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Black soot on the jar rim and a grey mark on the wall above my candles

Long shot, but where is that shelf? A candle under a shelf, near a doorway, or in the path of an air vent flickers constantly, and a flickering flame soots even at the correct wick size. I chased this for a month before noticing the jar sat two feet from a ceiling vent that kicked in on a thermostat. Moved it three feet, same jar, no soot.

1 · in/candlemaking ·

Honest hours, how much of April to September does one hive actually take?

I logged it one season out of the same curiosity. A routine inspection on a single hive, from putting the suit on to washing the tool, ran me about forty minutes. Weekly through the spring, dropping to fortnightly by July, then a handful of longer sessions for treatment and autumn feeding.

The spikes are what matter. The extraction weekend was most of two days including cleaning, which is the part everyone forgets. Assembling frames and foundation in late winter was a couple of evenings. Total for the year came out somewhere in the low twenties of hours, which sounds trivial spread over six months and does not feel trivial when eight of those hours land in three consecutive May weekends.

137 · in/backyard-bees ·

In-laws are convinced my kraut jars are a botulism risk, what should I actually be watching for?

Short version: acid is the entire safety mechanism, and a lacto-ferment that is working makes plenty of it. Clostridium botulinum does not grow in a properly acidic environment - the line usually drawn is pH 4.6, and a finished kraut or hot sauce sits comfortably below that. The cases people actually get hurt by are the opposite of what you are doing: low-acid vegetables improperly home canned and sealed, or garlic sitting in oil in the fridge, neither of which is a fermentation. What I would say to your mother-in-law is that the sourness she is suspicious of is the thing keeping it safe. If you want that in a form she will accept, your national food safety or extension service publishes tested fermentation guidance, and it is worth reading once properly rather than trusting a thread.

248 · in/fermentation ·

Everything in my product feels core - how did you decide what goes behind the top tier?

There is one category that genuinely belongs at the top and it is the things a company buys rather than a person: audit logs, role permissions, single sign on, data retention controls, an invoice instead of a card. Nobody who is buying with their own money wants any of them, and companies will not deploy without them.

Moving those upwards got me six upgrades in a quarter from accounts that were already paying and had been asking their IT department for permission. It did not remove anything from anyone, which is the test.

196 · in/pricing-tiers ·

Third rear flat in two weeks and I cannot find anything in the tyre

Two things to do before anything else.

First, read the tube. Line the hole up with the tyre by matching the valve to the label, then look at that exact spot from both sides. If the hole is on the inner face of the tube: the side against the rim - it's the rim tape or a spoke end, not the tyre, and you'd never find it with fingers in the casing.

Second, use a cotton ball or a folded tissue rather than fingers to sweep the inside of the tyre. A glass shard sitting flush in the rubber is invisible and doesn't cut skin, but it snags cotton immediately.

Repeated slow leaks in the same area with nothing in the casing is rim tape about half the time, especially if it's the woven cloth type that shifts.

587 · in/bike-commuting ·