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spires from Carfax

things start breaking

Life, Technology — May 2020

My (three year old) iphone has been playing up for the last month or two - maybe a couple of times a week apps start crashing randomly and I have to power-cycle it. Strangely, that started happening just as Apple announced a replacement model.

For maybe six months now the power switch on my (five year old) camera has been broken, so I have to remove and reinsert the battery to turn it on. I've been quoted £180 to fix that (and I'm not even sure that includes shipping). Again, this happened just before Olympus announced the upgrade for that camera model.

And the (ten year old) monitor I have at home has been turning off - and then coming back immediately - every so often for a year or more now, but the frequency with which that happens has started increasing rapidly in the last week. [Update: the monitor is fine, the mains voltage is momentarily dropping when the fridge starts up; so I think we actually have a fridge with a defective capacitor.]

I'm hanging on with all of these.

Our (ten year old) printer is still working, but increasingly fails to print complex or image-heavy documents. It's amazing how good software bloat is at making hardware stop working. And the rotor motor in our (four year old) microwave looked like it was going to die, but seems to have recovered now, fingers crossed.

The one major kit upgrade under lockdown has been the (nine year old) tablet Helen used (inherited from my father). That was increasingly unable to install current applications and was getting really slow (I suspect simple SSD aging) and unreliable. I was also worried about one of us ending up in hospital and wanting something bigger than a phone to communicate with the world. So it's been replaced by a smaller (well-sized for Helen to hold) but state-of-the-art tablet.

We've also acquired an extra freezer unit, to help reduce shopping frequency.

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