Try buying a decent toaster, I've found exactly the same. $20, $30, and $50 options all using the same internal mechanism with a different style of shell and minor changes to the control circuit, or $200-$1k models that are mostly marketed for commercial kitchens/hospitality use. Not a whole lot in between.
I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Nineteenth century kit wouldn't really be all that difficult to replicate with the materials available in the early middle ages. Even the precision stuff of the time, you can make a surface plate just by scraping an iron sheet. With a surface plate you can make everything else you need. The hard part would be higher quality metallurgy, but it's certainly doable, the Chinese were making cast iron as early as 5th century BCE. Even steel was possible with even Bronze Age equipment.
The funny thing is that the laser printer is much better for people who print once a week or less, because toner doesn't dry up and clog the printer. But for the price/quality it's hard to justify buying a new one.
But you do need to keep it and use it over a long period of time to justify the initial outlay. The cheap inkjet may very well be a better deal for most people even if they have to junk it every few years (especially now that the need to print paper copies keeps diminishing).
Realistically, how many people need and really expect high quality color prints? I’m sure the tech has improved marginally, but I was always disappointed as a kid with inkjet photo prints compared to professional prints. Most people would be better off having professional prints made rather than owning inkjet, very rarely do other documents require high quality color.
how many people need a printer, period? i haven't needed one for decades. if i need to print something i go to a print shop.
my mother (80yrs old) recently bought a printer because she was printing out poems and stories she had written over the years. that made sense for her, but i think that is going to be the exception, unless you live in a suburb or outside a city/village where a print shop is far away.
My kid had like $500 worth for printing available at his college and literally didn't use any of it. That said, during covid, I printed a ton of stuff for the kids for school. And it's nice to have one for crafty projects and printing forms for work and the government that can't yet be done online.
I take photocopies of kid's activity book pages for my kids to draw on so they're more than one-time-use.
When I know I'm going to cook something big and messy I like printing off the recipe first and treat it as disposable. Same goes for when I'm about to go wrench on the car or motorcycle, having all the torque specs and diagrams and what not printed and handy even with greasy grimy hands is nice.
Then in the end I'll still want some kind of scanner around for those things I get that aren't digital yet. Phone "scanning" apps just aren't as good of quality IMO.
But yeah, outside of these things if I want a high-quality print I just print online. Lots of places around me can take print jobs online and have common stuff all ready in an hour or so.
This is exactly what I do. There is a great shop a few minutes away and I can order fairly low volumes at great quality. Anything worth printing is worth getting done on their printer which is better quality and the the volume I print likely cheaper overall.
I went to a Brother color laser printer for home and send out high quality color prints to companies with high quality commercial photo grade or print grade equipment
Not sure how it is in Ottawa but here in the US Midwest distances are frequently measured in units of time. I might say I'm an hour from Green Bay or two hours from Madison, though I don't remember the actual mileage. That said, it usually only applies to distances over 20 minutes (between 7 and 25 miles, depending on speed limits).
That practice is pretty widespread in Canada. Ever since metrification nobody is really sure whether the person they're talking to is more comfortable with miles or kilometres. So they just use time.
Some time in the mid-2000s my dad showed me a website he'd found called Screams of Wheat which purported to show a pitched-down video of ultrasonic wheat screaming while being harvested. I always thought it was just a joke to troll vegans, but maybe there's a grain of truth to it?
Interesting, in cars the terms "generator" and "alternator" are used to refer to a DC device (dynamo?) and an AC device, respectively. Cars used DC generators for their electricity until the 60s/early 70s (depending on make/model) when they started using an AC alternator with a rectifier to make a constant 14VDC.
Right, I feel like between that and seeing it a lot over remote desktop I've never really appreciated the quality of the original. I always liked the wallpaper set from the windows 9x era because they were designed to look good in low quality 256-color modes.
