Bought a $400 thermal camera for my phone and it paid for itself in a day

I was on a service call for a hot breaker in an old apartment building last week. Could not find the problem with my regular tools. Grabbed the thermal camera I just got, scanned the panel, and it showed a bad connection on a neutral lug glowing hot. Fixed it in ten minutes. The owner was so happy he gave me two more jobs. Anyone have other good uses for these besides panels?

Pro tip: I was wrong about using PVA glue for everything

For a long time I thought PVA was fine for all my bindings, but a repair job on a 1920s family bible from Savannah showed me its limits. The old animal glue on the spine was brittle, and when I tried to reattach a section with PVA, it just didn't flex the same way and started to crack again after a few months. I switched to a wheat paste and hide glue mix for that kind of work and the difference in flexibility is huge. What's your go-to adhesive for repairing really old, flexible bindings?

Am I the only one who thought the new composite patch kits were just overpriced hype?

I saw a demo for a rapid-cure structural patch system at a trade show in Dallas last year and figured it was just marketing fluff. Then we had a small crack on a Cessna 172's wing root and the lead mechanic insisted we try it, and the whole repair was signed off in under two hours. Has anyone else had a tool or material they doubted completely change their routine?

I finally got a stubborn hydraulic fitting on a dredge pump in Galveston to seal after fighting it for nearly 8 hours.

What's your go-to method for dealing with a fitting that just won't seat right in cold, murky water?

Finally got my weekly spread to work for me after months of trying

I mean, I kept making these super detailed layouts that took forever to draw and then I'd just skip using them. Last week, I just grabbed a ruler and made three columns: 'work', 'home', and 'me'. I wrote my tasks in pencil and moved them around. Idk, maybe it's just me, but that simple change made me actually open my journal every day this week. Has anyone else found that a basic layout works better than a fancy one?

Just found out how many old hard drives get tossed without a proper wipe

I was reading a report from a tech recycling place in Austin. They said over 40% of the hard drives they get still have personal data on them. Pictures, tax files, old emails, the whole thing. I always knew people skipped wiping drives, but seeing that number really got me. It's not just home users either, they get drives from small businesses too. Makes me think about all the times I've seen a client just toss an old PC in the trash. Now I'm making it a point to ask every single customer if they want me to wipe the drive before I recycle anything for them. Has anyone else started adding a data wipe as a standard part of their service?

Vent: My power went out in Seattle and I couldn't buy a sandwich

Last week, a storm knocked out the grid in my neighborhood for about six hours. I walked to the corner deli, but their card readers were down and I had zero cash on me. I stood there hungry, realizing how helpless a cashless system makes you when the tech fails. Has anyone else been stuck like this during an outage?

My weirdest week ever started with a drone and ended with a very confused sheriff's deputy.

Saw a real old school chimney pot setup in Charleston last week

It was a row of houses built in the 1880s, and every single one had a different clay pot design. Has anyone worked on a historic block like that and found a good way to source replacement parts?

Warning: I used to think you had to clean every single lens element on a disassembly, but that changed after a Leica M3 job in 2022.

I was working on a customer's M3 and spent over an hour cleaning each element, but the haze was actually only on the rear group. A retired repairer in Chicago told me, 'You're just making dust problems and risking coatings,' and he was right. When do you guys decide to leave well enough alone on a lens clean?