Hi Tilderinos,

I've got to ship some wrought iron to a blacksmith in another country to be reforged and properly heat treated. I've worked with them before and they're far better than anything that is available in my country.

They've asked me to ship the pieces in a wooden box, that is not real wood (I don't know the English term for it). It must be processed wood, the names in our hardware stores are multiplex and plywood underlayment etc. This is to avoid customs issues with untreated wood.

I have been advised to make the sides of the box multiplex, with underlayment for the top and the bottom. I have my dimensions, but I have never done a woodworking project before and I am nervous the men in the hardware store will laugh at me for my inexperience.

I have some basic questions like:

• Is it okay to go to the hardware place and ask them to cut my pieces to size?

• The box must hold together fine, but it doesn't need to be beautiful or lasting. I am thinking of putting the top and bottom on like the back of an IKEA wardrobe, with tacks, but my wife says hiring a staple gun might save a lot of time. Would a staple gun be too aggressive and potentially wreck the rather soft treated wood?

• Lastly... Could someone just reassure me this will be fine? I associate woodworking as a very masculine 'father' skill and I did not have one of those. I have very poor spatial awareness and my wife is the furniture assembler in the house, so she will be helping me, but this is my first time trying this craft that I find very intimidating.

Thank you for any input anyone is able to provide!

It looks like we’re finally getting some real options in the space, so I’m interested in people’s thoughts and experiences!

I’ve been running a pair of LG 27MD5KL monitors forever, and they’ve been largely great - but they’re really showing their age at this point, and I’m being forced to upgrade either way because my new job requires using a Windows laptop (likely a Dell Pro 14, but TBC), and those old LGs use an esoteric dual link DP variant that only Apple supports. I’ll also be keeping my personal MacBook Pro, so smooth compatibility with both is a must. Use will largely be software work: lots of documentation, lots of terminal windows, lots of dark mode, but some design review work as well where decent colour accuracy helps.

Options I’m seeing at the moment are:

• Asus ProArt PA27JCV
• Asus ROG Strix XG27JCG
• LG 27GM950B
• BenQ MA270S
• Apple Studio Display
• Apple Studio Display XDR

I get the impression that Apple’s the better option where possible, but I’m concerned about compatibility, especially when I don’t directly control the choice of laptop. If anyone has real world experience on that one I’d be interested, especially the difference between “technically works on non-Apple laptops” vs “is an equivalently good experience on non-Apple laptops”.

I’m guessing just using separate inputs for each laptop will be fine on whatever I go for, but I’m open to getting a KVM if needed (L1Techs? I haven’t actually checked how hard it is to find one that supports 2x 5K yet…). Couldn’t immediately see anything that’ll take Thunderbolt input from the Mac and HDMI input from the Windows laptop and push both to Thunderbolt output, which might otherwise have been a way to bridge the Apple display question.

Probably going for 27” 5K rather than 32” 6K, unless there’s a compelling argument for the latter. I briefly tried a Dell 32” 6K a few years back and other than horrible backlight bleed, sitting that close to a 32” display ended up feeling like I was craning my neck rather than moving my eyes to see edge to edge.

So, what do people think would be best here?

Sending up a bat signal for @gary and @ButteredToast - you guys both know your stuff on this one!

Hello!

First, some context- I have a very particular way I keep track of my work and take notes throughout my work week. This is currently managed through an ever-growing list of Notion pages. And Notion is great! It does a ton of stuff really well, but it's also suffered from a lot of feature bloat over the years and has just enough oddities to irk me on the daily.

So, I built a thing. I call it True To-do because it's fun to say and I'm okay at software and less okay at marketing. It is an opinionated daily work tracker with a lot of little features:

• You can set a standard template that gets auto-copied to certain days of the week
• Supports infinite nesting and expanding/collapsing of those nested items
• Unfinished work the from the previous day can be auto-copied to new days
• It has various tools like a data roll-up and data controls
• It supports loading itself as an offline desktop app (PWA)
• Has many configurable settings for making the interface go from full to minimal
• Dark theme!

It is also 100% free, has no tracking, no cookies, doesn't ask for your email, your data does not leave your device, and is pretty performant (better than Notion, at least). It was written heavily with AI, but not by AI - It was directed, reviewed, and corrected by me.

What it does not have is any kind of user account feature. Everything stays on the device and will not transfer between devices unless you manually export and import the data. Maybe I'll add support for that at some point, I'm not sure. It is also only okay on mobile/tablet- this app was really made for desktop.

Anyways, give it a play around. It was purpose built by me for me but love to share the things I make when I think others may get some use out of them as well. I welcome feedback / bug reports / suggestions / etc.

https://hobblyhoy.github.io/TrueTodo-Pages/

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Spoiler discussion for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey