In the early 90s I ended up taking a Pascal course in high school for a math credit. Afterwards I joined the military in a computer software MOS and was trained in Ada. Of course... my actual day to day was often working with Visual Basic or VBA. The government employees assigned to my unit regularly worked in COBOL or Fortran... we had a single Ada system that required rebooting into 16-bit DOS to compile, but ran under Windows 95. Imagine the fun that was to debug from a single computer!
I am happy to contribute to your off topic meandering.
We pour concrete to make Atlas stones for specific weights knowing that these artificial stones will eventually be ruined by accident by the people who have a new interest in stone lifting. We also collect natural stones which may get ruined by mistake so people in the club can get used to lifting irregular shapes.
But when it comes to the historical stones, all the prep work above is so these stones are not ruined. It's a privilege to try to lift a stone that Irish or Scottish men would lift to become huscarls for their lord and breaking one out of carelessness is a loss for everyone in this hobby.
I had a Sears Admiral refrigerator that was built in the 90s which recently (three months ago) had the compressor go out. I've had the refrigerator since I purchased the house in 2001 and I have performed zero maintenance on it, so it was no surprise that the... uh... solid dust build up finally wore out the compressor fan. Though my wife and I did purchase a new refrigerator I intend to replace the compressor in the Admiral because >25 years is a good run and I expect the resurrected refrigerator [when I get around to resurrecting it] will outlast the new one.
I've never hooked up water lines for ice makers for my refrigerators, including refrigerators at my other properties. Call it a hunch.
I purchased a separate dispenser that takes 5 gallon drums of water. I strongly prefer the extra space over the convenience of water in the fridge door.
Mine's an LG, we've had it for roughly 10 years now and never had a problem with it. But we don't even use the icemaker in it (we have a separate ice maker as well).
Also, the phone number is right there on the flier so its not like the fliers owner can't be contacted after seeing a flier to see if the animal has been found and if the flier can be removed. Doing the right thing sometimes takes a bit of work.
Corruption is everywhere, not just in big cities. The more rural the county in US, the greater the chance that "stuff like this only happened in 3rd world countries" is necessary to get anything done [permits especially]. Anecdotal personal experience - living ~30 years in rural Virginia versus ~15 years in a city in upstate NY.
Haha yes, similar for me. It was word scramblers as games in AOL chat rooms that lead me to my love of programming... and of course Visual Basic 3.0. What an amazing product back then.
> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate?
This sort of negligence is intentional. My guess would be it started as a requirement for analog recording and was carried over without change and purposefully left at two hours when equipment went digital. The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation.
> The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation.
i'll bet lunch the actual recorder hardware in the airplanes is the same with the only difference being a knob set to EU rules or FAA rules.
I have fixed numerous home appliances over the past two decades almost entirely thanks to YouTube and eBay, and a willingness to apply myself. If the YouTube video has no intro and its subject is about your problem, you can be almost certain you're about to find out how to fix the problem.
YT is a great resource for fixing things like appliances, but the devices themselves have gotten (1) shittier, (2) harder to repair and (3) more expensive custom parts - that are themselves less durable. Example: the slide-out for the top rack of my dishwasher exploded, sending ball-bearings everywhere. The replacement part (mostly plastic) cost > $50 and to replace required I disconnect the water & power, uninstall the unit and access the 2 screws on the outside. Great for speeding up assembly in a factory, but ridiculous for any other purpose.
I think I have watched every video on how to fix my ice maker from freezing on my Samsung refrigerator and still can’t resolve the issue. I haven’t replaced any parts yet but I am dubious that it will solve it long term. It turns out that putting an ice maker inside the door/refrigerator compartment is a fundamentally flawed design.
Honestly, all upgrades and additional functions in a fridge/freezer are fundamentally flawed. Large partitioned box that gets cold, compressor system to make that so, some seals and a defrost circuit. That's all a fridge should be. No ice maker, no water dispenser, no french doors, no drawers.
This is the saddest part, a friend has two wash machines, one is an old top loader and one is a newer front loader; the front loader has been replaced three times whereas the top loader keeps running.
It had a control knob burn out and it was $50 or so to get a new one, one of the front loaders had a control board fail and it was $450 for a whole new front panel, which of course means nope.
To play the Devil's advocate, this might just be survival bias manifesting. The old top loader might have accidentally had top 0.0001 quality (tighter-than-average tolerances, etc).
Nah, it broke "about" as often as the others (making allowances for complications and design differences), it's just that when it broke, it was fixable for a reasonable amount because there was no computer board in it.
A similar but later top loader that I had died almost the same way, but required an entire control board replacement similar to the front loader; too expensive to bother with.
(Now an enterprising person could likely have repaired the control board itself, but that's beyond my "remove and swap" competencies.)
These PCBs (and I suppose more specifically whatever parts are on them) seem to be made of literal garbage — and yet they cost a mint. Had a wall oven with an “error code” - diagnosis: replace board, part cost $400, internet says there has been no revision of the board so the new board will likely fail the same way, and only the part would be warranted so the other $500 in labor cost to fix it could be incurred again next month or next year. Ended up throwing away the whole double oven.
Meanwhile I know a PCB and a few boring ICs and resistors actually cost like $30 max so I know that we are being scammed.
It was interesting seeing this from the other side as well. I have what I thought was an obsolete motorized awning with an obscure failure. I couldn't find anything about it so when I managed to fix it, I decided on a lark to grab my phone and record a short video. I didn't expect it would be of much use to anyone.
Now it has 80k views and dozens of comments thanking me for helping them fix their awning. (https://youtu.be/qae0XM4Dn4U)
The toaster at least makes toast. Alexa can only prompt me about adding toast to my shopping list.