Back in '08 I would eyeball the wind by watching the flag on the building next door.

One gusty day in Chicago, I swung a 5-ton steel beam right into a scaffold because I misjudged it. Now I keep a cheap handheld anemometer in the cab and check it before every pick. What's your go-to trick for reading the wind on a tight site?

Heard a guy at the coffee shop say he just asks the internet everything now

I was grabbing a coffee this morning and the guy next to me told his friend, 'I don't even try to remember stuff anymore, I just type it into a forum.' He said he fixed his sink, learned a guitar chord, and found a vet for his dog all from asking online this month. It made me think we're all just crowdsourcing our brains now. Has anyone else found themselves relying on asking here instead of trying to figure things out alone first?

TIL that fancy coffee water is a waste of money

I bought a box of those third-wave mineral packets you add to distilled water. It was 25 dollars for 12 packets. After a week of testing, I couldn't tell the difference from my regular filtered tap water in a blind taste test with my partner. My wallet felt the difference, though. Anyone have a cheaper way to manage water hardness that actually works?

A beta reader told me my fantasy hero was 'too competent' and it fixed my whole story

My brand new miter saw blade chipped on a simple pine cut and I'm fuming

Just yesterday, I was finishing up a window trim job in a house over in the West End. I put a fresh 80-tooth Diablo blade on my saw that morning, cost me about $75. First cut into a piece of clear pine, nothing crazy, and I heard this awful ping. A whole carbide tooth just flew off and put a nasty chip in the wood. I checked the setup twice, no pinched wood, no nails, just clean wood. It makes me think the quality control on some of these 'premium' blades has really gone downhill lately. I had to stop everything, drive back to the supplier, and argue for a replacement. Has anyone else had a new blade fail on them like that out of the box?

My nephew asked me why we even need HTML anymore

He's 12 and learning on some new visual builder platform, and it made me realize how much the starting point has shifted since I opened Notepad in 2005. Anyone else feel like the 'first step' into code is totally different now?

Stopped letting standby power bleed money and emissions in my house

A weekend with an energy meter showed me which devices to unplug or automate, slashing my use.

Hot take: All these star apps are making us lazy backyard astronomers.

Just look up and learn the sky yourself, it's not that hard.