Overheard a guy at the game store say 'just jam a paperclip in the reset hole' for a PS4 disc eject

I was picking up a used controller yesterday and this guy at the counter was giving advice to another customer. He said the fix for a PS4 that keeps spitting out discs is to 'just jam a paperclip in the reset hole for 30 seconds.' I almost said something. In my experience, that's a band-aid fix for the manual eject screw and doesn't solve the real issue, which is usually the rubber foot under the eject button swelling up. I had to do that full fix on my own console about two months ago, taking the whole top shell off to replace that little piece. The paperclip trick might work for a day, but it won't last. Has anyone else done the full rubber foot replacement and had it actually stick for good?

Spent 4 hours on a 'simple' laptop screen swap because of a hidden ribbon cable clip

Had a Dell XPS 13 with a cracked panel, thought it was a 30 minute job. The main display cable had a tiny plastic latch that looked solid but actually slides sideways, and I almost tore the connector off the board trying to pry it up. Has anyone else run into a connector design that completely fooled them?

Saw something at the old Trenton Steel site that made me stop

I was driving past the old Trenton Steel foundry site yesterday, the one that shut down about five years ago. They've got a chain link fence up, but a big section was bent back. I could see a pile of old ladle linings just sitting out in the open rain, no cover at all. The bricks were crumbling and the runoff was going right into a storm drain. It got me thinking about how much silica dust that must be putting out when it dries. Has anyone else seen old sites being left like this around their area?

I used to think you needed a ton of light for moss, but a guy at the Denver Botanic Garden changed my mind

I was setting up a closed jar terrarium last month and asked a staff member about my light setup. He pointed to a huge, healthy moss wall in their greenhouse that only gets indirect morning sun for about two hours a day. He said, 'Most mosses burn easy. Think damp forest floor, not open field.' I moved my jar from a south window to a north-facing shelf, and the moss is way greener after three weeks. How much light do your moss terrariums actually get?

TIL I was making my own pasta sauce wrong for months

Honestly, I was buying those little cans of tomato paste for my cheap spaghetti sauce. Then my friend in Chicago pointed out that a big 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes is like $1.20 and makes way more sauce for the money. I felt so dumb for not seeing it. What other simple swaps have you guys found for stuff like this?

That Tuesday we poured the big bronze eagle and the whole thing went sideways

We were casting a 400-pound bronze eagle for a park, a job we'd prepped for a solid week. The mold looked perfect, but halfway through the pour, a core vent clogged and the metal pressure blew a seam. Molten bronze shot out about three feet, hitting the sand floor and sending up a huge cloud of steam and smoke. We had to shut down the whole line for over an hour to let things cool and patch the mold. Ended up having to re-melt about 50 pounds of scrap from the spill. Has anyone else had a core vent fail on a big artistic pour like that, and how did you save it?

A quick chat with my barber about his credit card totally changed my mind

He was telling me how he got a secured card with a $200 deposit from Capital One after his divorce wrecked his score. He said he put his phone bill on it, paid it off every single month, and his score jumped 80 points in under a year. What's the fastest score boost you've ever seen from something simple like that?

A simple question I asked my neighbor about his lawn turned into a two-hour chat about soil pH and his old job at a fertilizer plant.

I figured I'd get a quick tip, but instead I learned more about nitrogen cycles and regional soil differences in our county than I ever expected, so has anyone else had a casual 'ask anything' moment that spiraled into a deep dive on a topic?

Our book club just hit 52 books read together, which is exactly one per week for a year.

Rant: My pour-over routine was a mess until I started using a kitchen scale

For months, my morning coffee was either too weak or bitter, and I couldn't figure out why. I was just eyeballing the coffee grounds and water, thinking it was close enough. Last week, I dug out an old digital kitchen scale I use for baking and started weighing everything. I aim for a 1:16 ratio, so 20 grams of coffee to 320 grams of water. The difference was immediate and huge. It's not fancy, but it made my cheap beans taste way better. Has anyone else had a simple fix like this that cleaned up their process?