Switched to a rotary brush and wow what a difference

For years I was using just rods and hand scrapers on all my flue jobs. Then I watched a guy in the next crew over at a job in Portland finish a 6 inch liner in like 20 minutes with this rotary brush setup. I bought one off his recommendation and tried it on a real sooty chimney last Tuesday. The before was a solid quarter inch of creosote and the after looked like brand new tile in half the normal time. Has anyone else had better luck with rotary over manual for heavy buildup?

My great aunt's secret pie crust recipe almost got lost last month

I was cleaning out my mom's kitchen in Cleveland and found a box of old recipe cards, all stained and faded. One card, for a lard pie crust, had my great aunt's handwriting and a note that said 'double the salt, trust me'. I made it for a family dinner and it was the flakiest crust I've ever had, better than any store-bought kind. If I hadn't found that box, her trick would have been gone for good. Does anyone else have a family recipe that was almost lost? How do you keep them safe?

TIL I was wasting so much money on fresh herbs

I was about to toss a bunch of wilted cilantro when my roommate pointed out you can freeze chopped herbs in olive oil in an ice cube tray. I tried it with parsley and it saved me $5 this month alone. Anyone have other tricks for making pricey ingredients last?

I picked a stand mixer over a food processor for my first big baking purchase. Did I mess up?

Spent 4 hours on a weird boot loop that turned out to be a bad USB port

Had a client's PC stuck in a restart loop, no BSOD, just a black screen and reboot. I pulled the RAM, swapped the PSU, even re-seated the CPU, nothing worked. Finally, after like 3 hours, I unplugged a cheap webcam from a front USB port and it posted instantly. The port must have been shorting. Anyone else had a simple peripheral cause a major boot failure like that?

Update: My uncle in Billings said to always use a 3H pencil for final lines, but I tried a 4H on a recent elevation drawing.

The 4H gave me a much sharper, cleaner line that didn't smudge under my hand (which is a big deal when you're working on a 36-inch sheet for six hours straight), so has anyone else found a 'standard' tip that actually held you back?

Took me a decade to figure out my governor rope tension check was wrong

I was doing a full test on a traction job in a Cincinnati office building last Tuesday. The governor rope felt fine, but the safety gear wouldn't trip during the overspeed test. My apprentice, a new guy fresh from trade school, asked if I was checking the tension with the car at the top landing. I'd always done it with the car in the pit, which is how I was taught. Turns out, that extra rope weight at the top changes everything. I redid the tension with the car up top and it was off by almost 30 pounds. How many of you were taught the old way versus checking it at the top?

My neighbor told me to just let my hens 'figure out' their pecking order, and it went so wrong

Last fall, I had a new hen getting bullied badly in my run in Portland. My neighbor, who has kept birds for years, saw it and said, 'Stop babying them, they need to work it out themselves.' I listened and left them alone for two days. By the end, the new girl was missing feathers and hiding in a corner, terrified. I had to completely separate her for a week to let her heal. Has anyone else had a situation where the 'let them be' advice totally backfired?

I just laid my 100,000th brick on the Johnson project in Cedar Rapids

I never kept count before, but my foreman told me the number today. It hit me that I've built a lot of walls over the years. That's a whole lot of mortar mixed and joints tooled. Has anyone else ever tracked their total like that?

My big presentation in Dallas crashed when I accidentally shared my screen with a cat meme tab open

I was halfway through showing our Q2 numbers to the whole team last Tuesday when my browser decided to refresh and put a picture of a grumpy cat wearing a tiny hat front and center for a solid five seconds before I could switch back.