At home I'm very proud of my triple monitor setup and second iteration of my hand assembled computer. The setup is built with ease of use in mind. To lazily chat with friends, unwind, and keep up with bleeding edge news.
When I leave my little tech temple, my mobile computer of choice is a flip phone. A substitute calculator and unit converter.
With no GPS it's great reading the land and people in it. Very occasionally I'll cheat and bum around in front of a cafe and use the tablet to find a spot but most plans are made at home on a printed map.
As stated in other articles here, it's great not having a slab fight for your attention with bleeps and red notifications while out on adventure.
TL;DR / Long story short: Be the friend at the restaurant conversing, not on the glass slab.
At my job, we extruded plastic sheets, so we had dies which were 84 inches wide with an opening of 0.020 inches. It's quite a challenge to get the plastic to spread evenly from the barrel opening all across that width like a river delta. There are two flexible lips inside, you can supply more heat to individual die zones to make it meltier, and at the very edges you stretch the plastic out a little so that several inches of the die end up contributing to one inch of the finished sheet.
The other option that is commonly used is using a mold with an internal manifold to heat the plastic, which is injected through heated tips or pneumatic/hydraulic valve gates. This shortens the space on the part such that the flow length of the plastic will be sufficient to fill the part, where with a single gate, it may not due to the part thickness and thermodynamic freeze.
That would make sense, instead of breaking the cog-setup, the little plastic part breaks off and saves the motor. Thank you for the explanation, one conspiracy theory less!
My favourite "smart" dumb device has got to be single sensor electronics. The automatic hallway light to be exact. It's a piece of plastic with a photocell and a LED.
So long as it has power (but a battery backup would be simple enough) it never fails to turn on "if this, then that". Daylight savings, changing seasons, solar eclipse.
It's never a device I have to think about.
And at home depot they sell $80 IoT light bulbs demanding a property app.
What has worked out well for me is a flip phone. The modern ones have all the offline smartphone features you need to get by. Call, text, alarms, calculator, camera. I have found it to be rugged, inexpensive, and one week battery life is a great selling point.
And when I get home to my computer, the refreshing relaxation of the internet is great.
Smartphones making people dumb, dumb phones making people sane.
SpaceX rockets don't have the most "advanced" engines, but they sure are cost-effective. Tesla's done some pretty good things with 18650 cells and cars, and now they're hitting some serious volume. I'm surprised that that cell works for utility-scale deployments, but...
