation online, and Discord channel as well.  

To make KaraKeep server available to you from almost anywhere, you setup a Tailscale distributed VPN, and enroll both your PC (whichever that runs the Docker container) and your smartphone (where you plan to clip from) to make sure they can see each other. And really, that's it. 

From now on, when you see an interesting article on the smartphone, simily do share >> KaraKeep. No need to choose keywords, no need to choose specific labels, no need to specify title... Share it, and forget it. It's clipped almost instantly, no matter where you are, and whether you're on cellular data or wifi. 

Run the app itself (or if you're at home, go to the machine running KaraKeep and browse to http://localhost:3000) and you can see what you've clipped, and use search and keywords to find what you clipped on that subject. 

If you want to use LLM to automagically pull out keywords for your searches, you need to configure KaraKeep (server, on your PC) by following this guide. 

Troubleshooting

Oh, and if you ever run into a problem with Docker, something about port 3000 is already taken, you need to restart hns, with "net stop hns" then "net start hns". You may also need to restart the Docker Container for Karakeep. Then it should work. 

If it fails on the smartphone side, make sure Tailscale is RUNNING. Obviously Tailscale needs to run for the VPN to work, and send your traffic back to your network to the KaraKeep "server". 

Now go have fun clipping everything you needed. 

Watch Out for LEGAL Scams: App that Cost WAY TOO MUCH on Subscription

For those who don't operate multiple phones... Androids use JPEG (or JPG), but iPhones use HEIC. The two standards are NOT compatible. If you share a photo from iPhone straight to Android, it will not be viewable. So what do you do? 

You convert it. 

Except the first convert I ran into is... essentially a scam. It basically won't do anything unless you engage the "free trial" which means you'll be charged in 3 days. It didn't exactly mention what's the cost. Then I looked at the email I just got:

Auto-renew subscription of $14.99 PER WEEK for an image converter?!

This app subscription costs $14.99 PER WEEK. 

Not per year. Not per month. PER WEEK?!

And this app doesn't even do HEIC to JPG, despite its name, "Image Converter Premium". 

Needless to say, I cancelled ASAP. 

Some Quick "Spending Money" Side Gigs in San Francisco (6/14/2025)

Need some spending money in San Francisco, but don't have a lot of time? Here are two things I've tried and gotten money for, 2 hours at a time, pay starts at 17.50 per hour and up, for VERY simple work:

A) Condu.it

Want to help a company that wants to create a headset that turns your THOUGHTS into typed words on a computer? Condu.it is working on that, and they need help of people who can type without looking at the keyboard, wear this heavy headset, and spend two hours looking at a screen and type responses without looking. You get paid $50 for two hours, and you can do up to 10 hours total. Beware... they are so booked, they are paying extra $10/hr if you can go extra early or extra late. That's $25+ PER HOUR (not counting any cost to get there, but there's a bus that go within 2 blocks)

However, beware, there are a couple caveats:

* You need some neck strength, because the headset is heavy and they provide a "chin rest"

* You do the two hours in the dark, as they need the laser to align properly. If you need a break, ring the bell

* You REALLY need to know how to type without looking at the keyboard, because you can't see the keyboard! 

If you can do all that, you will make easy $50 for 2 hours, up to 10 hours total ($500). They will hand you a check right at the end, which you can remote deposit into your bank via your banking app. Click on link above to book. If you click through, tell them "Kasey Chang" sent you. :) We both get a small bonus.  

B) Reflex

Reflex is working on something similar, albeit, they want to use your jaw's micromovements via subvocalization and turn that into typed words. What does that mean? Can you "say" things without actually making the sounds? That's subvocalization. At the study, you wear a headset with some extra sensors (more like a regular headset), and read both out loud and subvocalize a bunch of nonsense phrases to calibrate the sensors. Once you got it calibrated, you read aloud a book of your choice, for the remainder of the time. If you go back, you get to keep reading the book, or choose any ebook for under $10 on Amazon and they'll buy it for you to read into the machine to train their AI on the words and your jaw muscle patterns.

Their pay is $35 for 2 hours to read a book out loud. However, they only pay via Paypal, so you *do* need a Paypal account (at Paypal.com)  You can keep booking more time, but no more than twice a day.  

Sounds interesting? Click here to book time with Reflex $35 for two hours. You'll be paid within hours of finishing your session. 

https://reflexresearchstudy.as.me/schedule/7307a5c3/appointment/72148510/calendar/any

Any way, hope you earn some extra money!