Basic Household Tool List

(Edited to add suggestions from the comments and the general philosophy of this list)

• Tool bag (at least 15 inches long)
• Hammer (12 or 16 oz)
• Rubber mallet (white head preferred, non-marking)
• 6 inch Needlenose Pliers
• 8 inch Slip Joint Pliers
• 8 inch Crescent/adjustable wrench
• 10 inch Slip groove (large jaw) pliers
• Box cutter (optionally folding) + set of replacement blades
• Hacksaw + spare blades
• Scissors
• 25' Tape Measure
• Set of precision (small) screwdrivers
• #1 and #2 Phillips head screwdrivers
• Small and large straight blade screwdrivers
• Multi screwdriver with torx/phillips/straight blade heads
• half-round file (h/t @patience_limited)
• a metal putty knife or a 5-in-1 combination paint scraper (h/t @patience_limited)
• roll of twine
• roll of blue masking tape
• roll of Gorilla tape
• roll of black electrical tape
• super glue
• small bottle of wood glue
• 2" paint brush
• torpedo level
• small flashlight
• a strong neodynium magnet - to use as a stud finder and for many other things (h/t @the_man)
• 9v batteries
• AA batteries
• AAA batteries
• 50 1" #6 wood screws (zinc/steel, not brass)
• 50 2" #8 wood screws (zinc/steel, not brass)
• small box of 1.5" finishing nails
• light and heavy duty drywall anchors
• course and fine foam sanding blocks (h/t @patience_limited)
• 5 gallon bucket
• safety glasses
• N95 masks
• leather work gloves
• foam ear plus (h/t @the_man)

Bonus list (things that are more expensive or nice-to-have upgrades):

• a stud finder - the cheap ones are worthless, buy a good one or not at all (h/t @DeaconBlue)
• a battery powered drill + bit set (h/t @patience_limited)
• a set of metric and imperial allen keys (h/t @sublime_aenima)
• a basic socket set with a mix of metric and imperial sockets (h/t @auk)

The philosophy of this list:

A good starter set should include tools and supplies someone will be glad they had that they didn't know they needed. Even if they aren't "handy", a handier friend might use them (and they learn something in the process). It doesn't include very specialized things like demolition, electrical, or plumbing tools. If you're going to undertake projects in those areas, you should know a little about what you're doing, and you'll be able to buy the right tools for the specific project. As as electrical engineer, I particularly don't include a multimeter because I don't want to encourage someone to mess around with electricity if they don't understand how it might hurt them.

This list specifically does not suggest brands (except where the brand is the thing, like Gorilla tape). Opinions on what brand is best vary widely, but my general suggestion is this. Don't break the bank buying high end tools for someone who may never use them. A $2 hammer is going to be fine for someone who uses it once a year. If they are using them often enough to want something better, they can buy something better (or you can buy it for them).

Hi, I have a weird cubic space in my garage wall due to the location of the chimney and stairs to the basement.
The lower edge of that cubic hole is at 41 inches (104 cm) from the floor. Its deep is 40 inches (101 cm). Width 39 inches (99 cm). Height 46 inches (117 cm).
Too deep for static shelves, I cannot reach the end. Too tall for sliding shelves (kind of drawer thing), I am 5'7'' (172 cm). In its current form, it is too much of a space for its practical use.
I thought that a carousel that moves shelves up and down (like in this design for shoes https://storagemotion.com/shoeselect/) but for heavier weights would be practical... I have no idea how to even name the parts to buy them, if they exist.
Also, I will appreciate suggestions for an alternative solution.
Thanks.
PS: located in Massachusetts, US.

I am putting a new surface on my Deck. I am using Trex and 2.5" composite specific screws. These are small head screws with a T20 torx bit.

[img]https://i.ibb.co/MchtXPx/20230628-175119.jpg[/img]

I am 7.5 boards in out of 25 boards and I have destroyed 5 bits, 3 of them brand name impact rated bits. I am making sure to stay cammed in, and weight on top of the screw. I am lining the drill up with the angle of the screw. I am also predrilling every hole.

I feel like I have to be doing something wrong. I just don't know what else to do.

Edit - these are the exact screws I am using - https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grip-Rite-9-x-2-1-2-in-Brown-Star-Drive-Pan-Head-Coarse-Composite-Deck-Screw-10-lbs-Pack-N212CSB10BK/207193648

I'm curious what people have made with the assistance of any of the new AI tools.

Let's skip low-effort things like asking ChatGPT to generate an essay and posting it as-is. But besides that, if you made something you think is cool, post it here.

My university friends and I (and everyone's significant others, so about ~15 people) are planning a big catch-up trip, which will also be the first time to the country where I live for all of them. Planning has been a little higher friction than I expected, because we want to coordinate travel times to specific cities ("let's spend 4 days in City A, then all go to City B" etc), but people also have specific activities only they want to do (scuba, theme parks, etc) within each city. However, there's way too much to choose from and there's no way we'll do everything that everyone wants to do.

So right now to gauge interest in specific cities and attractions within them, we are just using a private Facebook group where people just make an idea as a post and people vote by liking it, and people can discuss the place in the comments. Things that we have fully decided are just placed on a spreadsheet. This process works but it doesn't feel great.

I've also explored Wanderlog, and I really like the fact that you can easily search for stuff and then place it on a map, but unfortunately its UI doesn't really support "branching" trips where some people will do different things on a given day.

What tools/processes have you had success with when trying to coordinate a big group trip?

Hello! Привіт! Pryvit!

I started learning Ukrainian on Duolingo in February 2022 following Russia's attacks. It was my first time attempting to learn a language for 10+ years and it just clicked. I grew to love the language, became entranced with the culture, and had desires to keep learning. Prior to Duolingo's redesign, I had a year+ streak and made it fairly far in the course.

The redesign has absolutely killed that passion. Maybe it's just the Ukrainian course, but it felt like I was going in circles and not really progressing as I once had. I've shelved my learning for a few months, but I really desire an alternative to Duolingo. Unfortunately, there's not many options that offer Ukrainian and I want to ensure I am learning the language as intended. I've read into how Russian influences have attempted to modify the language and I desire to learn the form that Ukrainian's would use.

I'm not quite at a level to learn from books or more static resources, and would prefer the interactivity of an app to help get me to that comfort level again. I've tried Pimsleur and wasn't as much of a fan of their format that reminded me of language tapes. One of the things I enjoyed with Duolingo was the verbal parts of it that helped with my pronunciation, and Pimsleur didn't appear to offer that.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! I have seen old posts referring to a SubStack and other resources, but at this time I need a refresher before I feel comfortable diving into those. I would love to incorporate learning a little bit of Ukrainian everyday again! Слава Україні!

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

I think many of us are students, or just like self-learning some topics for themselves, perhaps their work requires studying — I think it might be interesting to collect a few tips we have experience with on how to do it efficiently.

I would start with probably one of the best tools in this category that I think are still underutilized by many: spaced-repetition software. Perhaps more people might be familiar with the concept from language learning with word cards, but the base idea is that reinforcing some knowledge at increasing intervals will effectively make you remember it ’forever’. A final selling point on this topic: it only requires 10 minutes out of your entire life to remember a fact for basically forever with instant recall - that’s a very good use of one’s time in my opinion. For more information on it here is a great article.
(It’s talking about Anki, a notable spaced repetition program that is free and open-source (the ios client is paid though, as this is the only income source of the maintainer, but you could just use the web interface as well. Not affiliated))

I know the topic is very generic, but post any resources that helped you to learn making music, be it learning playing instruments or mixing.

For me, justinguitar.com helped in learning guitar from scratch. Lessons are spread out pretty well to not make very big jumps in complexity, and I love Justin's presenting.

Input wanted for an article.

Let's say that your company is considering the purchase of an expensive new application to help in the company's software development. The demo looks great, and the feature list makes it sound perfect for your needs. So your Management arranges for a proof of concept license to find out if the software is worth the hefty investment. The boss comes to you to ask you to be in charge of the PoC project.

I'm aiming to write an article to help developers, devops, and testers determine if a given vendor's application meets the company's needs. The only assumption I'm making is that the software is expensive; if it's cheap, the easy answer is, "Buy a copy for a small team and see what they think." And I'm thinking in terms of development software rather than enterprise tools (e.g. cloud-based backup) though I suspect many of the practices are similar.

Aside: Note that this project is beyond "Decide if we need such a thing." In this scenario, everyone agrees that purchasing a tool is a good idea, and they agree on the baseline requirements. The issue is whether this is the right software for the job.

So, how do you go about it? I'm sure that it's more than "Get a copy and poke at it randomly." How did (or would) you go about designing a PoC project? If you've been involved in such a project in the past (particularly if the purchase wasn't ideal), what advice could someone have given you to help you make a better choice? I want to create a useful guide that applies to any "enterprise-class" purchase.

For example: Do you recommend that the PoC period be based on time (N months) or workload (N transactions)? How do you decide who should be on the PoC team? What's involved in putting together a comprehensive list of requirements (e.g. integrates with OurFavoredDatabase, meets performance goals of X), creating a test suite that exercises what the software dev product does, and evaluating the results? ...and what am I not thinking of, that I should?

A while back I developed a desktop-based text editor (Scrivenvar) that uses the Chain-of-Responsibility design pattern to help me author fairly involved text documents. The editor's high-level architecture resembles the following diagram:

https://i.imgur.com/8IMpAkN.png

Am I reinventing the wheel here? Are there any modern, cross-platform, liberal open-source (LGPL, MIT, Apache 2), text editor frameworks (such as xi or Visual Studio Code), that would enable (re)development of such a tool?

Scrivenvar is written in Java, but to my chagrin, Java 9+ no longer bundles JavaFX. The text editor was based on MarkdownWriterFX, itself based on JavaFX. This means there's no easy upgrade path, so I'm looking to rebuild the editor either as a cross-platform desktop application or as a web application.

After using Shreddit to delete my Reddit history periodically for some time now, I finally decided to make a cron job to automate it on a weekly basis. I use it to delete every post and comment that isn't whitelisted, which right now is just a tiny subreddit for a musician I like that I solely moderate and a pinned post explaining why I have a bunch of karma but barely any posts.

After setting this up, it got me curious as to what tasks other people automate in their lives in order to streamline their workflows and eliminate minor (or major) routine tasks.

So, what do you automate, and how did you go about doing it?

I've realized over the past few hours that I've spent an absurd amount of money relative to my income over the last few days, and I think that starting to budget would probably be a very good thing for me. Does anyone know of any good tools for keeping and managing a personal budget?

@Deimos clued me in to this site which lets you filter your Steam library using tags. I had no idea this was even a thing, and it made me want to know what else I'm missing. What are some great sites/tools out there that improve your Steam experience?

It should go without saying that they need to be safe to use. I know scam Steam sites are a dime a dozen, so make sure you're posting something that's properly vetted.

Here's a running list of submissions:

Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should definitely install homebrew so that I can have a real package manager like I've got on Linux.