I highly support your idea. 20-ish years ago my parents dishwasher quit. Being an EE and hands-on repair tech, I did all I could with it. As far as I could tell, the very strange proprietary CPU died. A new control board was like $280 (20 years ago). So, I build a simple PC parallel port interface to replace the control board, and wrote some fairly simple code to control the thing. Worked for almost 20 years until they just wanted a new dishwasher. Of course integrating an esp32, Arduino, whatever, would have been much better than the old laptop I had used, but it worked.

I absolutely agree, and I wish more people would repair things rather than tossing them and buying NEW!. Most new stuff is crap anyway. I can hear it now: how expensive repairs are. True, but maybe it could be cheaper if people kept older stuff that was so much easier to work on.

I've repaired much / many things over the years, including washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, ovens, stoves, etc. (I'm a very hands-on EE).

Your washer might just have gotten soapy water on the clutch. Or oil from the gearbox. But I'm speculating, as there are many different designs.

If you have the typical older Sears / Whirlpool design, there's an interesting clutching system with 2 solenoids that move back and forth and sometimes they go bad, or get stuck due to soap scum. Sometimes a wire breaks internally due to the constant motion.

I'll qualify an earlier statement: some newer stuff is, in some ways, easier to work on. My 60 year old dryer is build like a tank, but you have to move it out to work on it- most things are in the back. Many newer ones are all accessible from the front. But like yours, the idler rollers get stuck, belts break more often. Also heating elements (electric) seem to fail more often in newer ones. Also the many temperature sensors seem to fail frequently. Pretty cheap and easy to replace though. Often caused by clogged filters (which need to be cleaned every load).

You're reminding me of the story of Apollo 13 where they had to very carefully restart systems.

Maybe having one huge grid is a bad thing? Obviously there are benefits of sharing power generation, but if enough generators go offline, and/or the overall demand exceeds generation capacity, maybe they'd do better to break the grid into smaller chunks? (I'm asking, I don't know the various tradeoffs / economies of scale, etc.)

Or, maybe they just need a more modernized control system that can take individual substations offline so as to not overtax the main grid? Of course, deciding who gets taken offline prioritization is a different problem.

Optimistic philosopher in me wants to hope that Microsoft or whoever could finally wring out all the problems, if they kept at refining the OS or application (preferably before ever shipping it).

I also like to think, and there's plenty of evidence to support this, that an older OS, fully patched, is much more secure than the newest ones. Over the years I've seen many (most) new vulnerabilities only affect the newest OSes.

And I think therein lies the problem: "accustomed to Windows" market monopoly. It will take time, but maybe all the TFA's older computer hardware will be refitted with Linux and maybe, slowly, we can get Linux into people's hands and more and more people will become accustomed to Linux.

The problem I see: Linux is so splintered. What distro should become fairly standard? Okay, maybe many are okay for the task. But what window / desktop manager? What look and feel? For some it will matter. Some might be okay with a variety as long as they can find applications, open and save files, shared drives, etc.

Personally I'm a very longtime Linux advocate (1995 or so). I'm torn because on one hand it's great to have the openness of Linux and distros, but on the other hand, there's no standardization of packages, package managers, window managers, Xorg vs. Wayland, etc. It's like the openness is its own enemy- lack of cohesiveness. I can cope, but the masses don't want to learn a ton of specific stuff, only to have no clue when they use someone else's computer.

Add to that: I'm a systemd hater, so that cuts out most distros, but that actually makes things simpler for me- only a few to choose from. But because of that, I got tired of spending (wasting) time evaluating various distros, so I end up sticking to whatever is simple and works for me, but wouldn't be good for the masses.

Thank you, very interesting. Not a chemist, but I believe PEX is polypropylene that is even more chemically and thermally stable.

Q: are all the food containers polypropylene? Again, not a chemist, but to my layman's senses, they're made of many types of plastics. I have a pretty good sense of smell, and many new food containers, including plastic bags like "ziplock", have a pretty strong and not good chemical smell.

Oh- add to that chemical smell list: "bottled" (in plastic) water.

I understand and respect your opinions. I'm anti-competitive and won't argue, but I want to point out: not a doctor nor biologist, fairly knowledgeable though, and two things to consider: 1) we're all different. Some people may be much more sensitive to the trace chemicals, and 2) the "gut biome" can be a very delicate / fragile balance. In some people it might be very easily knocked far out of balance. One I know of is "c-diff", which we all have, but if it gets out of balance, people literally die. Another: candida. Can be very difficult to stop candida overgrowth. Those and many more produce some very harmful toxins including neuro-toxins.

Or do like me and be your own mechanic.

Thanks. But I think my point stands: the jackboot thugs won't have access to my data unless and until a judge signs a warrant for it. I'm in the US. Sorry to hear that UK is ahead of us in becoming a full-on police state.

What if I encrypt something, using my own key, and upload that to Apple's cloud? IE, not using built-in Apple encryption, but maybe even just 7-zip and a 4096 bit key? I don't know, curious what others think.

I'm guessing you're referring to radon "daughters" (or sometimes "progeny").

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09047-2/figures/1/

Yeah, if it's easy enough, tough to beat free.

I use an IP blocker and so far so good. Won't stop the Verizon FIOS link from getting clobbered, but it's got a lot of bandwidth. At that point it'll just choke the gateway.

Yes, agreed. And as I posted above, an end user doesn't even need to care about LAMP, they just need web and maybe email hosting, or some kind of webform for messaging. So, minimal admin, cpanel, wordpress, similar.

I'm actually admin for such a thing: simple websites, wordpress, looked into a few other specialty back-end things but potential customers vanished. It's tiny, has shrunk over the years. Owner has no interest in the thing. Many huge players, considerations, etc.

It may be me, but I'm starting to see a worsening blurring of the word "cloud".

To me "cloud" is Amazon "buckets", or whatever others call it. A VM that someone has to admin, and can run whatever the thing supports.

For small local businesses, they just need some kind of web and maybe email hosting. Would you necessarily call that "cloud"? (like a godaddy or wordpress or some other cpanel or other simple admin thing)

Look into "CyberKnife" and other similar approaches to focusing radiation into a small target area.