Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with remove

Are laser treatments a good way to get rid of facial hair?

shelayna — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:08:29 -0800

I'm looking for information regarding laser treatments to remove facial hair. I'd like to do something about the hair on my face (I'm female). Until now I've been using depilatory creams, but I'd like a permanent solution. Are laser treatments the way to go? I understand that it's easier than electrolysis, and that I'm an ideal candidate for laser treatments since I'm very fair-skinned with dark hair.

How many treatments are generally needed?

Do I need to let my facial hair grow (i.e. not remove it) to a certain length before starting? (I'd feel very awkward going out and about like that)

Are there any after-effects like pain, burning or redness?

Any personal anecdotes for or against would be much appreciated.

If only they smelled like yams...

cavalier — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:21:31 -0800

We've returned from an uneventful Thanksgiving trip to the family nest to find nearly all of our baggage reeking of what can best be described as "Old Turkey." What in the world can we do to rid these bags of this awful smell? I don't get it. It was a normal enough Turkey day. No Turkeys were flash fried or immolated or puree'd. Turkey was baked, meals were had, squabbling ensued, your usual enough day. The house did not smell particularly of anything more than a home cookd meal.

Yet here we are. (sniff) -- eyuck! It's like, if the bags were left right next to the stove top, and we boiled the Turkey, this is what I'd expect the bags to smell like.

Fine fine, enough of the detail. I tried boiling some lemons and letting the bags hang out by the stove, but apparently that is more a fish oil thing.

One more wrinkle -- the baby stroller got "Turkey Musk" too. I'm hoping for a solution that doesn't involve just spraying perfume on the bags/stroller, if possible.

Crayon in the Dryer, 3x Over

theichibun — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:13:54 -0800

I washed some clothes with a crayon in a pocket. Now I've got yellow crayon spread out across my clothes. But it gets better. The clothes weren't getting dry and I kept putting them through the dryer. 3 times total, never noticing that the crayon stains were there. How can I get rid of, or at least minimize, the problem so I get some of my pants for work back? I've tried ironing with a paper towel and putting them through the washer with various combinations of OxiClean and other stain fighting products. At first running them through the washer seemed to be helping (cold/cold just in case maybe using warm water somewhere would help), but the last time I tried that I didn't see it getting any better. I also saw no good coming from the ironing method.

Due to my schedule the clothes have now been sitting in my room for about a week since the incident. Probably not a good move, I know. Do I have any hope of fixing the mess this late in the game?

Can I outsmart the cache.

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:43:31 -0800

How do I make something disappear online? (I know, I know) I wrote a controversial article on my own site. The subject is topical and my position is strongly stated so the article received a lot of traffic. My website and my (unusual) name were linked by several larger sites. My article has now been online for a couple of weeks and received a lot of flak. I didn't expect all this attention. I think writing the article in the first place was probably a bad idea. I already took the article down but it's still findable in caches. What's the best way to make it all go away?

What's the best way to remove wallpaper from plaster walls?

nitsuj — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 06:53:34 -0800

I'll be spending this coming weekend removing possibly several layers of painted-over wallpaper from 70-year-old plaster walls in my new house. Got any tips, tricks, secrets, or advice? So we bought a house -- yeah! -- but the previous owners (and perhaps beyond) lovingly painted over what I'm anticipating to be several layers of old, thick wallpaper. Naturally, I'd like to start fresh and do this correctly, but I need your advice.

I've a ton of different guides on the Internet, many with bits of conflicting information; I'm looking for your anecdotal advice! What methods worked the best for you? What's the One Thing I should definitely do? How bad is this really going to be?

Thanks!

How to I remove metadata from a photo?

Damn That Television — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:04:22 -0800

How do I strip absolutely all information (metadata, file created on, etc) data from a digital picture? I have some digital pictures. I need to make it so that absolutely no information can be gleamed from them -- what camera took them, when they were taken, etc. Is there an industry standard/government standard for removing this information?

How to remove built-in auto-complete entries from AOL's email client?

gemmy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:37:59 -0800

How to remove the built-in auto-complete entries from AOL's email client? My auntie uses AOL to access the internet. Whenever she goes to send an email and starts typing in the "To:" field, the software tries to auto-complete a match from her address book. Pretty standard. She can remove erroneous auto-complete entries (like mistyped new email addresses, which get added to the list automatically if she hits send without noticing) by deleting them from her address book.

However, there are a bunch of AOL-centric email addresses that show at the top of the auto-complete entries. Things like aolmedia, aolhelp, etc. There is no option for removing these entries from the address book, and there doesn't seem to be any way to remove them from the auto-complete list. They disappear if you add more letters, but they are confusing her. I have spent some time on AOL online help and on various forums trying to figure out a way to remove those addresses from the auto-complete list, with no luck.

Normally it's easy to fix any issues, even long distance, as my parents live nearby and are tech savvy. But we are all stumped here. Before I install the client in order to troubleshoot (shudder!), I figured I would ask here first. Anyone know how to get rid of these built-in auto-complete entries? AOL 9.5, running on Windows XP.

(Ditching AOL is not an option. If it was, I wouldn't be asking. She has used it for ages and is comfortable with it.)

Remove Windows 7 Beta

Alabaster — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:44:24 -0800

How can I uninstall/remove the Windows 7 Beta (dual boot on secondary partition) without formatting the partition? I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my D drive (really a partition of my primary drive).

Being a Beta, I naively assumed there would be some kind of uninstall option, but I can't find one and Google isn't giving me much hope.

There are hundreds of GB of audio sample data on my D drive which would be a huge hassle to back up (I don't have enough external storage and can't afford to buy a new drive at the moment despite reasonably low prices). Reinstalling it all from the DVDs would take days.

Is there any way to cleanly remove the Windows 7 Beta from my D drive while leaving the rest of the data intact?

If not, is there a *not-so-clean* way to do it which won't be completely disruptive to my system (for example: removing it from the boot list in MSConfig and then simply deleting the Windows/Program Files/etc. folders from the D drive) (If the latter option, will I run into file access issues?)

In case it makes a difference, my primary OS (on C:) is Vista 64.

Java Bunnies Breeding

Black_Umbrella — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:32:04 -0800

Which of these Java programs can i get rid of and why are they breeding like bunnies? Everyone that has my computer has the same issue where these things keep building up. It is school issued so i know a lot of people with the same computer and many of the same programs pre-installed. I have been deleting the old versions every now and again but why so many versions & which can I get rid of? I don't like 100+ MB bunnies breeding in my computer.

J2SE runtime vs Java 2 runtime vs Java 2 SDK vs Java(TM) update vs Java(TM) SE runtime

...I don't program so I don't need any if that is what they are used for. Oh and I run windows xp.

Dried Foam is nasty.

god hates math — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:15:23 -0800

Help me remove some nasty, dried upholstery foam from a Church pew. I have a church pew with an upholstered seat. The upholstery is old, torn up by my cats, and ugly, while the wood underneath is gorgeous. So, I'm ripping it up.

The bad news: There's a 1"-1.5" layer of upholstery foam underneath the upholstery, and it's dried to a hard crust. It doesn't come of easily, and when it does, it basically turns to dust. I've scraped about a third of it off so far, but I'm looking for a better solution for the rest. Please tell me there's some sort of chemical that will dissolve all the foam? Something that will re-dampen the foam enough so that I can tear it off in big chunks? I just don't want to spend hours scraping this stuff off.

Kicking out a roommate not a lease in San Francisco.

hobbes — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:02:28 -0800

Giving ye olde boot to a roommate not a lease in San Francisco.. One lease holder, and three people not on the lease. The lease holder wants a bad roommate to leave, but doesn't want to tell him herself, so I volunteered.

Besides verbally notifying him that he's got 30-days to get out, should I have a letter written and notarized? And do I need to have that letter written/signed by the lease holder? Anything else I prepare/ be prepared for?

Thanks MeFi.

Please. Go. Away.

theantikitty — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:23:26 -0800

How can I completely remove the Windows taskbar from view? This is for Windows Vista. To be clear, I do not want to autohide the taskbar. I would like it to go away. Completely. I use Rocketdock and some other programs that make the taskbar totally obsolete, but I haven't found any way to hide it permanently. I don't even want it to load up with Windows, but if there's a one time hide command I can do on startup I guess that would suffice. I've searched and searched to no avail. Is there a program out there (or a Windows setting somewhere) that will do this for me? This seems like it should be simple! Am I missing something obvious here? Thank you thank you.

Remove silk-screening from sunglasses?

SteveTheRed — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:05:57 -0800

How can I remove silk-screened printing from one lens of my new polarized sunglasses without ruining them? My wife, who is an an optician, bought me a decent pair of Ray Ban sunglasses as a present. I'm really happy with them -- they are the first pair of > $20 sunglasses that I've owned in my 37 years.

There is one thing about them that annoys me, though. On the upper corner of one of the lenses, there is a white, silk-screened "Ray Ban P" label. I think this looks pretentious and I want to get rid of it. Does the hive mind have any tried and true ideas for removing this without ruining my glasses? TIA.

How do I get rid of a directory when it "refers to a location that is unavailable?"

suimin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:30:17 -0800

On my external hard drive there's this empty file folder that I can't delete. Every time I try to delete the folder, I get a message saying that it doesn't exist. I'm not very tech-savvy. What do I do? So I tried to extract a compressed file--I can't remember if it was a .zip or a .rar. Nor do I remember the program I used to extract it--it wasn't WinZip, it was something I found for free on download.com. (Don't look at me like that.)

The upshot is that the zipped file was messed up somehow, but the extractor went ahead and created a directory for the potentially unzipped file. But the extraction didn't work, so it left this ugly directory just lying there, indestructible and pointless.

I did all this on my external hard drive, so when I couldn't delete the directory with the hard drive attached to a computer running Windows XP, I tried it on a computer running Vista. I keep getting the same response, about how it "refers to a location that is unavailable."

I don't know a whole lot about the inner workings of Windows operating systems. The mature thing would be to just ignore the stupid superfluous directory, but it drives me crazy. Is there something I can do? (It's a FAT32 file system, whatever that means.) Some kind of clean-up--other than the disk cleanup/defragment options in the system tools? And could I maybe get very simple, step-by-step instructions, so that I don't ruin anything? (Just a heads-up: any mention of "algorithms" and I'm lost.)

Paint thinner smells bad and I want it off.

Dipsomaniac — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:34:13 -0800

Anybody good at removing paint thinner from untreated wood? Had a small spill of paint thinner (varsol) on an untreated birch counter. Now, of course, there's a patch that smells like paint thinner and feels greasy as well.

Hemp-based soap didn't work, despite it usually being excellent at removing petroleum products. Right now I have clay cat litter sitting on it, but if that doesn't pull it out I'd like to know if anybody has any alternatives to try.

Password emergency / mystery with Filemaker

lorimer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:26:24 -0800

Password emergency / mystery. I'm a new Filemaker user and I've somehow set a password that's keeping me from accessing the file I just put two days of work (and some not easily replaceable data) into. I'm running Filemaker Pro Advanced 8.5v1 on an Intel Mac (OS 10.4.8).

I installed and started learning Filemaker on Friday. I was playing around with all the settings and options, and one is password-protecting a file. Since I was only experimenting with making my first file, and since I (wrongly??) thought I was setting a file-level rather than application-level password, I put in a throwaway password which I now do not remember and have no record of. The next time I tried to open this file it prompted me for the password, I tried a few times but couldn't remember it, and I gave up and created a new file.

This second file DID open repeatedly without a password during the same session of the application (i.e. app had not been restarted since creation of this second file, but file closed and opened freely). Unfortunately this session didn't shut down properly because of an unrelated issue (buggy unrelated app -- which I must use -- that occasionally makes my system stop responding and need to be manually shut down by holding the power button).

After I restarted the computer and Filemaker, my attempt to open this second file gave me the same password prompt. I'm 100% positive I didn't set a file-level password for this second file. This second file was made from scratch, not from a template and not a copy of the first file.

I tried creating a third file -- doing nothing but defining a few fields and one record, saving the file, and restarting the app. This third file DOES OPEN without a password -- implying this is not an app-level password issue.

During all of this I've been logged in as an Administrator-level user. The username in the password prompt is my Administrator username (but my system-level Administrator password is definitely not the password Filemaker wants). The option to log in as "guest" is greyed out.

I've Googled and the only Filemaker password reset or recovery utilities I can find are for Windows. Filemaker's Help says nothing about removing a password.

Please tell me there's some way to open my second file. I unfortunately put a LOT of work into it over the weekend, both data entry & careful layout/formatting. I dutifully made running backups of it... which are of course as unopenable as the original. Trying to open the file in a plain text editor gives me nothing usable (just strings of random-seeming characters).

I'm ready to entirely uninstall and reinstall Filemaker if it will help, but I can only assume these first two files have some metadata that says "no copy of Filemaker can open me without this password." If I were the company, I would've put in many safeguards to prevent me from doing what I'm trying to do now...

Bad head. Doggy style.

Sinner — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:38:54 -0800

A tick dug its foul way into my dog's belly yesterday. We found it dug in but not yet engorged in the middle of an irritated red patch of skin. I tugged 2/3 of of it out of my dog's skin, but despite my best efforts, the head's still in there. What now? I'll preface this by saying that I grew up with the same old wives' tales that many of you did about how I should have used a match, acetone, petroleum jelly, etc. It's pretty clear from even the briefest google search that the appropriate course of action is to pull the tick out, taking care not to leave the head in. What's less clear, however, is what to do if that care is taken, but the head and body still separate. This article states that :

"If the mouthparts break off in the skin - should I dig them out?

We have heard two competing opinions about this.

One viewpoint states that the mouthparts can cause a secondary infection, and should be removed as if it was a splinter.

Another viewpoint was shared with us by a pediatrician in a hyperendemic area. He states that parents can do more harm by trying to hold down a child and dig out the mouthparts with a needle. He instructs his families to leave the mouthparts, and that they will come out on their own as the skin sloughs off."

Can anyone do better than that?

get rid of bad tint?

mustcatchmooseandsquirrel — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:00:24 -0800

How do I remove bad tinting from the back of my car? I just bought a used car that is great [well, other than having to learn how to drive stick] except for the horrible purple bubbling tinting on the back windshield. I would just leave it on, but I can hardly see out of the back because of the stupid bubbles in the tint film.

I have read this and this but this method strongly suggests the need for a warm sunny day and I have, at best, only cold, overcast days.

Can I still remove this tinting? Do you have any tips for making this work without ruining the defroster lines?

I considered getting it professionally removed but they told me it would cost ~$200 with no guarantee that the defroster lines would still work.

Rim ding removal.

forallmankind — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 11:12:57 -0800

I want my car to look nice before I sell it - how can I get dings and scrapes out of the rims? The majority of the damage is of course on the front right, so it's not really worth buying a new set (approx $1000 on ebay). How do dealerships do it when they're selling used cars?

Odor Engineering Help Needed

b1tr0t — Mon, 29 May 2006 20:40:31 -0800

How do I get rid of the curry smell in my new apartment. I know just enough to know that curry isn't specific enough to mean much, but I don't know enough to identify the precise smell. Regardless, my new apartment smells somewhat like an Indian restaurant.

The apartment is no-smoking, so strategies that involve burning incense are out.

How can I neutralize the odor of my new place?

removing cigarette smoke from leather bag?

eatdonuts — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:04:46 -0800

Anyone have a suggestion for getting cigarette smoke smell out of a leather purse? Everytime I unzip my bag, I can now totally smell it.

Battle Royale II

Evstar — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:25:04 -0800

How do you remove a screw after totally raping its head?

Splinter Removal

jonah — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:59:42 -0800

Splinter removal. I got a gnarly splinter last night walking past a light pole, it's very deep and I can't seem to get it out. I soaked my hand, which I found out was wrong because it expands the wood, I tried grabbing it with tweezers, but it's too deep. I tried google, but could only find a few suggestions, any tried and true methods of getting out a DEEP (and painful) splinter?

How do I remove adhesive residue from a graphite pool cue?

pheideaux — Thu, 25 Dec 2003 08:09:35 -0800

I got a beautiful graphite pool cue for Christmas, but someone (not the gift giver) put a sticker on the shaft that has left a terrible gummy adhesive residue. How do I go about removing the residue without damaging the finish or the shaft itself? Google doesn't have all that much to say-- mostly companies selling professional adhesive removers. I have heard that WD-40 or nail polish remover would work, but would either hurt the cue? Thanks.