What are some lesser known items or tricks in your profession that most people don’t know about?
For me one thing would be Thrift drain cleaner. I was having issues with my drains being clogged and nothing really worked, but looking around on forums and advice from plumbers lead me to Thrift and now my drains work great.
Also, a tape measure that doesn’t retract until you push a button is better than a tape measure that retracts until you push a button
Sez you
Sez someone that never had one 🙃
Oh I have. For a bit. Then I put it in the bin where it belongs.
Fair enough. If like me you worked in building you’d appreciate it, I’m sure
MFW someone has different preference than me: 😡
I do, and I don’t lol. I’ll use a ruler if I don’t want it to retract.
Good idea. Got any links?
Only for where I live
They’re called autostop if that helps. Couldn’t use the other type now
Software Engineer and Bike mechanic here. Since this community is filled with computer geeks, I’ll stick to some bike knowledge that you should know.
- Tire logo should line up with valve stem. It looks nice and allows to find the stem really fast.
- To seat a stubborn tire, try some water and dish soap on the bead.
- To lube a chain correctly, you must clean and dry it first. I use biodegradable deagreaser and shop air. If you can twist the chain and feels gritty, clean and dry again.
- Avoid non bike chain lubes on chain. Using WD40 on a chain does more harm than good.
- After a ride, apply a finger dab of suspension oil to fork and shock and cycle the suspension a few times to push the grime from the seals, and wipe it off.
- Get a good chain wear tool. Catching a worn chain on time can save a lot, by not having to replace expensive chainrings and cassettes.
- Don’t get a bike specific toolset, because half of the tools you won’t use. Make your own toolset base on what you need. Nobody needs a crank extractor or a axle cone spanners anymore. Start with a decent hex set (2 to 8mm), small torque wrench, brake bleed kit, presta valve extractor, shock pump, 25Torx bit, tire levers, chain breaker, chain wear tool, cassette extractor + chain whip, adjustable wrench, cutters and assorted screwdrivers and pliers. And a floor pump. From there it just goes on, but it will be for specific uses on forks, hub, rims, etc.
HAProxy is really powerful load balancing software. Not only does it go above and beyond on features but it handles a really large volume of traffic on very little compute. For example I ran a site with 350hits/sec base traffic (that regularly bell curved up to 500hits/sec) on 4 HAProxy instances running on t3.micro EC2 instances and I was terminating TLS on 20,000 domains at HAProxy. And if you’re in a position where you need to pay for support they will bend over backward to help.
Wow, how is it with mostly heavy bandwidth loads?
I haven’t done it myself, but I know Vimeo was one of their keynote speakers speakers a few years ago as a high profile customer.
The MOST important tool that everybody doesn’t know or forgets about in wood working is wax/oil/paste wax. This is because you use this to lubricate the faces of your tools, what slides and presses against the wood. Just by applying this to the sole of your plane makes it 2x easier to push and is a game changer.
You can add this to your saws as well and they will glide through their cuts with ease. You can put it on a shooting board too, anything that your tools rub up against.
Another good one is saw setting pliers. These exist to easily adjust the “set” of a saw. The saw’s teeth taper out slightly to make the width of the cut wider than the saw plate, to prevent binding in the cut.
Cheaply made saws often have a poorly made set, often far too thick which makes a very wide cut (the saw is now more likely to wander off cut) and slows you down significantly. If the set is 30% wider than it needs to be, the saw is now by extension 30% slower (you are removing more material than necessary).
Now to the point (no pun intended). The biggest difference in performance from a cheap saw and expensive saw IS the set, and with these pliers and a triangular file you can make every cheap crappy saw cut like a dream and just as well as any expensive saw. Only thing other than that is the handle, which you can carve down yourself as most are too large.
19mm wrench and a 3/4 wrench can be used interchangeably.
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You can actually convert ALL the inch values to millimetres with maths!
No. There are some tool sizes that simply will not fit. Especially if the bolt and tool are made to the correct tolerances.
The closest measurement to 1/4" is 6mm but it will simply not fit because 1/4" is 6.35mm. theres a big enough difference between the metric measurement and that you can’t use it.
Yes, if you convert inches to millimetres with maths it will indeed tell you that 1/4" is 6.35 mm …
You can come up with an equivalent number, but if the mm side of the equation is not a whole number, then it’s not useful.
Not to partially side with the other guy but I have indeed gotten sets with a 6.3mm, or at least labelled as that, socket. The elusive 12.7 remains to be found.
This is interesting! Is it an imperial socket labeled in metric? Is it a specialty socket?
I never actually measured to see but if I find one soon I’ll report back. Until then here’s this one for sale.
I don’t think you understand what everyone else is talking about so I’ll tell you instead of piling on.
They’re talking about socket sizes for nuts/bolts. In the US we have fractional inch socket sizes (1/4", 1/2", etc) whereas metric sockets are sized by full millimeters.
So while you are correct in saying you can convert all inch values to millimeter values, you can’t always use a metric wrench on an imperial bolt, or vice versa. For example, a 6mm wrench will be slightly too small for a 1/4" bolt, and a 7mm will be slightly too large.
3/4" and 19mm just happen to be close enough to exactly the same that you can use both wrenches on either size bolt.
A note about drains: My drain guy advised me to stop as much material as possible from going into my drains so they don’t need cleaning.
So I’ve put “strainers” (traps?) on all my drains, don’t use my garbage disposal, etc. and have much less need for nasty drain chemicals or a drain guy. Ymmv.
Playing it safe will definitely work, but also there’s nothing wrong with using your sink disposal properly. Nothing hard or firm like bones or plastic, no coffee grounds, and don’t drain fat in the sink.
Word of advice for anyone entering a trade: get a laser pointer in your first kit, it’ll save you so much time
and waste just as much
How?
The cats are ruining my life
Because you’re too busy playing with the laser pointer to do your intended task!
Going with a lesser known trick for software engineers: for VS Code, there is a setting to make your tabs go on top of each other rather than going off the screen. So then, you don’t have to scroll for the tab you want and you can instead just visually look.
Also, yeah, yeah, I know about Neovim, and yes, I’ve tried it many times. It’s just not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
Spill the beans! What’s the trick? Where’s this setting?
It’s “Workbench > Editor: Wrap Tabs” or, if you don’t use the UI, it’s
workbench.editor.wrapTabsand it’s a bool
and you can instead just visually look
myself, I always prefer visually looking, rather than audibly or olfactory.
Emphasis… /s
I never claimed to be a writer haha
A doddler. Very strange shaped device that has the magical ability to tighten up almost any toilet seat
I don’t know if lesser known, but here’s my list of day-to-day favorite tools:
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VSCode for editor (with plug-ins)
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Tmux for terminal multiplexing / persistence
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Yakuake for drop down terminal
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MongoDB for database
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Dolphin for file management
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Go for programming
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plasma for a friendly window manager with tiling capability / rectangle for mac
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pass + git for password management
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