As long as you trust them. Some painters may be factoring in prep, like small hole repair, etc. And there is a difference between a good and bad paint job... I would not just hire a lowball contractor unless I had a personal recommendation from someone.

Argh. Shave and learn to spell “maintenance.”

Taking your comment as actually being serious, opinions aren’t valid just because they are vocalized by someone. This whole idea that opinions have to be respected because someone expressed them is silly. You may opine that vaccines are harmful, but that’s a bullshit position universally contradicted by science.…

So far I’m liking it. I like the import function, although I really wish I could bulk delete repetitive entries instead of doing them one at a time (unsurprisingly, seems like my browser on my MacBook has an awful lot of password overlap with my workcomputer and my home desktop).

Thanks all. Think I’m probably going to give it a try—been waffling on a password solution for the wife and I (and joint accounts) and this seems to fit the bill.

If anyone is a regular user of LastPass, maybe I can get some questions answered... Reading their site, it seems like you can enable two factor authentication to gain access to your crypt. Does anyone know if that means two factor authentication is required every time you log into any site (I’m wondering how…

I’ve got several Thermoworks thermometers (and a pH tester). The one I use the most at this point is this guy:

I’ve got several Thermoworks thermometers (and a pH tester). The one I use the most at this point is this guy:

Exactly what I was going to say... I’ve got a couple of those four packs of single serving wine “bottles” in my pantry for precisely this reason. I want to say that there are certain flavors that only alcohol soluble.

In a strange way, fucking up is good practice. As an kid, I tried to build things—doing stuff like nailing into end grain and using short L brackets where I really needed a big shelf support. I learned through experience that kind of stuff doesn’t work. But I still see plans on websites (websites that look very…

There are a lot of bad plans out there, including from at least one of those linked sites. Part of the problem with the Internet is that any pinhead can publish a set of plans whether they know anything about woodworking or not, and their ability to self-promote and design a website may have a lot to do with how…

The same people who save money using MDF are likely to be the same people that save time by not cutting dovetails. Besides, dovetails are great when you need a strong joint where wood movement is an issue—dovetails maximize strength based on the physics of the wood grain. MDF is stable and has no grain, so there is no…

Three of the sites in my cooking RSS feed are on your list—Serious Eats, Food52 and Saveur. I haven’t found those to pander to lowest common denominator tastes and have had very good success with most of the recipes I’ve tried from those sites. I’m also partial to the Homesick Texan, which serves up some spicy fare…

I designed the cabinets in, of all things, powerpoint (don’t worry, I’ve since learned Sketchup). But all I was really doing is using it as a notepad as I adjusted dimensions, and I have to say it wasn’t bad for that. At the time, I had done a lot of european style frameless cabinets (used to be some great tutorials…

When I built my shop cabinets, I went with a lot of very narrow drawers for precisely this reason. I highly recommend: (i) the exercise of building your own shop cabinets, (ii) building as many 3” drawers as you can; and (iii) using full extension slides.

Hmm... I went the other way. “All that work”... to avoid cooking? For fuck’s sake, there are plenty of easy, but tasty recipes out there.

Besides, if their url is www.youtubered.com, sounds too much like a site that does things to you with a potato.

But: I’ve found that extra five minutes provides time for the moisture in the rest of the mushroom to leech out and you get a leathery, not so tender shroom—the oven dries off the surface and allows you to get a nice brown, but still plump mushroom. And timing isn’t an issue if you just turn on the oven while you wash…

I can’t take the credit. Think I started doing this after Tom Colicchio approvingly commented on Kristin Kish’s technique for doing this in Season 10 of Top Chef.

You want to get rid of surface moisture for better browning. Wash ‘em/don’t wash ‘em, but stick ‘em on a sheet pan and throw them in the oven for a couple minutes to dry off before throwing them in the frying pan...

My experience is that turning seems even more conducive to sucking money out of your wallet than other woodworking pursuits. It also seems to be obsessive—I’ve seen a number of woodworkers who buy a lathe and then, in rapid order, all they do is turn. No more “flatwork.” That said, there are deals out there, because…