Carl

Buying used is less frightening than it sounds if you know the four checks. Actuation count if the body reports it, a photo of a plain white wall at a small aperture to reveal sensor dust and marks, look through the lens toward a light for fungus and haze, and work every dial and button in the shop. Buy from a dealer with a warranty for your first one; the price difference over a private sale is roughly the cost of not learning this the hard way.

Disagreeing with the stainless answer. You said eggs five mornings a week and one steak: that's twenty-something egg cooks a month against four steaks and eight sauces. Seasoned carbon steel does eggs better than stainless ever will, it's light enough to handle one-handed, and it takes the steak fine. Buy a £12 saucepan from a supermarket for the sauce and stop making one pan do a job it's bad at; that's still under your £60.

The stomach upset stories are almost all loading protocols or badly dissolved powder. 5 g in warm water, stirred properly until it's actually gone, no loading phase. If you drink a gritty cold glass of half-dissolved powder on an empty stomach you will absolutely feel it and then blame the compound.

Worth knowing that a diffuser and a candle throw scent completely differently, so an oil you love in a jar can be underwhelming cold. Anything built on top notes reads bright and thin in reeds, and the heavier vanilla, amber and woody types do much better because they evaporate slowly. If you are choosing three of your six, choose the heaviest three.

Slow is an understatement on some of them, but the colour out of the box on the manufacturer converters is genuinely different from a generic profile and it shows most in skin.

The stiffer feed is the practical half of this. At 100% hydration a weak starter looks like nothing is happening even when it is, because the bubbles just collapse into the liquid. Thicken it and you get information back.

Two things that matter more than the format. First, the built-in flash on these has a short useful range, so put a sign on the table telling people to stand close, or you will get ninety underexposed prints of a dark room. Second, put a pen that writes on glossy film next to the guestbook, because normal biros skate off the print and people give up.

Also worth saying that a soy flame that stays under roughly a centimetre and a half is doing its job. Anything taller and flickering is you watching unburnt carbon go up the jar.

I burned this exact comparison last winter because I was sick of guessing. Four identical 8oz jars, same 464, same 8 percent of the same oil, wicks CD-6 through CD-12, four hour burns, photographed the flame at 30, 60, 120 and 180 minutes and weighed each jar before and after.

The CD-12 was throwing visible black by 80 minutes and burned through noticeably more wax per hour than the CD-8. The CD-10 was the interesting one: clean on the first burn and sooty by the third, once the pool got deeper and the glass was holding heat. That is very likely what you are seeing on a shelf jar you have burned a few times. The CD-8 never sooted but left a thin ring on the glass for the first hour, which self corrected on the second burn. I sell the CD-8 version now and nobody has ever complained about the ring.

Stand them on edge with a gap between each bar and put a fan on the rack for a few hours a day. Cure is water leaving, and water cannot leave a bar that is sitting flat on a solid surface in still air.

I'd also retire 'doubling' as your target. Apparent rise depends on jar diameter, hydration and how much you stirred the air out, so a wide jar makes a healthy starter look lazy. Use an aliquot: a tablespoon of the mixed dough in a small straight-sided container, or just accept a reliable 50 to 60% rise, which bakes perfectly good bread. I've had starters that never doubled in their lives and made better loaves than ones that tripled.

Have the body serviced before you commit. Inherited cameras usually have sticky slow shutter speeds and dried light seals, and you will spend three rolls blaming yourself for problems the camera is causing. A service costs about two rolls and turns an unknown into a tool.

Made-to-measure starts around 500-700 at the accessible end, which after two failed off-the-rack jackets plus alterations is not the gulf it sounds like. If your shape is genuinely off the standard grid it's the honest answer.

Mild disagreement: those are two different tools you're trying to buy at once. Pancakes want responsiveness because you're constantly adjusting to avoid burning batter, and thin steel is lovely for that. Smashburgers want brute stored heat. If it genuinely has to be one purchase then yes, cast iron, but know that you're optimising for the burgers and living with a griddle that takes a quarter of an hour to be ready for six pancakes.

Fix the next batch instead. Partial gel is a temperature problem, so either force full gel by insulating hard or putting the mould in a barely warm oven and switching it off, or prevent gel entirely by putting the mould in the fridge for a day. Anything in between gives you the ring. I went the oven route and have not had a partial gel since.

Which is why I'd split it by what you're actually defending.

Abuse and noise: the flood, the scraper, the script kiddie - goes to the binding, or to a WAF rate limiting rule in front of the worker so the request never costs you any CPU at all. Business rules, this account may request three resets a day, need to be accurate and global, and that's a durable object keyed by email, or a row in D1 with a counter and a timestamp.

Trying to make one mechanism do both is how people end up writing an accounting system, which is the thing you said you didn't want to do.

I'd push back on 'it's all thickness'. Surface finish matters a lot in the first months. Sand-cast iron has a pebbled texture with real tooth for oil to key into, so early seasoning grabs unevenly and looks patchy exactly like yours describes. Rolled steel is smooth, so the first layers go on thin and even and look better sooner. Ten years in they converge, but your patchy-versus-even observation is about how the surface was made, not about carbon.

Cardboard in a garage, cut them up and use them. Indoors, in a breathable box, out of the sun, a well built bar will outlast your interest in it.

Owned both in one focal length for about a year and sold the expensive one. For me the difference at A3 was visible if I looked for it and invisible if I did not, and the weight meant I left it at home for anything casual. A lens you do not carry is worth nothing. That is a personal conclusion, not a general one, and someone shooting the same subject in worse light would reasonably decide the other way.

This is correct and worth emphasising: it only applies if you genuinely do not tow or haul. The moment you put a load in, that softer carcass is the wrong choice and you are outside the placard.