Our neighborhood recycling bins went from full to half-empty in 6 months

I live near a busy corner in Portland and used to see the city recycling bins overflowing every Tuesday by noon, but now they're barely half full since the new compost rules kicked in back in January. Turns out when people started putting food scraps in the green bins, it cut down on a ton of random trash and plastic bottles that used to pile up. Has anyone else noticed a drop in their local recycling bin traffic after a program change like this?

I finally saw what 2 years of bad caulking does to a shower tile

Pulled out the old grout last weekend in my master bath and found black mold growing behind the caulk line on the floor side, has anyone else run into this with silicone vs acrylic caulk?

Shoutout to the offset smoker over pellet grills for competition cooks

I helped judge a local KCBS event near Austin last month and watched two teams side by side. The guy on the offset had this rich, clean bark while the pellet grill meat came out kinda muddled and soft. Anyone else notice a big gap between the two methods when the pressure is on?

Used to hate writing prompts with strict word counts, last month changed my mind completely

Tried envelope budgeting vs apps for 3 months and one won

I swapped from YNAB to cash envelopes for my grocery and eating out categories back in July. The cash envelopes made me way more careful because I could actually see the money leaving. Has anyone else found that physical money works better than digital tracking for certain categories?

Chat with a librarian changed how I see content moderation

Had a chat with a librarian at the downtown branch last Tuesday. She said the library doesn't ban books, they just place them in different sections based on age and context. Then she asked why social media can't do the same instead of outright deleting stuff. Never thought of it that way before. How do you guys feel about labeling vs removal?

Shoutout to my garage wall for saving me 40 bucks on a bike rack

I needed to store my mountain bike for the winter and didn't want to drop 50 or 60 bucks on one of those fancy vertical racks from MEC. So I just grabbed a couple of heavy duty shelf brackets from Home Depot for like 8 bucks total, bolted them into the studs in my garage, and hung the bike by the top tube. Been three months now and it hasn't budged an inch, plus I can still park my car in there. Kind of makes me wonder how many other simple solutions I'm overthinking because stores sell a fancy version of the same thing. Has anyone else found a dirt cheap wall hack that worked just as good as the real deal?

Switched from buying bagged rice to a 25 pound sack from the Asian market

Debate: Is it smart to use a GFCI breaker instead of a receptacle in a crawlspace?

I ran into this on a job in Raleigh last week. Old house with no easy way to get a GFCI receptacle in the crawlspace because of moisture and dirt. I figured just throw a GFCI breaker in the panel and call it done. Saved me from mounting a box down there and dealing with corrosion. But my partner says breakers are too expensive and you lose the convenience of a reset at the outlet. What do you all think? Am I overthinking this or is he right that it's a waste of money on jobs like this?

Went to a coding meetup in Austin and noticed something weird

I went to this beginner coding meetup last month in Austin, and almost everyone there was learning Python or JavaScript. But one guy was trying to learn COBOL and everyone gave him this weird look. Is it just me or are people sleeping on old languages that still run a ton of stuff?