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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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