My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age.
If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
Your 1969 MG Midget is enormously polluting and a death trap in a crash. The turn signal is small and dim and barely visible to other motorists in bright sunlight. The ride sucks and the reason it’s easy to repair is there’s almost no interior structure or noise or thermal insulation to remove.
Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes, today’s cars aren’t designed to be collector items that will sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
The reason it's easy to repair seems to be that the wire is accessible. That turns out to have nothing to do with LED vs. incandescent signals or the lack of a catalytic converter. It probably has nothing to do with crumple zones either. It may have something to do with the lack of cabin insulation, but I honestly doubt it.
But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity) seems good.
> a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget
Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they often bury one module under several layers of others. It requires you to disconnect and move working parts and assemblies to uncover the broken one.
Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely. The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
> but why should they be?
That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into a black and white issue.
>modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget
My current car, which cannot be jumpstarted since it has a 48v battery for ignition and driving, and has dash-breaking OTA updates requiring a visit to the dealer or a proprietary 1200 usd software, and can be easy stolen by unplugging a headlight and feeding data into the common bus, would disagree.
Is it a death trap? Totally. But you could put a cat on it and dramatically reduce emissions. Consider also that initially producing a car is a major contributor to the environmental impact of a car.
I think a better example might be a similar era john deere tractor. It was designed to replace expensive human labor and was designed to be simple and to be fixed.
I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
Wrong. 2/3of a cars pollution are produced in production. The fuel consumption, polluting as it is, needs 20+years to catch up to the gestation environment damage of a car. Perverse as it sounds, old rusty clunkers are more environmental friendly.
To do some wiring that'll be bulletproof and last:
1. get wiring rated for under-the-hood heat (the wiring sold at auto parts stores is no good for that)
2. get crimp-on connectors
3. cut the plastic off the crimp-ons
4. put heat shrink tubing on the wire, well away from the end
5. crimp the connector on
6. solder the crimp joint using a thermostat controlled soldering iron
7. move the heat shrink tubing over the joint, and heat it with a bic cigarette lighter to shrink it on
8. voila!
P.S. Crimped connections don't last. After about a year, they'll work loose a bit from vibration, and corrosion will creep in, and you'll get a loose connection that is very frustrating to find. Soldering it prevents that from happening.
Soldering crimp connectors (that are not otherwise designed for it) will reduce the flexibility of the wire and introduce stress concentrations. Those stress concentrations will reduce the fatigue life of the harness.
Soldering a crimp is not good practice, a correctly done crimp will not come loose (OEM connections are mostly crimped), and you risk making a brittle section if the solder wicks past the crimp.
Soldered connections are a no go in automotive. Crimped is way tougher for vibrations. Corrosion shouldn't be getting in with heat shrink or a good connector.
I’m in automotive tech school right now and the advice in the context of the automotive sector (not electronics) is to always crimp where you can, and only solder if you absolutely must.
I'm curious to know more about how much vibration your solder joints see. I agree that most crimped connections tend to be sub-par but in my experience that is due to either bad tools, bad materials or both. Personally I use Wagos if waterproofing and/or space isn't a concern, marine grade crimp connections (and the proper tools) if it is.
> My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame. I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
I want to see EVs/plug-in hybrids with similar levels of simplicity wherever possible. Virtually all vehicles in the US nowadays are completely overloaded with unnecessary sensors/electronics that are ripe for failure.
After watching the Edison Motors company build a hybrid electric logging truck prototype on YouTube it made me quite disappointed there don't seem to be other classes of vehicle being made in a similar user repairable manner. Of course, passenger vehicles do have some additional regulated safety requirements compared to a heavy vocational truck but perhaps someone will try to figure it out.
>There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life.
At some point we must reach peak tech. In the Elite: Dangerous universe, there are quite a few ships you can use, but the majority of them are designs that are hundreds of years old. They are modular spaceships, of course, so they have received upgraded technology as time has gone on, but there are some quirky little ships flying around.
Compared to phones though, we'd need to get carriers to guarantee their old networks stay functional so old cellular radios will still function. Maybe when tech advances enough we CAN have a modular phone it will be less of a concern.
My father gifted me 35 year old speakers he had stored in his attic.
I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K.
My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set.
I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.
Something that is frequently underestimated when it comes to the sound of speakers is... the rest of the room. Room acoustics make a huge difference, and if your room isn't set up right then high quality equipment is just a waste of money.
I too had a similar experience... My dad had to liquidate his old HiFi set as kids were growing up, but after the nest was empty I gave him the old towers back!
We built a set of these: https://projectgallery.parts-express.com/speaker-projects/zd... which are a throwback to the old HiFi sets of the 70s-80s. I _really_ like the reference sound of this set. The only thing they don't really do is the sub-sonic punch that action movies require, but that's probably ok for apartment living with neighbors.
As if large corporations base their business strategy on ethically/environmentally-minded consumer demands. At most they will propagandize or triangulate their engineering approach slightly - just enough for the media cycle to turn to some other issue. Gotta make those quarterly profits stand out!
Also - if you haven't changed a printer cartridge in 12 years than you are printing very little (which is fine, but it's not a typical use-case by which to evaluate longevity).
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
Repairability and build simplicity were a big factor for me purchasing the Meze 99 Classics. I can't say how long they'll end up lasting, but you can visibly see almost every screw in them. Even if I can't find Meze-branded replacement parts for the rest of my life, they seem modular and simple enough that I could probably at least limp them along for a LONG time.
They aren't cheap, but they are also some of the best headphones I've ever personally used. I don't make any claims of being an "audiophile" or whatever, but they're like the headphone equivalent of using my Kali LP-6 monitors.
Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
Brother and Canon are both really good examples of long-term thinking in Japanese companies, along with Nintendo.
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
And it’s not just Japanese companies that manage to pull that off. Some others have managed to do the same. See: Lego, for example. They branched out into movies, games, and parks, but their primary and core product remains bricks.
Well let's not overdo it. Right now if you search the Brother knowledge base to troubleshoot something you'll be surprised to see that the questions are there, but each and every answer says "the page you requested was removed". It works as long it works but in the end, it's the same garbage company.
"As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner instead:
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
> my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
It’s pretty typical for printers (and a huge amount of iot devices) to only support 2.4GHz. I’m a little impressed that this is the first device you found this incompatibility with.
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
This is going to become a bigger problem over time. A lot of the embedded chips that provide WiFi only supported 2.4GHz. There’s a whole bunch of devices that just aren’t going to work.
I never got actual Postscript to we work on Linux and my Brother. It looks like the ripping runs on the host side, and what gets printed is bitmaps. Works fine on Mac and windows though.
I'm pretty sure mine came with some OCR PDF-generating software. It has Fax functions I never use, Copy functions that come in handy several times a year, and Scan I've used a few times. The web admin interface seems to have a lot of options.
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
I have had a Brother laser printer for 11 years. I am legitimately on my second toner cartridge. I try to tell family and friends not to bother with inkjet printers but they don’t listen.
My dad’s big fancy Cannon photo printer has caused him nothing but grief. He swears up and down he needs to be able to print large-format full color photographs, but I have never seen him do so. What I have seen is his black cartridge dry out between uses and fail when he needs to print a form.
My wife is occasionally frustrated by our inability to print color, but I am more than happy to drive to Walgreens or my companies office to print a color item once every couple months. An inkjets ink would’ve dried between prints.
We have 2 brothers for our small business, one as the main and the other as a backup (which we have also brought with us when traveling). We are heavy users, probably >10k pages every year, but we have only replaced the drum once and have successfully ignored the "optical photoconductor life over" message for nearly 2 years.
Once a new cartridge failed ("not recognized" error even though it was purchased through Staples) and the brother support person walked me through some secret squirrel reset code which I of course saved for future use. The fact I could get someone from the company on the line to help me was a rare experience for tech companies.
My only gripe with the toner cartridges is the requirement to enter a serial number to get a recycling mailing label. The serial numbers are miniscule.
Our 7 year old brother laser printer finally got its first cartridge replacement last year :) We don't print much, but that's the point, we just leave it sitting there, and when we want to print, it prints. Never had a problem with it in 7 years!
The most use my Brother printer got was three years ago when my seventh grader needed to print school worksheets and then we scanned them to be turned in. This was during the COVID lockdown school year, and yet it's STILL on the OEM cartridge it came with
One of the best purchases I have ever made is my Brother laser jet. I’m still on my first toner cartridge after three years. It works every time and never complains or updates.
I've got a Samsung laser printer that was gifted to me when I started post-secondary 13 years ago. Still chugging right along. Never had a hiccup with it. Windows finds the drivers without issue on a new OS install (I have drivers backed up just in case).
No colour printing, but who cares. We do the same thing as you. When we want some photos printed (usually for distribution to family), it's no major hassle to get them printed at the local office supply.
I'm at 15 years with my £50 brother laser. I think it's had 3 or 4 toner cartridges in that time. It just sits quietly and prints when requested. Brilliant!
I feel like I bought the last good HP LaserJet that was ever made.
Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0% doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it has a usable web-based management interface.
So far I have the following complaints about the printer:
* After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue.
* Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the output quality is fine.
* The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized to the Canadian market.
Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go!
Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for them will likely be a Brother.
One of my first tasks at my first job, like 25 years ago now, was to scrape crud off of a LaserJet 4 fuser. My boss explained that they tried using remanufactured toner cartridges to save money, but they found that these would deposit crud on the fusers. Thanks to tight budgets, we ended up scraping the crud off of the fusers using a screwdriver and only replacing the fusers if they were too far gone. They had switched back to HP cartridges before I started there, but the results of the remanufactured cartridges were still around for a few years.
We also used a product called Rubber Renue to rejuvenate the pickup rollers/pads as a bottle of that stuff (which lasted a LONG time!) was significantly less expensive than the maintenance kit that contained the new rollers.
The savings for that refill kit are significant, but I also don't want to potentially ruin my unicorn printer.
I have a 4050DTN for regular B&W and a 5000TN for anything wide format. These two are absolutely bulletproof, I can get cartridges for my 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage; a single cartridge got me through two degrees with zero problems. Currently on my third cartridge in almost a quarter century.
Will look into your M254DW as a colour option, per your experience with it.
I used to have this one! Loved it. Upgraded to a m276nw when I needed a scanner. This printer has been perfect as well-- never complains about low toner levels, prints well, supports AirPrint and some (not all) of HP connected services like email printing, but no subscription needed or any HP bullshit getting in the way.
Buying a black/white only brother laser printer solved all my printing problems.
Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
I think people forget that ink is a liquid which dries up and leaves a sticky mess. They think of the printer as a magic technology box that somehow is supposed to deal with that mess perfectly, without issues or waste.
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
The only problem with these ancient and durable HP Lasterjets - I used to use a 4L - is that they were slow. My modernish Brother HL2270DW - which I got for free at a garage sale because the toner cartridge was missing so they couldn't test it - is much faster and can print double-sided. And has a $20 aftermarket toner cartridge in it.
I used to maintain/repair a couple of LaserJet IIIs (circa 1990), up until about 2010, when I got tired of the printer's footprint being so large, and retired my last computer with a parallel port. The LaserJet III was the VW Bug of laser printers in terms of being easy to repair.
We used old HP Laserjets in a warehouse up until about a year ago. Towards the end, we had to repair and replace them with increasing frequency due to the beige plastic becoming very brittle. As a result, the printers became hard to service and more prone to damage during regular use. Replaced with a cheap Brother laser.
It worked surprisingly well for my Epson so. Connect to WiFi, all devices find it, including Linux ones, without additional drivers or software.
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
GNOME ships a scanner app that can scan from many (newish) networked scanners without a driver. The UI is, ahem, about as minimal as you would expect from a GNOME app, but it works.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
My exact experience. It just works and it's fast. In the rare occasion I need a fancy color print, there's a store close by where I can order some nice prints with a few clicks.
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
I bought a black and white laser printer (Brother HL-L2350DW) because paying a little extra for laser up front results in much total lower cost of ownership due to the cartridges lasting much longer than ink jet. I have had it almost 5 years and I've only replaced the cartridge once.
One of the worst offenses I've ever seen as an example of this is this trend with newer refrigerators (which I'm sure will brick after 2-3 years when the manufacturer stops supporting the software) where they have a camera inside that projects to a screen on the door. Cool, you can see what food is inside the refrigerator!
Do you know how else you can do that? by opening the door. We need to stop "innovating" features that absolutely no one needs, because clearly the result isn't a better product, just a messier, more complex one that is frequently over-engineered and under-supported.
The worst refrigerator innovation is including an RFID tag in water filters, and refusing to make ice or dispense water unless the filter is replaced within a certain timeframe. Google for GE RPWFE
The hack is to cut the RFID tag off a blank that bypasses the filter and tape it to a cheaper 3rd party filter.
The amusing thing is that its actually cheaper to replace the RFID sensor board in the fridge & use a generic filter than to use an official GE filter (re-using the cutout RFID tag from a genuine GE filter). The RFID sensor in mine died, and prevented it from dispensing water/ice. And no, I didn't choose this fridge. It came with the house when I bought it.
A great crowdfunded business would be to sell aftermarket kits for all the enshittified appliances. This somewhat exists already (my samsung fridge had frost buildup on the sensor, causing the fridge cycle to never come on!), so the business would be to cover 95% of all appliances in the last 15 years. The best innovation would be to develop a lego-style board repair kit that can be tailored to any specific model. So the same board can be used (with nominal reconfiguration) to repair/replace a Kenmore icemaker vs a GE. A deeper option would be to sell "retrofit kits" that allow you to gut everything except the motors/compressors/refrig circuitry. Or for a dishwasher, toss all the circuits and just use the frame.
Nobody cares what people need, they care what sells.
Don't have the link, but I once read a study analyzing the Asian market regarding electronics. The focus was on washing machines, fridges, etc. They discovered that more features, even if useless, improves sales.
So you'll have a washing machine with 50 buttons, 20 lights, 2 LED screens. People will buy that over any simpler one.
As long as we consumers behave like this, the other companies go out of business.
Yup as always it's consumers that are the problem. Sure, vulnerable people need to be protected, but fully functioning adults should have the mental capacity to sort shiny from useful.
Can I open the fridge while I'm at work to see if I need to get more milk on the way home? I believe it can also send reminders using AI to see if something is getting low. I thought it was dumb the first time I saw it, but there are genuine use cases that tempted me to put a wyze cam into my dumb fridge so I can get the same sort of features.
The worst example might be windows in the doors, so you can look into them. Except you put stuff on the door shelf and block the view or you can't really see inside all too well. Plus now you have introduce thermal issues.
On these smart fridges, I struggle to see how these are anything but gimmicks undermining the device's lifespan. Most cooking requires items from many sources. You can check your milk but what about the flour in the cupboard? AI reminders. Is that a subscription service or are advertisers being given your data?
How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days...
I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
I see now after having made this comment there's a sub-thread under this parent that discusses how useful this refrigerator feature can be. I guess I was just born 40 years too late. Seems impossibly silly to me.
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Your parents' generation probably think a number of things that you use every day are "impossibly silly".
Now if it had cameras in the back on each shelf so you can see what someone left back there obscured by other things, that might make that display worth it...
I unfortunately can't find it right now, but I remember seeing a semi-famous quote from the 1950s/60s? calling out variable-speed windshield wipers as an absurd consumerist luxury emblematic of what's wrong with America.
The refrigerator camera sounds like the same kind of thing. Modestly useful feature that may well become standard-issue someday because the underlying components can be made very cheaply at scale.
The insidious thing about it is that they won't just "let you see what's in the fridge", you'll have to sign up to "see-your-fridge-as-a-service" with their shitty app (that sells your location, buying habits, etc) and a $7/mo paywall. Also, since we're talking about Samsung, never buy samsung appliances. they are meant to break down.
The camera in the fridge is not for the customer's convenience. The camera is for image-recognizing the food brands the household is consuming, so the manufacturer could sell data for an extra couple of cents.
I imagine a scenario in the future when all fridges have it, like all TVs now have smart features. Of course it will sold as "check fridge while you are at the grocery store" feature.
Is it local only? It would be pretty handy if you could check while you were at the grocery store, I don't always plan my shopping list in advance so it'd be helpful to check things like "How much butter do I have" or "how full is the milk".
I thought there would also be electricity usage benefits but after looking at people online who have crunched the #s that might be negligible.
My first thought was similar, but in the opposite direction: the data collected by a non-local camera in a refrigerator (coupled with WiFi network details for location info) is something that Walmart and friends would pay a lot of money for.
If you want your refrigerator and freezer to save energy then make sure there is as little empty space in them as is possible. It makes the entire system more efficient, stable, and reduces the impact of opening the door.
While I definitely won't have insterest in these fridges, some of them (I'm thinking the Samsung) scan your fridges contents and let you know what's about to run out (milk, eggs, etc) for the next time you do a run.
Still not worth 1000usd to me, but more practical than "just seeing what's inside".
that's mostly really dumb, but I can see the reasoning. opening a fridge takes energy since it temporarily lets warm air in. theoretically, a fridge with a camera might save energy, but in practice, the difference is probably pretty miniscule
But not as thermally insulating. Every time I walk past the open airs freezers placed right next to the open air hot food warmer at the supermarket I know 100% that we will kill this planet.
A small number of us might offset it a tiny bit, but it's inevitable that we turn this place into an uninhabitable mess. I do not believe at all that things will change in the future.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
My dishwasher has a "wifi-button", so I decided to figure out what it does, as it turns out, it's completely useless. The only features you get is "you're out of rinse aid" and "Turn on remotely".
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
We got a new dishwasher a while back and it came with a mobile app - this was a bit of a faff to get working but was mildly useful in that it would send a notification once the cycle was done.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
I measured the energy consumption of my connected iQ-500 Siemens dishwasher. It used 750 Wh per load total, regardless if I used eco (3h55min) or 40/50 degree standard program (2h15min). I am guessing the "eco" mode only saves water.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
I intentionally bought the dumbest dishwasher I could find. It has two cycles: "Normal" and "Heavy Duty", a "Heat Dry"/"Air Dry" selector, and a start/stop button. I could not find one that was simpler.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
Even a door-open alarm works better as an actual alarm than an app notification. My fridge does that: it beeps if the door is left open, so you can get your ass back in the kitchen and shut it. I don't want to receive a notification from my fridge app while I'm at work because my wife left the fridge door open at home (or vice versa), I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
>I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
I recently bought a LY washing machine that is smart.
I now get notified when the wash cycle is done, this is actually useful for me as the laundry is not in the house so I can't head a buzzer or chirm. Is it essential? Probably not.
We got an air fryer recently, a Cosori brand. Its app tells me when the cook cycle is done. I named the device "PHILLIP J AIRFRY", so getting a notification makes me smile. Yeah it's silly, but sometimes you need a little frivolity in your life.
Genuinely curious.. how well does this really work, with a real fridge? All the photos I've ever seen are of a staged fridge someone clearly spent an hour or two carefully arranging, and usually between 20% and 50% capacity.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
My fridge also have an app, with usefull feature - to track when bottle of water is cooled. But. I need to login to app everytime I open this app.
And there is no way to share access to the fridge to anyone else.
I need a printer to print. Ideally at acceptable prices (I know, ink cartrigaes are like razor blades and that won't change ever). Plus points if it can be connected to a network (which is a given today). I don't have to print when not at home (why would I fax something to myself when I am not at home?).
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
know what innovation i want? a smart camera inside that can scan a label and remember the expiration date...then later on notice if i've used it or not and remind me to cook it/eat it if nearing expiration
That would be useful, however expiration dates are often printed so badly and in all kinds of locations that it seems difficult to make that work reliably. Also people wouldn’t want photos of their fridge contents being uploaded to a cloud AI all the time.
Sounds like a good idea until I think about our fridge. After the weekly shop the fridge is packed to the brim so much that the light barely makes it into some corners. How would a camera help here?
Towards the end of the week the fridge is empty and I know I need to buy the usual.
Use case dead in my head.
It would be nice if there was a standardized machine-readable format for information like expiration dates. It would be neat to be able to track inventory in the fridge by just scanning a label when you put it in then scan and mark as empty when its done.
My fridge has a door open alarm, and I wish it didn’t. I have yet to be like “wow, I’m so glad my fridge is beeping at me while I try to decide if I want chicken or taco leftovers”.
My Brother printer is one of my better purchases to be honest. I sound like a complete shill, but it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
I got a brother B+w laser printer 4 years ago, plugged it into a switch and all my macs and iPhones found it, can print to it, and it just sits there waiting for a thing to print. Still on the original toner.
Completely agree: it's one of the best purchases I've made.
Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
The best part I like is it provides a unique email address and hosts a server inside it. I can literally just email a pdf and get it printed on back-back pages, no commands, love it!
Funny how the article seems to be selling this as "not innovating". I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that it was just a social media post and not some ad-entrusted clickbait repackaging that theverge.com article while trying to one-up it with the "no innovation" claim.
Mine constantly falls into some deep sleep state where it can’t be found on the network and I have to spend ~10 minutes coaxing it out of sleep using an unknown combination of random button jabs and test prints before it can be detected by my devices again and will print.
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
Mine used to have the problem. Upgrading the firmware and using Ethernet did not fix it.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
Ran into the same issue. I think using ethernet instead of wifi was the solution (and maybe something with disabling ipv6? been a long time since I looked into it).
I have a very old (more than 10 years old) Brother HL 2130 that still works like a charm. I changed the toner only twice, I added an RPi behind it to have it network-enabled. Also one of my best purchases !
I have over time switched to Brother printers (lived through Epson and HP) because they are the least bad of the bunch. But Windows will still claim they are offline with no way to un-offline them, or print jobs will still get stuck from time to time - but this is probably just the Windows printer queue software staying exactly the same since two decades, with Microsoft giving zero fucks about it (or about anything requested by users, for that matter).
I had that issue for a while. I solved this issue by ensuring SNMP was allowed on the printer. I never had that issue again after confirming SNMP traffic worked.
there is an LTT series where they try to daily drive Linux. They complain about a lot of stuff being half-broken, unfriendly or simply not missing. But they are amazed that printing just work out of the box without all the issues they have on Windows.
I have a similar experience. Installed and connected my Brother printer 3 years ago, pop in new ink about once per year and that's it. It works and I do not need to worry about it.
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
I wish that were true for my Brother printer. I bought a basic but decent black and white laser printer of theirs several years ago, and it worked great for maybe 3 years, but then it started refusing to accept print jobs from all inputs (wifi, ethernet, USB, doesn’t matter, neither does the device sending the print job) and factory resets do nothing to help it. So now, it sits in a closet while the Canon inkjet with janky print heads that it replaced is doing print duty.
Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
This! It even gets regular firmware updates which (when I notice them) I always say yes to and it always keeps working. They even told me how to reset the low toner warning so I can replace colors when they actually run out.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
> it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
WiFi is a nice feature, but instead of buying a new printer, I setup a CUPS server on old raspberry pis and turned both my and my parents’ printers into WiFi capable ones. Now our 5+ and 15+ year old printers are just as good as any new ones today.
I bought a brother printer once largely because of the praise I see in HN, but it was a color inkjet printer. It did not work out well. At first it was great, but I don't print much and ink dried on the print head and the 'cleaning' mode used up all the ink and and basically it never worked properly again after that. I ended up tossing it for a POS canon inkjet. I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
Definitely consider the outlay for a colour laser printer. I've had one for around 5 years and it has been no trouble and is always ready to print, scan and copy.
I have the same experience - after an initial slightly tough config to get it connected to wifi (understandable given the budget price and older model), it has worked flawlessly - I will always recommend brother printers now
Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
I have an older brother that only has ethernet, but I share it via my server, so I'm good that way. Every device that needs to print can print to it no matter the OS they're running. In this day, that is amazing. I don't have to have special apps or 4 different printers. I just have the one and it just works. This is as it should be.
This is probably not a popular opinion but that is nothing special. My HP MFP M177fw laser printer has no issues at all, and if I must believe HN it's manufactured by Brother due to its well behaviour.
I own a Brother DCP7065DN that I bought nearly a decade ago, and it still works just fine. I've always used third party toner (there was a setting that needed to be toggled to enable this). I can even print and scan from my phone.
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
Readit News
My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age.
If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes, today’s cars aren’t designed to be collector items that will sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity) seems good.
Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they often bury one module under several layers of others. It requires you to disconnect and move working parts and assemblies to uncover the broken one.
Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely. The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
> but why should they be?
That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into a black and white issue.
My current car, which cannot be jumpstarted since it has a 48v battery for ignition and driving, and has dash-breaking OTA updates requiring a visit to the dealer or a proprietary 1200 usd software, and can be easy stolen by unplugging a headlight and feeding data into the common bus, would disagree.
The disposability has to be factored into the environmental impact.
I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
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To do some wiring that'll be bulletproof and last:
1. get wiring rated for under-the-hood heat (the wiring sold at auto parts stores is no good for that)
2. get crimp-on connectors
3. cut the plastic off the crimp-ons
4. put heat shrink tubing on the wire, well away from the end
5. crimp the connector on
6. solder the crimp joint using a thermostat controlled soldering iron
7. move the heat shrink tubing over the joint, and heat it with a bic cigarette lighter to shrink it on
8. voila!
P.S. Crimped connections don't last. After about a year, they'll work loose a bit from vibration, and corrosion will creep in, and you'll get a loose connection that is very frustrating to find. Soldering it prevents that from happening.
Were you fired for soldering crimp connectors?
I want to see EVs/plug-in hybrids with similar levels of simplicity wherever possible. Virtually all vehicles in the US nowadays are completely overloaded with unnecessary sensors/electronics that are ripe for failure.
>There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life.
At some point we must reach peak tech. In the Elite: Dangerous universe, there are quite a few ships you can use, but the majority of them are designs that are hundreds of years old. They are modular spaceships, of course, so they have received upgraded technology as time has gone on, but there are some quirky little ships flying around.
Compared to phones though, we'd need to get carriers to guarantee their old networks stay functional so old cellular radios will still function. Maybe when tech advances enough we CAN have a modular phone it will be less of a concern.
This is the reason I chose GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.
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I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K.
My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set.
I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.
We built a set of these: https://projectgallery.parts-express.com/speaker-projects/zd... which are a throwback to the old HiFi sets of the 70s-80s. I _really_ like the reference sound of this set. The only thing they don't really do is the sub-sonic punch that action movies require, but that's probably ok for apartment living with neighbors.
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A phone, yes. A 'modern' phone conforming to our 'modern' expectations, no.
It would have to be significantly larger, less performant, and have a worse screen for it to last even ten years.
To make it repairable you'd have to make sure individual chips and capacitors are swappable, which costs ~2x power draw compared to a SOC.
Only because the code we write is crappier
As if large corporations base their business strategy on ethically/environmentally-minded consumer demands. At most they will propagandize or triangulate their engineering approach slightly - just enough for the media cycle to turn to some other issue. Gotta make those quarterly profits stand out!
Also - if you haven't changed a printer cartridge in 12 years than you are printing very little (which is fine, but it's not a typical use-case by which to evaluate longevity).
Other than that, definitely agree :-)
Even with replaceable batteries, there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
I don't understand how with those three things, you are able to renew the blinker service subscription.
They aren't cheap, but they are also some of the best headphones I've ever personally used. I don't make any claims of being an "audiophile" or whatever, but they're like the headphone equivalent of using my Kali LP-6 monitors.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
..."
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
> https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-depl...
One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box.
I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
My dad’s big fancy Cannon photo printer has caused him nothing but grief. He swears up and down he needs to be able to print large-format full color photographs, but I have never seen him do so. What I have seen is his black cartridge dry out between uses and fail when he needs to print a form.
My wife is occasionally frustrated by our inability to print color, but I am more than happy to drive to Walgreens or my companies office to print a color item once every couple months. An inkjets ink would’ve dried between prints.
Once a new cartridge failed ("not recognized" error even though it was purchased through Staples) and the brother support person walked me through some secret squirrel reset code which I of course saved for future use. The fact I could get someone from the company on the line to help me was a rare experience for tech companies.
My only gripe with the toner cartridges is the requirement to enter a serial number to get a recycling mailing label. The serial numbers are miniscule.
No colour printing, but who cares. We do the same thing as you. When we want some photos printed (usually for distribution to family), it's no major hassle to get them printed at the local office supply.
I recently used an online photo printing service for the first time.
It was awesome.
To persuade your dad, maybe send him a print (directly from some service).
Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0% doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it has a usable web-based management interface.
So far I have the following complaints about the printer:
* After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue.
* Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the output quality is fine.
* The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized to the Canadian market.
Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go!
Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for them will likely be a Brother.
https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
One of my first tasks at my first job, like 25 years ago now, was to scrape crud off of a LaserJet 4 fuser. My boss explained that they tried using remanufactured toner cartridges to save money, but they found that these would deposit crud on the fusers. Thanks to tight budgets, we ended up scraping the crud off of the fusers using a screwdriver and only replacing the fusers if they were too far gone. They had switched back to HP cartridges before I started there, but the results of the remanufactured cartridges were still around for a few years.
We also used a product called Rubber Renue to rejuvenate the pickup rollers/pads as a bottle of that stuff (which lasted a LONG time!) was significantly less expensive than the maintenance kit that contained the new rollers.
The savings for that refill kit are significant, but I also don't want to potentially ruin my unicorn printer.
Am I being paranoid? Genuinely curious.
I have a 4050DTN for regular B&W and a 5000TN for anything wide format. These two are absolutely bulletproof, I can get cartridges for my 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage; a single cartridge got me through two degrees with zero problems. Currently on my third cartridge in almost a quarter century.
Will look into your M254DW as a colour option, per your experience with it.
Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
People were buying second-hand 1995-era Laserjets in 2010 because they were simply better than anything you could buy new. They... Just Worked.
So now I bought a color laser instead, and I couldn’t be happier.
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
Printing works just fine so.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
Consumer garbage printers are consumer garbage printers.
Do you know how else you can do that? by opening the door. We need to stop "innovating" features that absolutely no one needs, because clearly the result isn't a better product, just a messier, more complex one that is frequently over-engineered and under-supported.
The hack is to cut the RFID tag off a blank that bypasses the filter and tape it to a cheaper 3rd party filter.
The amusing thing is that its actually cheaper to replace the RFID sensor board in the fridge & use a generic filter than to use an official GE filter (re-using the cutout RFID tag from a genuine GE filter). The RFID sensor in mine died, and prevented it from dispensing water/ice. And no, I didn't choose this fridge. It came with the house when I bought it.
Don't have the link, but I once read a study analyzing the Asian market regarding electronics. The focus was on washing machines, fridges, etc. They discovered that more features, even if useless, improves sales.
So you'll have a washing machine with 50 buttons, 20 lights, 2 LED screens. People will buy that over any simpler one.
As long as we consumers behave like this, the other companies go out of business.
The worst example might be windows in the doors, so you can look into them. Except you put stuff on the door shelf and block the view or you can't really see inside all too well. Plus now you have introduce thermal issues.
How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days...
I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
Only works for a neatly organized fridge. The way my kids cram everything into the fridge makes this feature worthless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcXu4_K1tMQ
Your parents' generation probably think a number of things that you use every day are "impossibly silly".
The refrigerator camera sounds like the same kind of thing. Modestly useful feature that may well become standard-issue someday because the underlying components can be made very cheaply at scale.
I imagine a scenario in the future when all fridges have it, like all TVs now have smart features. Of course it will sold as "check fridge while you are at the grocery store" feature.
I thought there would also be electricity usage benefits but after looking at people online who have crunched the #s that might be negligible.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=segway_more_...
I'm just referring to the picture on that site of the segway.
Still not worth 1000usd to me, but more practical than "just seeing what's inside".
A small number of us might offset it a tiny bit, but it's inevitable that we turn this place into an uninhabitable mess. I do not believe at all that things will change in the future.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
Your dishwasher might not implement it, but the existence of wifi-connected start function probably means that home assistant could enable this.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
I will absolutely never enable it.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
It turns out it was a very simple Wifi ESP8622 project to wire up a reed switch + a magnetic door sensor to add such an alarm to Home Assistant.
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my understanding.
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
If you get a notification at work that your fridge door is left open, it would stay open until someone gets home and manually closes it.
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Couldn’t be happier with it
Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
Think about that before you email anything you want to keep private.
I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on the printer. Back to fax spamming...?
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
I print once a never, so the only answer I remember is to power cycle the little bastard.
And then I have to reboot my pc so windows 10 will find it.
There's probably a couple services I could restart instead, but reboot is fast enough I don't care.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
They've made the best scanner by refusing to innovate in that area as well.
:)
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
https://i.imgur.com/YtnfaAN.jpg
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Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
It's universally coupled with a lot discussion about how much of a scam inkjet printers are from any company.
> I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
.....then....buy....a Brother COLOR laser?
The levels of arrogance in "well I can just throw out more than half the advice" is breathtaking...
...and then you have the nerve to blame the community?
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Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
It never gets in my way, always works when I need it, is happy about the default drivers and costs me around 20€ in ink every two to 3 years.
It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.
The HP laser that was replaced was finicky at the best of times.
If you want one that additionally has PCL 6 support for universal compatibility, get the slightly more expensive HL-L2375DW.
I have both, no regrets.
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!