and honestly it's not just rings either. I got a roll of cheap PEX tubing from a no name brand on eBay once. Fittings wouldn't grip it right no matter what I tried. Spent a whole weekend redoing a bathroom run and still had a slow drip at every joint. Ended up cutting it all out and buying the good stuff from Ferguson. That cheap tubing was like trying to grip a wet noodle.

Oh man, I totally relate to this! I picked up one of those cheap LED tripod lights (the kind that looks like it belongs in a low-budget music video) and figured it'd fizzle out after one use. But that thing survived me dropping it off a ladder twice and somehow still works, which is more than I can say for my phone screen (RIP). Honestly, it's become my weirdest source of pride, like "yeah, my lamp is tougher than your lamp." I love when cheap stuff just decides to be durable for no reason.

My buddy Mike runs a crew over in Oklahoma City and he tried this last summer on a small strip mall job. Said his guys kept fighting over whose turn it was to clean the tablet screen with their shirts, so he finally just printed out the whole set on bond paper and taped it to a plywood table. He told me they finished the framing two days faster because nobody was hogging the device and everyone could just walk up and look.

Wait, have you checked if your oven temp is actually accurate? I had the same flat bread problem and it turned out my oven was running 50 degrees cooler than what I set it to. The scoring thing is legit too but even with perfect scoring, if your oven isn't hot enough to create that initial burst of steam, the loaf won't spring up properly. I used a cheap oven thermometer from the grocery store and it changed everything. Ngl, sometimes it's the dumb simple things like temperature that mess us up more than the fancy techniques.

Used to be all about the fancy layouts with stickers and everything, thought simple would be boring. But after trying a plain grid for a week, it's way easier to actually write things down and remember them. You're right that the clutter was what stopped me from using my planner before.