1. Clamp a guide to the square.

To make it easy to align the framing square on the stringer consistently, clamp a straight wood strip to the square. On the outer edges of the square, align the strip with the run dimension on one leg and the rise dimension on the other.

2. Find the crown.

Sight down the edge of the stringer stock to determine if it crowns. If it does, lay out the stringer so that the crown on the completed stair will face upward.

3. Lay out the first tread and the second riser.

Hold the square so that the leg with the tread dimension is closest to the end of the stringer stock but far enough from the end to allow for a riser below. Try to lay out the notches so that cutting them gets rid of knots and defects.

https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2013/10/15/lay-out-accurate-stair-stringers-with-this-custom-tool

By Andy Engel Issue 248 - Dec/Jan 2015

Instead of serving dozens of icons, all you need is just five icons and one JSON file.

In your HTML, for the browser:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico"><!-- 32×32 -->
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple.png"><!-- 180×180 -->
<link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.webmanifest">

And in your web app manifest:

// manifest.webmanifest
{
  "icons": [
    { "src": "/192.png", "type": "image/png", "sizes": "192x192" },
    { "src": "/512.png", "type": "image/png", "sizes": "512x512" }
  ]
}

Justify text blocks even with fonts of different sizes.

By default, lots of image editing tools save PNGs with 2^24 color depth, just in case.

So in Acorn, my image editor of choice, I’ve been taking special care to crank down the bit depth on PNGs in the export dialog. In many cases, I’ve cut image weight 80% or more by indexing colors to a palette of 256 or fewer values, with no loss of visual fidelity.

That PNG at full-color depth is about 379KB. Restricted to a palette of 32 colors, it’s 61KB. And that’s just at the export time: once I run them through ImageOptim, the optimized sizes are 359KB and 48KB.

For well-insulated houses, minisplits are beginning to dominate the market. They are especially suited for lower heating and cooling loads and providing quiet comfort with surprisingly low amounts of energy—energy that can be produced on-site or pulled from renewable sources on the grid.

Minisplits have a few disadvantages and downsides, and they are interrelated, combining to make or break the minisplit decision. The big three are the price of electricity, the severity of the winter, and the quality of the building envelope.

From Fine Homebuilding #296