Probably just paranoid, but I can’t fall asleep if I leave my devices charging. There’s a nagging fear of the battery going up in flames while I’m asleep.

My monitor had a bright blue power LED smack in the middle of the lower bezel. I took it apart on day one and brutally ripped out the LED, only then did I ever connect it to my computer.

Maybe a bit niche, but in higher level math courses, instructional material often seems out-of-touch, written by professionals for professionals. Inconsistent notation between authors and unexplained symbols in equations are also royal pains in the ass.

Probably eye-ther, but eee-ther on random occasion

Very much the opposite, but probably because what I ended up doing follows their image of success. Become highly educated in a technical field and then make a decent amount of money (on paper, in this economy). Not sure I would have the same approval if I wanted to become, say, a graphic designer.

Lovely day of volunteering. Not sure how to tackle the mountain of work waiting for me on Monday though.

I have a mug that’s twice the volume of a condensed soup can. I’ll put an arbitrary amount of water in the electric kettle, dump the contents of one can into the mug and then fill the rest with the boiling water. Result is soup at the perfect temperature for consumption. Makes me feel better than having instant ramen when I’m lazy imo.

Electric kettles with plastic parts that touch boiling water, particularly the removable mesh thing. It’s like a microplastic infuser that’s good for about 300 liters, after which it falls apart. Then the kettle doesn’t know when to stop automatically and you can’t buy a replacement mesh piece because they discontinued that model of kettle last year.

I now have a kettle that doesn’t have the funny mesh, but if you don’t open the lid while pouring, the scalding hot water just runs down the side.

The old fridge had condenser coils out in the open and you’d just dust them. The new fridge has them under the unit and I can see quite a bit of dust accumulating on them. But I’ve no clue how to clean them without tipping the entire fridge over.

Also, the newfangled rice cookers. The nonstick coating in them chips off much easier than in regular pots and pans. Then there’s 3 or so gaskets, one of which is impossible to remove without breaking the lid. I really hate cleaning rubber gaskets, especially if there’s a perfectly fine way to design something without them.

I’ve also wondered about this too. In my opinion, at least several layers, but not more than 25. No good reason, it just feels right to me.

Of all the e-waste components I’ve tried out, the one used part that should not give you any trouble is the CPU. Except in the case of 13/14th gen Intel CPUs degrading, the CPU should be either dead or alive with no surprises.

An Intel Atom notebook with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage acquired for $200 on Black Friday. Despite many attempts to optimize it, it was practically unusable 4 years in. If I had the foresight to buy a used ThinkPad for the same price instead, it could have been my daily driver to this day.

Also a faux leather wallet. The “leather” started turning to goo and powder about a year in. Some of my cards and my wallet photo still have some of those decayed fake leather bits stuck on the edges or rubbed in.

Side-loaded apps could be anything, ad-free or ad-infested. It costs money to publish an app to Apple’s App Store, even if the app is going to be free. For commercial developers, that’s an incentive to monetize and recuperate the $99/year Apple charges. For open source developers, that’s a barrier to entry.

On the Android side, free and ad-free apps are correlated with being open source. Many open source developers are philosophically against publishing on Google’s Play Store, or at least know that their main audience does not want to sign up for a Google account to download it from the Play Store. But that’s not saying that the Play Store is inherently superior to Apple’s App Store. It just happens to overlap with open source apps that are guaranteed to be free and ad-free, given the lower barrier to entry (one-time $25 fee).

This is more an exception than the rule so far, but one final case is an open-source developer wants to publish their perfectly safe and legitimate app, but is rejected. This happened to Organic Maps on the Play Store.

Contrast these app stores with F-Droid, where users do not need to sign up for an account and developers can publish for free without handing over personally identifiable information. However, it relies on a form of sideloading that is not possible on iOS devices, at least outside of the EU.

If you still are using it, try this:

• Disable RAM Plus under Battery and device care > Memory
• Reduce transparency and blur under Accessibility > visibility enhancements
• Disable the home screen media page, if it’s there
• Use 3-button navigation instead of gestures

Got just a bit more performance out of a friend’s A03s that way.

My workplace has an e-waste bin we can rummage through and I’ve scavenged many an upgrade for my machines. If it weren’t for that, I’m not sure I would have the same confidence troubleshooting used parts. Making a couple of assumptions here, but upgrading with used parts one by one would be a good starting point. I’ve had good luck returning eBay items that were described as working but were in fact defective.

You had me in the first part, but that last paragraph reeks of Apple fanboyism.

Anyway, I also had an iPad 2 back in the day and it was a pretty solid machine coming from media players and digital photo frames of yore. Also an amazing mobile gaming experience compared to the cramped iPod touch or iPhone of the time. But terribly frustrating if you wanted anything outside the walled garden, even something as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash support.

What plumbercraic says though is absolutely the case today. Some of my family use Apple devices. Mind-blowing what ad- and subscription-infested apps they endure on the regular. Sometimes they’ll ask me to recommend friendlier apps and I really wish iOS had its F-Droid equivalent. Yes, the Play Store also has terrible apps, but when only the Apple App Store exists, I have to spend time hunting for the one good app, which could just as well enshittify the next year.

There’s probably worse, but off the top of my head, a Sandisk Curzer Fit USB 3.0 drive. It would overheat about 15 seconds into a file transfer and throttle to well below USB 2.0 speeds, perhaps even USB 1.1. I tried to alleviate the issue by using it through a USB 2.0 extender (thereby ruining its entire appeal to compactness), but it developed bad sectors soon enough. It was satisfying smashing it to bits with a hammer though.

Happened to me with a laptop case. Made me nauseous and suspicious of anything made from neoprene since.

It’s probably habit, but it just feels somehow wrong to blow my nose without a piece of paper snugly against my nostrils. Like trying to poop without being seated on a toilet bowl.

In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There’s probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there’s varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there’s at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don’t they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?

Perhaps a design where both mating surfaces are plastic with metal for the rest of the body? A lot of vacuum insulated bottles have plastic bonded to metal in the cap, they just have to repeat that with the bottle itself