The dishwasher died yesterday. It’s a Kitchenaid that’s only six years old. The Bosch that preceded it lasted eight years, and so did the Bosch before it. According to Consumer Reports, Bosch is the most reliable brand. My definition of reliability is fifteen years, which happens to be age of the Maytag washer and dryer pair I bought for $700 on a no sales tax weekend in 2008.
Samsung is supposed to be one of the less reliable brands, but that’s what I bought today for $399 at Lowes. CA says it cleans and dries very well, and I like the handle. I’m less enamored of the door’s pulley mechanism as seen in the photo. Here comes the fourth dishwasher since starting this weblog!
MySqueezebox, the app intermediary for Logitech Media Server, is no more, taking access to TuneIn with it. Being determined to keep live radio streaming on my LMS network, I built a local collection of essential favorites to access the streams directly. It took a while to find all of the right URL’s, but they’re now working within LMS.
AKG K240 Studio headphones, made in Austria Some days, like yesterday, there is some ringing in my ears, and it’s best that I not aggravate it by wearing headphones. On certain other days, like today, there is only the usual sort of “head noise” that I suppose everybody has. I take advantage of that for listening to music, along with noticing the sonic characteristics of recordings and whatever gear I’m using. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, after turning 60 I had my hearing tested in an anechoic chamber by a PhD audiologist. I was able to correctly identify sounds that were just above the threshold of audibility.*)
My retirement activities are being determined in part by what my sinuses are doing to my ears on any given day. For all the countless hours I spent on airplanes traveling for work over many years, and then in the loud data centers at my destinations, I’m amazed I don’t have a much worse chronic case of tinnitus.
Adjusting to aging is something that those of us who last this long must do. I sit here rubbing my weak ankle that is also determining my retirement activities. It would otherwise be fine, if not for an elderly Russian man slamming into the back of my stopped car 22 years ago.
While sitting, rubbing and listening, I am worrying about someone near and dear to me who will undergo open heart surgery. We’re counting on world-class Boston heart surgeons to be as successful as a world-class Boston retina surgeon was in restoring the sight in my left eye.
* You are of course wondering what headphones were used in the test. The Beyerdynamic DT-150, that has been a standard at Abbey Road Studios for many years.
Artist — or AI? — depiction of the Odysseus lander on the Moon.
Playtex fabricated the space suits for the Apollo Moon missions. The Playtex logo wasn’t placed on the lunar landers, but the Columbia Sportswear logo is on the Odysseus lander. Columbia’s contribution to the mission was the development of a thermal fabric, based on NASA’s original space blanket from the 60’s.
My multi-function Canon printer is seventeen years old. Finding OEM ink cartridges for it is difficult and, when successful, extremely expensive. The scanner is excellent, as seen in the post from a couple of days ago, so it’s a keeper. I’m trying to decide on a brand of after-market refill cartridges to try.
I needed to print a tax document, and the Pixma MP600 said no can do, because one of the colors of ink has run out. ARGH! It was time to punt and pull out the even older, long idle Samsung ML-1710 laser printer.
I crossed my fingers that I could find a generic driver in Windows 11 that would work with a legacy printer. *Whew!* Success!
When I was doing AM radio DJ duty, I could monitor either what was going to the transmitter from the studio, or what the transmitter was putting out over the air.
If I was working alone on a weekend, I always monitored the over-the-air signal. What I heard wasn’t quite what listeners with regular AM radios heard, because the station’s AM receiver had wideband reception.
My GE Superadio III, now almost 30 years old, has wideband AM reception. It’s only useful during the day, on stations that are well separated on the dial from other stations. Here’s an example of the difference in sound quality, for all that it matters anymore. 🙁
