No dishwasher?
I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to grasp how an example of a bad dishwasher user interface is a barrier to all dishwashers (at least in terms of UI - clearly you may have environment reasons).
Scraping off stuck stuff, the whole process of cleaning the sink, plugging it and filling it with water, sorting dishes by category (do the glasses first! Pots last!), running out of room to put the dry dishes so dry hands and put some away, then back to washing.
Its not unpleasant, but just lots of work and the dishwasher does a decent job with 60 seconds of effort (put dry clean dishes away; rack dirty dishes, push a button). I do it before leaving for work.
Of course, now with the energy-star hoax I'm starting to regret buying a new dishwasher, but that's another discussion.
Result: clothes washers that don't wash (my washer at least has a button to override Energy Star, obliquely named Extra Rinse or Heavy Duty), dishwashers that don't get dishes clean; water heaters that deliver luke-warm water.
The goal cannot have been "Use less energy, even if it means sucking". The goal was actually "Get a sticker on your product, for marketing reasons." Thus, a hoax.
As a counter point, I have a front-load 2011 Samsung washer and dryer. I even got some money from the Big Evil Government water district for the washer and IIRC from the Big Evil Power Company for the dryer.
I am 200% satisfied with the wash and drying quality. It will take quite a bit to convince me that energy efficiency requirements are causing problems.
I highly doubt that running through 2 cycles saves energy compared to doing it right the first time.
Kinda like a dumb tech support q.: you're cleaning out the lint filter before each use, right? :)
Second: are you sure it's your dryer? Maybe the washer isn't spinning them as dry as they need to be. Try using a washer cycle that spins harder/longer. Did you replace only the dryer w/o replacing the washer.
The duct was jammed full of lint. So, no air was flowing out. The dryer had a safety interlock that disabled the heater. This is why the clothes took so long to dry. It is also why we didn't start a fire and burn down the house.
Now we clean the ducts every 18 months and the dryer works great.
The guy at the applicance store was completely sympathetic; he hears it all the time. The washers are a widespread disappointment.
So it is likely to change over time.
It's worse than that, companies save on Federal taxes by making these progressively worse appliances. Whirlpool is infamous for not just paying no taxes but getting "tax benefits" (credits they can carry forward) for 2008-10.
And my GE washer rations hot water quite fiercely. If there was enough commonality in the various model's firmware I'd sure like to join a group that reprograms them in a sane way.
Hope this helps. IIRC I saw an article on Popular Mechanics about this a few years ago and tried it and it works.
Another tip then, I don't just open it a few inches but all the way and pull out both racks. That way all the steam escapes within a few seconds and you can close up the dishwasher again. You do need a bit of ventilation but I just open my balcony door. And then, there's a few cups or glasses that have concave bottoms so they gather a bit of water. If you blow hard on them while everything is still hot, the drops will fly somewhere (it's just water), and those glasses will become fully dry thanks to the last bits of heat.
Another tip. If you wrap it up real good so no soap can get to it, you can easily cook a piece of salmon in your dishwasher. It's not a great way (cooks too hot, for too long), but it does work and that's awesome.
Another tip. If you got a compartment for a "shining agent", you can put a mix of white vinegar and ethanol in it. It works. Both of the substances easily evaporate in the heat so you won't get a vinegar smell or anything (unless you use balsamic--good luck with that). An expensive commercial shining agent might work even better, I never tried them.
Yet another tip. Maybe you have a built-in water-softener whose ion-exchanger needs recharging by pouring dishwasher salt into another compartment. The only difference between table salt and this stuff is that the granules are big so it dissolves slower. So, buy big granules table salt instead (the stuff used in table salt grinders), which is much cheaper.
Another other tip. You'll probably still do some cleaning by hand, when you need a specific utensil or something. If you use a plastic dishwasher brush, you can put that one in the dishwasher as well to clean it. I'm unsure why, but I find brushes to last a lot longer when I occasionally clean them in the dishwasher.
If you can trust your dishwasher to not leave weird residue on your stuff, you can also use this method to clean plastic hair-combs every once in a while.
A dishwasher really is a magical device. You can even put some lines of source code in the cutlery rack, and they'll come out with less bugs. True fact.
F&P is built sturdy (e.g. feel difference in the rack). Unit is built as two drawers that are operated separately, so you can start the washer with smaller loads. No multi-level racks. Has 3-4 duration-of-wash settings (up to 2+ hours), but for normal dishes I never had to use anything but fast (20 min).
They are pricey but in my opinion you should get a similar quality dishwasher or not get a dishwasher at all.
http://www.fisherpaykel.com/product/dishwashing/ Warning: website is terribly designed
My water comes from a well. Its plentiful and free. Its pointless to save a gallon, and make me hand-wash half the dishes. </rant>
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_produc...
It seems to me, you just bought a crappy appliance. Go buy a better one. That will solve your problem; inaccurate ranting about energy efficiency efforts will not.
Doesn't you dishwasher have any adjustment to set the temperature or length of the cycle? What model do you have?
My appliances are all "A" rated (EU energy label), but to get that rating for the dishwasher I have to use the "eco program", and I'd think there was something similar in the US?
There are plenty of buttons on the washer (which is a user-interface nightmare of its own). Two help a little: 'Heavy Duty' and 'Extra Rinse'. Selecting both leaves the clothes smelling slightly less of sweat and dirt. And of course when the cycle completes, it turns off to save (miniscule) power. Turning it on results in the default settings again!
Googling it, I see no hack to defeat the settings. Just a lot of talk about strange error codes and how to reset them. Sigh.
Mine (front loaded) has a pre-wash (2 hour program) or "soaking" mode for extra dirty clothes (4h), and I can select temperatures from 0-90 degrees celsius, but most clothes get clean at 40 degrees.
I had to do an obscure button trick described in the user manual to have it remember the previous settings after a completed cycle, though.
Maybe I can find a trick in the manual; thanks for that idea.
My sink is right by the kitchen window and I can look out past our rose bushes and watch assorted wildlife gambol and frolic. (Mostly bunnies and birds.) Kind of idyllic I suppose if you ignore the all-same-look suburban houses.
If there are a lot of dishes I'll wash certain things and load others into the dishwasher for later. But I sort of like washing dishes in my house.
It takes 10 minutes, start to finish, to wash and put the dishes in the rack, if I've neglected to do them for a day or two. 15 total if I towel dry them.
Yeah, the dishwasher would be more convenient, maybe, but doing it by hand is just plain faster and I don't have to multitask.
Probably cheaper, too.
On the plus side, I agree that it's kind of therapeutic to do them. :)
Estimate how much you need by hand. Filling up the sink, 5-10L? And then rinsing it all afterwards, another 5 at least. Keep in mind that a dishwasher does about 4 meals while you usually do one at a time when you do by hand.
One fix I found online was that if you have a hotter than normal water supply, the exhaust vent isn't big enough to let all of the steam out so the board gets wet.
The service guy crimped the vent wider after I told him about that one.
> - No Kindle
You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.)
> - No Facebook
There's a huge meme of 'Facebook is worthless' both on HN and on Reddit and other tech-oriented communities that I fail to grasp. There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.
For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this.
DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated.
It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive.
It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time.
Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :)
I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable.
Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files.
This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable.
My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB?
Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs.
(That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)
That's basically (a) time saved on shipping + (b) money saved since those books are in the public domain + (c) no trees were cut for me to read those books + (d) storage efficiency.
That or some sort of company library for tech docs.
It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not.
In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/
My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products.
I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways.
As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent.
I hope that made some sense.
Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting.
My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'
If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?
I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.
Sure, if I really, really, really cared about my friends, I would practice calligraphy, hand-make my own paper, and train a flock of messenger birds to deliver them.
But there's a lot I want to get done, and a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with, so if there is a decent way to do so that is more efficient than the 14th-century technology that I could use, then I'm going to use it.
If you have aesthetic objections to new-fangled things like the telegraph, the horseless carriage, and Facebook, by all means don't use 'em. But don't go pissing in other people's soup just because you don't approve of the dish they ordered.
No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...
It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.
It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.
Of course, YMMV.
Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.
For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.
It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.
Necrophiliac bestiality
Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.
As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? : "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
"My helo-elephant is the _only_ peanut powered mode of transportation with automatic mouse avoidance!" True, perhaps, but when someone asks why you need a helo-elephant it's often not informative to just say what it does with more words... they're often looking for you to justify why you need to do those things (or do those things at once).
How many times in your life have you moved house to somewhere far away? What you wrote here makes it sound like it probably wasn't very much.
My whole family uses Facebook for keeping up with people we don't live near anymore. I use it for keeping up with college friends whom I don't live near anymore (moving across the state will do that, let alone moving halfway across the world).
You might ask, why am I keeping up with college friends? The answer is: because I'm 23, so they're still a large fraction of all the friends I have.
As I recall, there was a rather frightening New York Times article once posted to HN on how even decades after college, most people still haven't made that many new friends to replace their friends from adolescence.
Scary stuff, hence: Facebook.
Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.
No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.
It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.
Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that.
Playing with some rough numbers into I get about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks.
Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.
At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.
Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.
As someone used to moving around a lot, I carry around much of my book collection and a selection of important research papers on my Kindle. It's damned useful to lug one Kindle instead of 20 kg of physical paper.
I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned way; stirring constantly so that nothing burns to the bottom of the pot. I don't use a dryer. After washing clothes (no I don't do this by hand!) I put clothes on a drying rack. I fold clothes right away after they dry.
Overall these little hacks have made me less lazy and have given me a feeling of having more energy.
What does this even mean? How is this a "hack"? Is vacuuming a "fitness hack"? How about sit-ups? Or walking?
We're at a point where in general use it is inches away from a synonym of "modify" or maybe even simply "non-default".
Which is all good, either way.
Related aside: The world seems to be making it more and more difficult not to have a smart phone (or, almost equivalently, to have a dumb phone). This sucks.
Don't know about the US, but certainly in the UK there's nothing that I've come across that comes even close to the Kindle for my usage patterns - and I'm prepared to pay that little bit extra for that level of usability.
I used to pirate all my books, but it got to the point where I realized paying $6 for the pleasure of a properly-formatted, error-free book was a better deal than pirating and ripping them.
I don't think it really beats paper materials in logistics. You're buying proprietary books. 14-day lending to other people (who may not have a Kindle) doesn't really solve that.
All that minimalism but still using an iPod?
What is real value? Why is value important? Is fun a part of value?
Your setup is quite radical in my opinion although I know that are even more extreme ones and this is not a way for most of us. Several years ago we used to memorize contacts and birthdays or keep them in a (paper) notebook but that's not an alternative for most of us nowadays.
I keep my setup as minimal as possible and I'm still frustrated by these bugs and limitations.
I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.
I guess that you still have to have the discipline not to connect wifi, but I don't think that would be too much of an issue. Disabling/enabling wifi on Android is fairly easy. This barrier, though small is probably enough to help keep you in-check.
It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.
But I agree they are fantastic, except the prices for the high end are usually ridiculous.
As some others said, I would reconsider the "No Kindle" though. This cheap device saves a lot of space for me.
Somehow I can't find this kind of machines in places like UK or Netherlands.
I forget how much mine cost, but I don't think it was more than $300.
They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.
Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always.
EOM
[1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.
I suspect you mean they've been optimized for the shareholder's benefit.
I would still agree that cost optimization has certainly done its part in trampling all over maintainability.
That said, they're definitively more expensive. We only got them because they came with the house.
"Perfected" is a tricky word. :-D
There are one button dishwashers out there.
Is that really true Ed?
Or is it possible you suffer from the same syndrome that prevented certain people from programming their VCR's? (Especially older people).
Perhaps you've noticed that even the youngest kids are really good at working the TV and the remote. Their desire to watch TV seems to increase their intelligence (and acts to prevent frustration) to the point where they are motivated to overcome any and all obstacles and can often (from my experience) do things with those remotes that older people find very difficult.
I say don't give up. In fact to me it's the opposite. Dealing with those things is actually good for your brain and keeping you young.
...but no smart phone? Blasphemous.
And no issues with it in 5 years. It replaced a dirt cheap, super simple 1980s style single-lever, single button model that failed after <1 full year of usage.
Not everything is broken, it's just cheaper and possible to make shitty things en masse. You can still pay for quality (see: Porsche reliability vs. Chevy reliability).
The inability for me to fix them is what keeps me from upgrading. As the OP noticed, everything is broken, so I expect I will have to get anything repaired. I'd prefer to save some money and do it myself.
I also haven't seen a dishwasher with 40 buttons, as claimed in the parent post, and my modern Bosch washing machine doesn't look any more complex than the Miele one my mother had 25 years ago.
Presumably the companies don't want to compete on longevity as shareholders want short term returns and so aren't interested, generally, in long term stability and good stewardship of resources.
That just leaves quality and features to compete on. Quality costs money and features are relatively cheap.
So the companies stuff in features and pretend it's a quality product all the while hoping it breaks down the second it's outside warranty ...?
Too cynical?
Sometimes it's also about focus, too.
Same with my digital camera, Microsoft Word, Excel, et cetera.
Don't master. Learn what you need to get the job done.
Twist ending: I do the dishes a lot, and I end up washing them by hand anyway. Why? Because it's tedious labor that gets my mind away from coding and technology. I consider it meditation. My wife hates that I don't use the dishwasher.
I'd like to look at the System Process List right after boot and have there be no more than 20 entries, knowing exactly what each thing does.
Apple.
I don't use any modern technology that replaces perfectly good methods with something unnecessary just because everyone else is doing it.