Burr & Bloom

And remember first attestation is a floor not a birthday. The word was spoken before it was written, so use dates to disprove, not to prove.

I repeated one of these in a talk to about eighty people and got a very polite email afterwards with three citations attached. What it cost me was not the embarrassment, it was that I stopped trusting my own stock of fun facts for about a year, because I could not tell which of the others had come from the same bad source. If you have a mental collection of these, it is worth auditing the whole set at once rather than one at a time.

Landing zone before you lift, announce every move, blade down and behind. Drain in the sink, not across the room, and close the kitchen when the hob is on.

Green spot algae, and the counterintuitive fix is phosphate. Low phosphate in the water column is what triggers it, so dosing rather than starving is the move. I add enough of a comprehensive fertiliser to keep phosphate somewhere around 1ppm and the spots stopped appearing on new leaves within a month.

It showing up only on anubias makes sense too. Slow growing plants hold each leaf for a year, so anything that lands on them stays. Fast growers just outgrow it.

In a low tech tank with plants actually growing, not really. The nutrients cause algae myth comes from tanks where the plants were already stalled. Keep the light modest and dose, that combination is stable.

Do not buy a consumer camcorder expecting these benefits, though: that is the trap. The features that matter live on the prosumer and broadcast-style bodies: a manual zoom and focus ring you can actually grip, XLRs with proper level control, real ND, and dual slots. A cheap handycam gives you a long lens, an autofocus you cannot override and a built-in mic you will never use. Used prosumer is where your budget goes furthest.

The thing I got wrong for years was assuming versus and adverse were related because they both mean against. Adverse is ad plus vertere, turned toward, and adversary comes through the same route, so they really do share the vertere root, which felt like a lucky guess until I checked. But controversy, conversation, universe, vertigo and version are all in that same family too, which is the point at which the root stops helping you predict meaning and you have to look each one up anyway.

Sour and bitter in the same cup at 40 seconds is the signature of channelling, not of a grind setting. Water is punching a hole through part of the puck and blasting past the rest, so some coffee is scorched and most of it is barely touched. Going finer makes channelling worse, which is exactly what you are seeing.

Order I would fix things in:

• stir the dry grounds in the basket with a thin pin or a straightened paperclip for 15 seconds before tamping, this alone fixes most of these
• tamp level, and check it by eye from the side rather than by feel
• make sure 18g actually fits, if the puck touches the shower screen before you lock in you are getting a crater
• pull one shot and look at the spent puck, a hole or a soggy patch confirms it

Only once the shot runs evenly should you go back to adjusting grind by taste.

Agreed, though I would exhaust the free fixes first. Plenty of entry grinders make acceptable espresso once distribution is under control.

One thing worth checking rather than assuming: if it is slimy and stringy rather than dusty, and it smells faintly swampy, that is cyanobacteria and it behaves completely differently. Diatoms feel gritty and come off in sheets. Yours sounds like diatoms from the description.

The free tiers worth knowing about, since your budget matters: the main open source password manager's free tier syncs across unlimited devices and is genuinely complete for one person, and mainstream privacy focused mail providers have free tiers that are fine until you want your own domain. That means your 120 can go almost entirely into the domain and mail line, which is where I would put it.

Get the model number, ring the maker, ask two questions: does setup require the app, and can I buy a pump in five years. If either answer is soft, walk.

If grind size does not change your drawdown, the water is bypassing the coffee bed rather than going through it. Two usual culprits with a conical.

First, the paper is not sealed against the cone, so water runs down the gap. Rinse with enough water to actually stick the filter to the walls and press the seam down before adding coffee.

Second, and more likely from your description, you are pouring high and hard into the middle, which digs a channel straight down. Pour in slow concentric circles from about 4cm above the bed, stop 1cm short of the paper, and keep the water level fairly low rather than filling the cone in one go.

A thin and slightly salty cup is under extraction, which fits both of those.

I took the year six adjunct route at a college forty minutes away and it worked financially and cost me the year academically. Two courses, both new preps, both with a lot of grading, and I wrote almost nothing between September and May. If you can possibly avoid teaching new material in your writing year, avoid it, and if you cannot, teach something you have taught before even if it pays slightly less. Repeat preps are worth an enormous amount of writing time.

Method book is exactly right then. Ordering Origin Uncertain and reading the blog this week.

Yield per square metre is closer than people claim, but not identical. In my beds the mixed planting gave a bit less of any one thing and a lot more variety across the season, which suited how we actually cook. The measurable win was pests, we stopped getting wiped out by one bad year of a single problem because nothing was planted in a big block anymore.

If you regularly end up with more coffee than you can drink in a month, freezing in single dose portions works well. Small airtight containers, straight from the freezer into the grinder without thawing, and it holds for months. Do not refreeze what you have opened.

This transfers to anyone with an irregular life, not just shift workers. Parents of small children in particular. The clock is a fiction, the sequence of events is real.

The other half of it is not stirring after the steep. Every stir puts settled fines back in suspension.

Used market it is. Anything I should test in person?

Slight disagreement, or at least a caveat. Tabs cover nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium at the roots but the traces still matter, and green spot algae is usually a water column phosphate problem. If you can stretch to a small bottle of all in one liquid at about 15 dollars that also lasts a ten gallon nearly a year at low tech doses, you are covering both for not much more.