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Bedroom particulate reading climbs every night from about 11pm and nobody is cooking

Different suspect: outdoors. In winter my overnight peaks lined up almost exactly with neighbours' wood burners, and the reason it fell in the morning was that opening the door mixed the bedroom with the rest of a bigger, cleaner house rather than that I had ventilated anything. Check the timing against an outdoor station near you before assuming the source is in the room.

44 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Three years in and I still pay myself whatever is left: how did you set an actual number?

UK version of the same warning: the small-salary-plus-dividends arrangement people repeat in forums is only sensible if the company actually has distributable profit, and the numbers that make it worthwhile have shifted more than once in the last few years. Dividends drawn out of a company that turns out to have made a loss get reclassified and it's an unpleasant conversation. Ask your accountant to run your actual figures rather than copying what a bloke on a forum did in 2019.

58 · in/shop-owners ·

Eight weeks of azelaic acid and I cannot tell if anything changed, how do you decide to keep or drop a product?

Slightly against the grain: if you cannot tell after eight weeks of daily use with no irritation, that is a result, not an absence of one. Something that is quietly working usually shows up as fewer bad days rather than a transformation, and you would probably have noticed fewer bad days. At 24 a tube every six weeks, the honest question is whether that money buys more elsewhere, and for redness specifically I would rather put it into a better sunscreen habit.

55 · in/skincare-routines ·

Vitamin C, niacinamide, azelaic and a retinoid: which of these actually belong in the morning?

The only one with a strong reason to be nocturnal is the retinoid, and that is partly because a lot of retinoids degrade in light and partly because it plays badly with a morning routine you have to rush. Vitamin C in the morning is the traditional pairing because it sits under sunscreen and the two are complementary rather than because it stops working at night. Niacinamide is agnostic, it will do its job in either slot, so put it wherever it fits your ten minutes. Azelaic is the one I would move to mornings for you specifically, because stacking it on top of a retinoid in the same evening is how most people end up with a flaky face and no idea which product caused it.

104 · in/skincare-routines ·

Cheap monitor screams VOC every evening - is that number measuring anything real?

Partial disagreement with writing off the VOC bar. As an absolute figure it is nonsense, agreed. As a relative alarm it has been useful to me twice - a new mattress that quietly outgassed for three weeks, and a cleaning product I did not realise I was breathing for an hour every Saturday. Use it as a hey, something changed signal and ignore whatever units it thinks it is reporting.

48 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Where does webcam money stop buying picture - is anything above about a hundred doing something?

Resolution is the least important number on the box and it is the only one they print in large type. What changes as you go up in price is sensor size and lens aperture, which together decide how you look in a room that is not brightly lit, plus autofocus that does not hunt every time you move, plus less aggressive sharpening and noise reduction baked into the image. The steepest part of that curve is in the low hundreds and it flattens quickly after. Also, unglamorously: a light in front of you will change your picture more than any upgrade in this price range, because every camera looks good with enough light on the subject.

205 · in/webcam-and-mic ·