it's almost like western society, particularly in the united states, has spent the last 70 years intentionally stripping away community and easy access to a third place.
I have a Symmetricom ExacTime ET6000 that had a Motorola Oncore M12+ mounted to an ACE-III interposer made by Synergy systems that hadn't suffered from a rollover yet, but instead had a 3 month leap second induced offset. I went the (mildly easier) route with a Furuno GT-8736D, then modifying the interposer with a level shifter for the serial lines as the ET6000 uses 5v TTL logic, and the Furuno chipset is only rated for 3.6v maximum (and so was the M12+, for that matter!).
it's likely not the dimmer's fault; phase angle triac dimmers were designed when resistive loads (incandescent light bulbs) were king. except for the super-low-wattage-per-lumen type, most LED light bulbs I run across these days are based capacitive dropper power supplies, which are inductive by nature (hence their atrocious power factor). combining that kind of load with phase-angle dimming is a recipe for crazy harmonics many orders of magnitude higher than the 60Hz base frequency.
I assume that design based on something like TPS92411 actually ends up being cheaper and more reliable than various series capacitor constructions, while being dimmable just fine and without spewing EMI. So it is just question of the OEMs having one 10 year old design and still using it.
Use something like an Aube RC840T-240; it generates an isolated 24vac supply and has an isolated normally-open 24vac input for closing the contactor. Using anything else is liable to cause life-threatening spiciness if something goes wrong.
I use one for my addition's electric baseboard heat, and control it with a standard dry contact thermostat, but you could easily use a mosfet or relay controlled by an ESP32 or similar instead.
I had a similar experience with a common, cheap medication, where my insurance started denying the prescription out of the blue. it took several weeks of back and forth with my doctor, and then a lengthy amount of time on hold with the insurance, company where the exasperated pharmacist and I were eventually told that only 15, 24, and 90 day in person pickup supplies were now covered.
the Sheevaplug, Guruplug, and Dreamplug are what really got me into embedded computing and linux. I still have my Sheevaplug in storage, and a Dreamplug in service as my internal DNS server. the Marvell Kirkwood SoCs they were based on were quite long lived, eventually being rebranded as lower-end Armada chipsets.
P.S. if anyone wants to tinker with that ecosystem, there's still quite a number of people dedicated to packaging up Debian for them, and if you're okay with some soldering to get UART access, you can get a brand new $18 Dell Kace M300 to try out. in a lot of ways, I still prefer them to any newer single-board computers, despite my pretty significant collection at this point.
That would, unfortunately, require actual infrastructure investment into trackage and electrification, and the nationalization of all the Class I freight companies. I'm not going to hold my breath.
the Tipo Quattro platform deal with Fiat, Lancia, and Alfa Romeo had no GM involvement and it was finalized over five years before GM ever bought controlling interest in SAAB-Scania.
