A cedar post in my own backyard split clean through after a single hard freeze this winter.

I had to pull it out and reset it with a proper gravel base and a concrete collar, which got me thinking, what's your go-to method for setting posts in areas with extreme freeze-thaw cycles?

Had a shutter curtain ribbon cable tear on a Leica M6 while the customer was watching

I was in my shop in Portland, the owner right there, when the tiny ribbon for the second curtain just gave out during a test fire. I had to tell him straight up that his classic camera needed a part I didn't have on hand. Ended up ordering the ribbon set from a supplier in Germany, which took two weeks and cost him about $150 extra. Has anyone else had to manage that kind of pressure and delay with a client looking over your shoulder?

Just realized the difference between a regular dado stack and a wobble dado for plywood

I was cutting dados for some built-in shelves and tried my old wobble dado for the first cut. The bottom of the groove was rough and it tore up the plywood core. For the next piece, I switched to an 8-inch stacked dado set I borrowed from a friend. The cut was so clean and flat, with no tear-out at all. The stacked set just gave me way more control and a cleaner glue surface. Has anyone else found the wobble dado is just not worth it for finish work?

Hot take: If you're still using a standard utility knife to cut LVP planks, you're making a 3 hour job take 6.

I watched a guy on a job in Tempe last month try to score and snap a 7-inch plank 8 times before it finally broke clean, and switching to a hook blade with a carbide tip lets you zip through a full box in under 30 minutes, so what's your go-to cutting tool for that stuff?

Walked past that new condo build on 5th Street and the brickwork made me wince

I was downtown yesterday and saw the crew finishing up the facade. The soldier course above the windows was all over the place, some joints looked a quarter inch thick, others were almost touching. They were using a basic 9-inch level for everything, even on the long runs. The foreman told me they were pushing for 800 bricks a day per guy to meet the deadline. How do you even keep a line true at that pace? I get the pressure, but that building is gonna look wavy in a year. Anyone else seen a job where speed just totally wrecked the quality?

Tried to figure out the timeline for a show and spent three hours on it

I was watching a series where the main character kept jumping between different time periods. I paused it to look up a simple chart of the events in order. What I found was a forum thread from 2018 with a hundred comments, all arguing about one specific flashback. I got sucked into reading the whole thing, checking wikis, and even looking at old blog posts. Has anyone else wasted a whole evening on something that should have been a quick search?

Heard a guy at the supply house say 'I just draw what they tell me' and it kind of bummed me out.

TIL that the average pair of jeans uses over 1,800 gallons of water to make, found that stat in a report from the UN Environment Programme.