Category: Consumerism

Everyone in Florida prepares for the Category 5 hurricane that, generally, never shows up (e.g., Tampa hasn’t been hit badly by a hurricane for 100 years). Hardly anyone prepares for an internal water leak and quite a few of our neighbors have suffered severe home damage from, e.g., burst sink faucet supply lines. All of the houses in our neighborhood are about 23 years old and that’s apparently a great age for a massive water escape.

I debated and dithered between the Moen Flo and the Phyn Plus. The vulnerability of the Moen Flo is a mechanical impeller that reportedly fails after 1-3 years, but my friend decided that the Phyn Plus would impose more restriction on water pressure (maybe due to 3/4″ internal pipe where our supply is 1″?). Our plumber has a Flo so we decided to go with Moen (the evil Kohler empire rebrands Phyn Plus). The Phyn Plus makes some stronger claims for intelligence.

About one month after the Flo went in we had our first leak, a steadily dripping Roman tub faucet. Here’s an excerpt of the Flo’s recorded usage:

What’s remarkable about the above is that the AI Water Overlord decided that it was a perfectly normal usage pattern for a human to stand at a faucet for several days and pull out 0-0.01 gallons per minute. No alerts were issued. I did an AI support session with the app, which told me to go onto the web site and see if I could do a “MicroLeak” test there. The app wouldn’t let me do it maybe because it thought that a faucet was legitimately in use. In any case, the history showed a few MicroLeak tests passed with flying colors during an obvious and steady leak. Through all of this, the app displayed a “fat/dumb/happy” screen:

I eventually did call the Moen support number. The phone line was quickly answered by an American with no accent. He had no explanation for why the device hadn’t raised an alert, at least, and decided to escalate the question to Tier 2. Meanwhile, although I’d purchased a bundle of the device and three years of extended warranty and other support (assuming that the impeller will fail for us as it has for everyone else), the Web application showed me as not subscribed to “FloProtect” and kept trying to sell me “FloProtect”. The customer support agent confirmed that I actually WAS subscribed.

The leak was bad enough that if had happened while we were away for a few weeks it could have caused $50,000 of mold and other damage. Fortunately for us, however, it was leaking into a tub with a drain and we observed it with our own eyes.

The second fun part of this story was that I had previously asked a contractor to sort out the access panel situation for the Roman tub faucet and the shutoff valves. These were mostly tiled in so a plumber couldn’t service them. He converted two of the tiles to a magnetic mount. “Just cut the grout with a utility knife,” said the contractor, “and then maybe use a suction cup to get the tile out.” Of course, this was a huge challenge for me and I didn’t succeed without a trip to Home Depot to get a pro-grade suction cup grabber.

When I did get my unskilled paws on the 23-year-old shutoff valves I was able to turn them all the way to the right. This shut off the cold water to the tub, but the hot water still flowed out at a substantial rate and continued to drip (apparently, it was the hot water that was dripping). I torqued it down some more and finally got the pressure low enough that the dripping stopped with the faucet tap turned off. ChatGPT says that failure of old shutoff valves is common:

Most angle stops or multi-turn shutoff valves use a rubber washer or packing that seals against a brass seat. Over time, the rubber hardens, cracks, or disintegrates. When you turn the handle clockwise, the valve stem no longer presses tightly enough to fully stop flow — so you get a partial seal and reduced flow instead of a full shutoff.

So, as part of the joy of homeownership, in one day we had

• a leak detector that wouldn’t detect leaks
• an access panel that couldn’t be accessed
• a shutoff valve that wouldn’t shut off

I’ve been wanting to replace the tub filler for a couple of years but I can never wrap my head around how to find something that will fit the hole pattern that we have. Nobody has ever been able to figure out what kind of faucet this is. There is no manufacturer’s name or logo above or below the tub deck. It seems to all be high quality stuff, but there wouldn’t be any way to replace a cartridge or the trim (finish badly marred maybe by some previous owner’s cleaning attempt?) since we can’t figure out where it might have come from.

Maybe the goal should be to have it all done by National Fix a Leak Week (March 16-22, 2026 unless there is another government shutdown).

The actual leak:

Did the Flo ever shut off the water for any reason? Yes! The app had been told that we have a pool and that the pool lacks an auto-filler and it had seen multiple episodes of the pool being topped off by hose before. After I turned up the sensitivity following the failure to detect the above drip, the Flo shut off the water after about one hour/1,000 gallons. So I guess if we ever do have a leak in the house, the Flo will prevent more than 1,000 gallons from covering the floors?

Update: Mere hours after this post went live, the Tier 2 folks at Moen called me back. I learned that it does the MicroLeak test by shutting off the water in the middle of the night when, in theory, nobody would want to use it. Then it spends 1-4 minutes watching for a pressure drop that could be caused by a leak. This effect can be masked however, by traditional hot water heaters and their expansion tanks. It’s possible that the layout of our house and the expansion tank would prevent any Flo device from noticing a leak on the hot side (which I think is what we had). The Tier 2 folks watched the above video and said, however, that our Flo should have noticed that level of leakage. So they’re sending me new hardware, but with the caveat that it probably won’t fix the issue. I’m planning to test it by introducing a fake leak. At the same time, I learned that our plumber should probably have put in a new “consumer water shutoff” valve before the Flo. That would enable us to easily replace the Flo without having to go to the street shutoff.

Full post, including comments

I recently did some work in a law firm conference room where we were trying to review some PowerPoint slides that contained patent excerpts and, even after walking right up to the big flat-screen TV it was impossible to see text and figures clearly. A diverse (and therefore strong) group of female scientists of color created the first 8K television 22 years ago:

Why can’t we buy these today? Dell made a 32-inch monitor with 8K resolution and, therefore, an absurd PPI of about 275. It seems to be discontinued. Meanwhile, they continue to sell a 43-inch monitor with 4K resolution, an inadequate 100 PPI (it would be a great monitor with 6K resolution and, therefore, 160 PPI). At the typical desktop viewing distance of about two feet (24 inches), 150 PPI is supposedly near the limit of human perception.

100-inch 4K TVs now seem to be down to consumer prices ($1500). Especially if used as a digital picture frame and approached closely, it would be great to have more than the 44 PPI resolution that 4K affords. Samsung actually does make an 8K 98-inch TV… for $35,000.

I would love to know who is willing to pay 20X for the resolution bump! Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders should perhaps try to get a list of these folks and hit them with a new “fair share” tax.

In other TV news, I decided that our boys should be able to watch their beloved NFL in 4K. Our house is in the middle of an Xfinity-only ghetto and the neighborhood of 1/4-acre lots isn’t dense enough for AT&T or Hotwire/Fision to be willing to invest in burying fiber. Three cable boxes and basic cable TV are bundled into our HOA fee. I traded in two of our Xfinity cable boxes for the latest and greatest XG1v4 version (not regularly stocked at the local Xfinity store, bizarrely, considering that every customer now has a 4K television). After being plugged in for a day, and presumably after an Artificial Intelligence review of my weblog posts, both boxes locked themselves to showing only a single station: South Florida PBS. They wouldn’t respond to the channel up/down and Guide buttons on the remote. I would love to see this implemented on a national basis by President AOC! Imagine how much erroneous anti-Science thinking could be corrected if Americans were restricted to watching only PBS.

Circling back to the main question of the post… Why aren’t 8K televisions littering Costco and Best Buy? “There is no 8K content” doesn’t make sense in light of the fact that the latest smartphones can take still photos in 8K resolution (48 megapixels) and some can capture 8K video (e.g., Samsung, Google Pixel). Also, for progressives who claim to be defending the U.S. Constitution against the hated dictator, the idle screen of a TV could be a display of the sacred document (four pages handwritten or, typically, closer to 20 pages with modern typesetting). Lying down in front of the TV could be the progressive’s pit bull tearing apart a Donald Trump chew toy:

Full post, including comments

From exactly 20 years ago:

This had been powering the hard-wired network in the walls of my old Harvard Square apartment ($125/run in pre-Biden dollars, facilitated by an attic above) and failed at some point in 2025. The front of the device was showing only one link light and it wasn’t on a port to which anything was connected. I found to my delight that the GS116 was still made by Netgear(!) and assumed that the new one ($100 for unmanaged) would have the same mounting pattern and, therefore, I could slide it up underneath the desk using the same screws. Sadly, however, they changed the spacing on the mounting holes.

I think that we need to give a shout-out to the Netgear engineers circa 2000 who made a machine that could run almost forever in Internet terms.

(Why didn’t I upgrade to a 10G switch? Xfinity is the monopoly Internet provider in most of Cambridge, Maskachusetts (the officials who wisely run the world’s smartest city rejected Verizon FiOS some years ago) and one is lucky to get 200 Mbits download throughput on their “gigabit” service, which is throttled to 35 Mbits upload.)

Full post, including comments

My 9-month-old pocket-carried iPhone 16 Pro Max stopped connecting reliably to USB-C cables. This had never happened in the bad old Lightning jack days. There’s an Apple Store 15 minutes south of us in Palm Beach Gardens (home to Tiger Woods’s former plaintiff/club-wielding attacker). The “geniuses” there cleaned it out in their back room so I can’t say what tools they used.

I had thought that the EU-mandated euthanasia for Lightning was a pure boon to consumers, but maybe others have noticed the same fragility?

Here’s what ChatGPT has to say:

Yes — USB-C jacks are generally more susceptible to dirt and lint issues than Lightning, though both can fail from pocket debris. Here’s why:

1. Connector Design

• USB-C: The jack is a receptacle with 24 tiny exposed contacts along the walls. Debris can sit in the bottom of the port and prevent the plug from seating fully, or it can block some pins. Because the plug’s tongue is solid and must slide into the port, any pocket lint at the bottom tends to get compacted and cause “won’t charge” problems.
• Lightning: Apple’s Lightning jack has fewer contacts (8), located only on the plug itself. The port on the device is a simple cavity with spring contacts on the sides. Dirt buildup still happens, but there’s less opportunity for debris to block a critical central “tongue.”

2. Durability in Daily Use

• USB-C: More fragile if debris prevents a flush fit — wiggling or forcing a plug against lint can bend pins inside the port.
• Lightning: More forgiving; the plug’s flat contacts scrape against the spring pins, which can tolerate a little more obstruction.

3. Real-World Failure Patterns

• Many phone repair shops report that the number one cause of “dead” USB-C ports is lint compaction, especially in phones carried in jeans pockets. The plug simply won’t go in all the way until the port is cleaned with a pick or compressed air.
• Lightning ports can also clog, but they usually fail from mechanical wear on the spring contacts after many years, rather than lint preventing insertion.

4. Cleaning and Maintenance

• USB-C: Needs more frequent cleaning if the device is often pocket-carried. A wooden or plastic pick works best.
• Lightning: Easier to clean, less prone to deep compaction.

---

🔹 Best Practices for Cleaning a USB-C Jack

1. Power Down First

• Turn off the device completely.
• If possible, unplug the battery (for laptops) to eliminate any chance of shorting pins.

---

2. Start With Compressed Air

• Use a can of compressed air held upright.
• Give the port short, controlled bursts at different angles.
• Avoid holding the nozzle too close or using “liquid spray” mode (which can cause condensation).

---

3. Use a Non-Conductive Pick if Needed

If air alone doesn’t work:

• Use a wooden or plastic toothpick or a specialized port-cleaning tool.
• Very gently scrape or lift out compacted lint at the bottom of the port.
• Work slowly to avoid scratching or bending the pins on the side walls.

---

4. Optional: Isopropyl Alcohol for Sticky Residue

• If there’s grime (e.g., soda, lotion), lightly dampen a lint-free swab with 99% isopropyl alcohol.
• Gently wipe the inside walls.
• Let it dry completely before powering on.

---

5. What NOT to Do

• ❌ Don’t use metal objects like paperclips or needles — they can short pins or bend contacts.
• ❌ Don’t soak the port in liquid cleaner.
• ❌ Don’t blast with high-pressure air compressors (too strong, may damage).

---

🔹 Maintenance Tips

• Keep devices in a case that shields the port from pocket lint.
• Store with a dust plug (tiny rubber caps for USB-C are cheap).
• Clean ports periodically if you carry your phone in jeans pockets.

---

Should folks who do all of their charging and CarPlaying, etc. wirelessly invest 10 cents in a dust cover?

Full post, including comments