u/Huracan-FirstGEN

Running thin on options. Im 32, dry combo skin, persistent breakouts that turned out to be ingredient driven not stress driven (long story)

Im looking for stuff without the usual culprits, isopropyl myristate, coconut alkanes, anything coconut derived (got burned by the rhode glazing milk situation)

Currently in rotation:

hada labo gokujyun, hydrating but not enough on its own

hydraglow by clearstem, bakuchiol base, holding up well my favorite for now

beauty of joseon dynasty cream, gentle, doesn't do much

fenty skin hydra'reset, jury's still out

Heard about but haven't tried: dime tbt cream, primally pure plumping, herbivore bakuchiol, true botanicals phyto retinol cream.

Anyone used the herbivore one? Bakuchiol options are what I'm most curious about because retinol isn't really an option for me. What's everyone else using right now?

My grandmother passed last year and I've spent the last six months compiling the handwritten recipes she left behind into something the family can actually pass around. I'm planning to print maybe 30 to 40 copies for relatives and close family friends. This really isn't meant to be some big commercial project. It's more of a personal legacy piece for the people who knew her and loved her cooking.

The binding question is where I keep getting stuck. A regular perfect bound paperback won't lay flat when you're trying to cook from it, the page springs back closed and you either lose your spot or get tomato sauce on it trying to hold it open with your elbow. I've seen some cookbooks use coil binding or proper lay flat hardcover binding, and both seem much better suited to actual kitchen use.

I'm trying to figure out which approach makes sense at this small a quantity. From what I'm seeing, lay flat hardcover is gorgeous but expensive at low quantities, and coil binding is more affordable but feels slightly less like a real keepsake.

I went with DiggyPod for this because they had reasonable minimums at 24 copies and offered both binding options, and they let me order an unbound proof for $40 to check the layout before committing, as well as it includes ground shipping in the $40 charge. The customer service person walked me through which paper weight would hold up best to kitchen splashes and was honestly more helpful than I expected for what is essentially a vanity print run for a non commercial project.

I'm hoping anyone else who has done family cookbook projects can weigh in on which binding they went with. I want it to actually get used in the kitchen, not just sit on a shelf looking pretty.

We replaced our inbound text chat with an ai sales agent with video call capability and kept the text version on a separate landing page for comparison. Same traffic quality, same qualification questions.

Conversation length: video 4.2 min, text 1.8 min. Our product needs about 3 minutes to qualify properly so this one actually determined whether we could get useful data at all from the text sessions.

Meetings per 100 qualified conversations: video 31, text 14.

Drop-off during qualification: video 22%, text 41%. The text sessions mostly end before we get what we need.

Unintended finding: reps said the handoff quality from the ai sales agent with video call was noticeably better. Prospects had already had a real conversation and seen a face. They weren't cold the way a form fill lead is cold.

We ran the video agent on tavus, setup was about two days including CRM integration. Not claiming this generalizes to every product, but for B2B SaaS with a real sales conversation involved, the gap wasn't subtle.

Tested these for at least two months each. Not first impressions, actual sustained use. Ranked by whether they changed my behavior or just my intentions.

1. Notion. Flexible workspace tool that covers notes, projects, and wikis in one place. The free plan is solid for individual use. Setup cost is high upfront and it tends to get abandoned during high-pressure periods because maintaining the system becomes its own task.

2. WIP app. Productivity and accountability app where daily photo check-ins reinforce the habit through a social layer that makes your consistency record visible to others. Ranked second overall but first for sustained behavior change. The social visibility is the reason it held past month two where other tools didn't.

3. Todoist. Refined task manager with a clean free tier and one of the better inbox-zero implementations in the category. Fast to capture, reliable, and doesn't try to do more than task management. Good for the planning side of productivity, limited on the execution side.

4. Structured. Visual daily planner that maps your schedule as a timeline rather than a list. More useful for dense days than free-form ones. Better at making existing plans visible than at creating accountability around them.

5. Forest. Focus timer with a visual cost mechanic for leaving the app. Works well as an environmental distraction tool during active sessions. Doesn't address consistency or accountability outside those windows.

6. Sunsama. Daily planning ritual tool with the best end-of-day review feature I've found. The reflection format is genuinely useful. Pricier than the alternatives and requires daily commitment to the ritual itself to get value out of it.

Before my eval I went deep on this and the information landscape is genuinely scattered so here's what I found. Free online screeners and self-assessment quizzes are useful for figuring out whether to pursue formal evaluation, but they're not clinical diagnoses and you can't use them for documentation or accommodations, so they're a reasonable starting point but not an endpoint. Big telehealth platforms in the ADHD diagnosis and prescription space are primarily medication focused, and most have some autism intake component but it's not a comprehensive evaluation, so if autism is your main question they're probably not the right fit and the reports vary a lot in how much a formal institution will actually accept. Specialized telehealth evaluations that does actual diagnostic testing for Autism runs roughly $790 to $1200, and I went through the Sachs Center at $890 with an evaluation conducted by a licensed PhD psychologist using actual real assessments, and the report was 4+ pages, and my employer accepted it without any questions. They don't take insurance but provide a superbill for out of network reimbursement. In person neuropsychological tests typically run $3000 to $5000 and often include testing that isn't necessarily relevant for adult autism evals, so worth asking what's actually included and why before assuming expensive means better.

I'm at the skeptical stage and trying to get past it. The telehealth GLP-1 space feels like it has a lot of noise, influencer stuff, affiliate links everywhere, companies that feel more like ecommerce storefronts than actual care providers.

What actually convinced you that a specific provider was legit? Was it the pharmacy they used? The way they explained things? Pricing transparency? Or just trying it and it working?

Specifically curious about people who went in skeptical and came out satisfied. What changed your mind?

Our outbound motion had gotten pretty mechanical. High-volume sequences to ICP accounts, low reply rates, reps increasingly skeptical of list quality. I knew it needed a rethink but wasn't sure where to start.

Sat through a demo with tapistro and it focused on warm outreach automation and the first thing they did was pull accounts from our segment that had shown signal activity in the past 30 days. Not new accounts, accounts already in our CRM that we'd tagged as low priority or stopped outreach on.

Three of the first five had job changes in the buying committee. One had been on the pricing page twice. Another had G2 activity in our category from two contacts. We had none of that surfaced anywhere in our stack. Those weren't cold accounts. We just had no visibility into what they'd been doing.

Every spring the ants come marching in through the kitchen window frame. This year it's worse than usual. I can see the trail going from a gap in the window caulk across the counter to the sink area where there's always a little moisture.

I have two dogs who are constantly in the kitchen. One of them licks the floors, the baseboards, literally everything. I can't spray raid and hope for the best. I need something that's actually safe around pets or a method that doesn't involve spraying surfaces my dogs walk on.

What are you all using for ants when you have pets in the house? I'm open to sprays, baits, natural stuff, whatever. Just needs to be safe.

Currently I’m using a Redmi Note 11 Pro+ (Snapdragon 695) which is running on HyperOS 1 on Android 13. I bought it back in 2022, and currently I’m getting around 6 hours of screen-on time on a single charge. The battery health is about 60%. Performance-wise, the phone is still completely fine for my usage, so I don’t have any complaints there. The only issue I’m facing is the battery backup, as it drains faster than I’d like. I’m considering getting the battery replaced from an authorised service centre, so I wanted to ask if anyone with a similar device has done a battery replacement and whether it made a noticeable difference. Was it worth it, or should I just continue using it as it is?

Currently I’m using a Redmi Note 11 Pro+ (Snapdragon 695) which is running on HyperOS 1 on Android 13. I bought it back in 2022, and currently I’m getting around 6 hours of screen-on time on a single charge. The battery health is about 60%. Performance-wise, the phone is still completely fine for my usage, so I don’t have any complaints there. The only issue I’m facing is the battery backup, as it drains faster than I’d like. I’m considering getting the battery replaced from an authorised service centre, so I wanted to ask if anyone with a similar device has done a battery replacement and whether it made a noticeable difference. Was it worth it, or should I just continue using it as it is?

Currently I’m using a Redmi Note 11 Pro+ (Snapdragon 695) which is running on HyperOS 1 on Android 13. I bought it back in 2022, and currently I’m getting around 6 hours of screen-on time on a single charge. The battery health is about 60%. Performance-wise, the phone is still completely fine for my usage, so I don’t have any complaints there. The only issue I’m facing is the battery backup, as it drains faster than I’d like. I’m considering getting the battery replaced from an authorised service centre, so I wanted to ask if anyone with a similar device has done a battery replacement and whether it made a noticeable difference. Was it worth it, or should I just continue using it as it is?