Here's a collection of 20 astounding hacks that'll help make your marking more accurate and your days more productive.

• Tack Trim in Place While Marking
• Don’t Trust Factory Edges
• Use a compass for scribing
• Circles (with a speed square and nail)
• Flashlight as plumb bob!
• Isometric graph paper

A complete guide for Apple displays for iphone, ipad, etc.

Design is problem solving

In a previous essay, I visualized it like this:
By focussing on the thinking part of design, design could move into a broader problem solving space. Hence the statement that design is problem solving. It is. Design solves design problems.

Design is making the world more beautiful

Design is question finding

But design is even more than problem solving and making the world more beautiful.

Most people see design as just the second diamond: problem solving. Most clients approach a designer with a problem definition a.k.a. a design brief. They already know what the problem is and w(previous essay)ant a (team of) designer(s) to solve it for them. If that is actually the right problem, great. Experience tells us that that is not always the case. More often than not, new insights about the problem at hand arise during the solving of the problem. That is why designers often propose to go into the first diamond first to investigate the problem and possibly redefine the problem. This prevents them from designing a brilliant solution for the wrong problem. That can be very expensive. The goal of the first diamond is to make sure we are solving the right problem, find the right question. Most innovations and complex problems benefit hugely from going through the first diamond. In his recent Harvard Business Review article, Art Markman argues that the quality of our problem framing determines the success of your solution.

Top startup leaders share their best tips for managing up, including communication tactics, building trust, and goal setting with your manager.

1. Always align on these two questions.
   1) What is success for me personally? 2) What is success for my manager’s team?

2. Show your work with what matters most.
   “To effectively manage up, you’ve got to understand what your boss wants and needs. This is an exercise in radical empathy and motivation,”

3. Communicate early and often to avoid surprises.
   They think they’re bugging others with constant, timely communication, but this isn’t true at all. When you communicate proactively, you’re giving your leaders up the chain of command the gift of choice: To act on that information, to store that information as notes, or just not do anything with it,”

4. Don’t bury your requests.
   “Writing regular email updates has by far been one of the most effective ways of managing up. These could be project updates, team wins, or personal progress. The emails don’t need to be overly formal — in fact, many recipients typically appreciate a more familiar tone as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the content,” he says.

5. Create a doc to hit the most important points.
   “In my 1:1s with my manager, I make sure our shared agenda and notes are populated ahead of time with the topics I want to discuss, as well as providing any context necessary — like linking to relevant documents. Some of the most productive and effective 1:1s are when our agenda and notes are well-organized ahead of the meeting,”

• FYIs that don’t need a discussion
• Updates from the report
• Updates from the manager
• Follow-ups on action items from the previous weeks
• Discussion topics

27. Create a State of the Union report.
    To simplify managing up and to hold yourself accountable, he suggests sending a weekly “State of Me” email to your boss. “Regularly share what you’re doing, what you plan to do, and what you’ve done with your manager. This weekly email should include your current priorities, things on your mind, and blockers you need help with.

#2d4277 #97c4be #cad8e3 #f35d51 #fa932b

It's that time of year again – where we consider what the color trends have been for the past couple years, and how those might change going into 2021.

Build this handy mobile workbench that folds up to only 7 in. You only need two hours, some 2x4s, 3/4-in. plywood and 8’ of 1x4.

Color scheme for UI design

I wonder why most modern solutions built using Perl don't enable UTF-8 by default.

Saying that “Perl should [somehow!] enable Unicode by default” doesn’t even start to begin to think about getting around to saying enough to be even marginally useful in some sort of rare and isolated case. Unicode is much much more than just a larger character repertoire; it’s also how those characters all interact in many, many ways.

List of 256 colors for Xterm prompt (console). Contains displayed color, Xterm Name, Xterm Number, HEX, RGB and HSL codes.

When I first met Vim, I thought someone was looking to make his life more complicated. But after a while I figured that Vim is the perfect text editor for people who want the text editor to be…

Phony Targets (GNU make)

SVG isn't just useful for illustrative animation. It's hella handy for UI too.

Orsola de Castro shares 3 tricks to mend your clothes and challenge yourself to think of imperfections as opportunities.

• One: Darn your holey knits
• Two: Fix your jeans Boro style
• Three: Pareidolia your stains

Build Guides
Building your own PC and need ideas on where to get started? Explore our build guides which cover systems for a variety of use-cases and budgets.

The command for Insert mode abbreviations looks like this:

:iabbrev [<expr>] [<buffer>] {abbreviation} {expansion}

• - stands for Vimscript expression to create the expansion.
• - means that it only applies to the current buffer.
• {abbreviation} - is the thing you type, or your “trigger”
• {expansion} - is your final outcome
• Anything that’s inside a [] is optional.

Author: Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier Editing in Vim can be a breeze, if you know how to make use of its more advanced features. Moving around files can feel like a slog if you’re stuck with the basic movement keys, but editing is effortless when you have command of marks and jumps. Basically, a mark is …

This is a list of the pieces I chose when building my own gaming PC:
Case: NZXT H510.
Central processing unit (CPU): Intel Core i5–9400.
Thermal Paste for the CPU: ionz IZP8.
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 GAMING EDGE AC (this particular motherboard seems to be unavailable everywhere at the moment).
Memory (RAM): HyperX Fury.
Graphics processing unit/Graphics Card(GPU): EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SC ULTRA GAMING.
Storage (SSD): Kingston 120 GB SSD A400 Solid State Drive.
Hard Disk Drive (HDD): Seagate Barracuda 1TB Hard Drive.
System cooling: Cooler Master MWE 700 White 230V.
Gaming peripherals: Samsung S24D330 24-Inch LED Monitor, RK100 3 Color LED Backlit Mechanical Feeling Gaming Keyboard, Trust Gaming Headset GXT 310P Radius with Microphone.
Operating system: Windows.

I put the first coat of polyurethane on some oak plywood shelves last night, and it turned out horrible. The surface has a bunch of little tiny rough bumps...

Oil based poly, especially the typical brands at the big box stores, is way too thick to be applied by brush by most of us mere mortals. And stretching the finish over a larger area in order to obtain a thin coat exacerbates the problem even more. It is just too thick to level on its own if you over work it even slightly.

Even though the can will likely tell you not to thin it, thinning with mineral spirits or naphtha even 10% by volume will vastly improve its ability to level on its own. Naphtha flashes off faster giving the film less time to collect dust nibs, one cause of the bumps you talk about.

Poly on the first two coats does feel bumpy but the more coats with proper treatment between coats will be very smooth.

Useful T-SQL queries for SQL Server to explore database schema.

select schema_name(tab.schema_id) as schema_name,
    tab.name as table_name, 
    col.column_id,
    col.name as column_name, 
    t.name as data_type,    
    col.max_length,
    col.precision
from sys.tables as tab
    inner join sys.columns as col
        on tab.object_id = col.object_id
    left join sys.types as t
    on col.user_type_id = t.user_type_id
order by schema_name,
    table_name, 
    column_id;