Owen Grover, a volunteer at the museum who currently helps maintain the cluster of BBC Micro machines, said they held up well despite being more than 30 years old. The BBC Micro was "pretty robust", he said, because it was designed to be used in classrooms. This meant that refurbishing machines for use in the hands-on exhibit was usually fairly straightforward. "The main problem we need to sort out is the power supply," he said. "There are two capacitors that dry out and if we do not replace them they tend to explode and stink the place out. So we change them as a matter of course." General maintenance on the machines includes replacing keys that stick and the occasional component that fails. Thankfully, he said, there were few custom-built components in the machine so getting spares is easy. Harder-to-obtain parts are cannibalised from broken or faulty machines the museum has in its stores.
My solution is also me. I answer all robocalls (even the pre-recorded ones) with "Hello. This call is being recorded". I've quickly gone from around 3 or 4 a day to almost zero. Guess they're scared of the fines, and it looks like they share information on who's after them.
I wonder how this works when robo fax calls ring you up.
Clock times are not merely a social convention, they are a societal requirement. I don't think my boss would accept my excuse of "I changed all my clocks" when I roll into work 4 hours late.
Societal requirements are another type of social conventions, utterly arbitrary. Showing up on time to please your boss is another convention, although probably necessary if you wish to stay employed.
Does that really make it easier? Seems like it just exchanges one problem for another. You might know what "time" it is everywhere, but you don't know when they're working, sleeping, etc."
You don't know that now.
You just assume that everyone is on your schedule.
People I have known, who worked the night shift, would sometimes be tormented by acquaintances who habitually called them (and woke them up from a sound sleep) at 1100, and who would then make the feeble excuse "I forgot you were a day sleeper." One ingenious 3rd shift worker I knew dealt with the worst offenders by calling their house at 0300 and then saying "Oh, I forgot you were a night sleeper." When I worked the 3rd shift I shut off the ringer on my phone, let my answering machine handle calls, and did not answer knocks on the door.
Combustion engine driven compressors are similar to electric motor driven ones, but are more complicated and certainly have plenty of moving parts. Adsorption/absorption refrigeration systems have fewer moving parts, as they use heat as the main driving force and so don't have compressors. But they still have moving parts like pumps and fans, and they are completely dissimilar in design to mechanical compressor driven refrigeration.
My old 1975-era RV fridge had no moving parts at all, no pump, no fan. Just a propane driven pilot light which switched off & on as it heated the ammonia in a sealed system. The ammonia circulated passively. The fridge had to be kept in a more or less vertical orientation for the circulation to work properly. Too much off level, it wouldn't work. When the RV was rolling down the road, the orientation of the fridge was less important, the constant shifting back & forth of the fridge would allow the refrigerant to circulate quite well. Its main point of breakdown was the pilot light / thermocouple mechanism, kept either getting dirty or corroded, otherwise it was extremely reliable. The propane supply could be switched off and the fridge could run on "shore power" - 110VAC when the RV was plugged in. The 110VAC was simply used as a heat source, again, no pumps, no fan, electricity was solely used as a heat source.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
