We recently had to toss a pair of Wusthof shears that had gone ridiculously dull. I tried sharpening them with a simple honing steel and it didn’t help. The typical commercial sharpening service won’t handle scissors. I don’t have a sharpening stone. (Maybe some of you all know whether it is practical to sharpen shears like the above? If so, what’s the technique and equipment required?) Despite the fancy German brand name, I think that these were #FakeWusthof made-in-China and cheap ($25 on the Web right now).
I discovered via some Amazon order research that our still-sharp Shun shears celebrated their 9th anniversary of domestic abuse (put in dishwasher for sterilization after cutting meat, for example). They’ve never been sharpened and are still highly effective. The screwdriver blades on the back of the handles are a fun idea, but we have never used them.
I’m not sure if there is a reasonable option for America First enthusiasts. Is there any U.S. company that can compete with the Japanese, Swiss (Kuhn Rikon), or Germans (not the fake Germans in China who made our recently tossed “Wusthof” shears) in standard knives and scissors?
the Wirecutter (NYT) absurdly purports to rate kitchen shears, doesn’t include the Shun, and says a $15 Chinese-made OXO is the best (based on a 2017 review, which when I tried to find it Google showed me the NYT/Wirecutter article “The Best Pubic Hair Trimmer”)
Update: I bought the more expensive Shun shears and they’re heavier. It’s unclear if they’re better but at least now we have a second pair to use if the first is being sterilized in the multi-hour dishwasher (thanks, regulation!).
For Democrat friends, the perfect Christmas gift: audiobook of One Way Back, read by the author Christine Blasey Ford (see New version of the Boeing 787 announced: “the Christine Blasey Ford Edition 787, for which the launch customer will be United Airlines. The 787 CBFE is equipped with a fainting couch section for Premier 1K members who are terrified of flying”). Part of the Amazon description:
Her words and courage on that day provided some of the most credible and unforgettable testimony our country has ever witnessed. … This is the real story behind the headlines and the soundbites, a complex, compelling memoir of a scientist, a surfer, a mother, a patriot and an unlikely whistleblower. Ford’s experience shows that when one person steps forward to speak truth to power, she adds to a collective whole, causing “a ripple that might one day become a wave.”
Facebook AI has seen me post enthusiastically over the years about Disney World and also about Japanese gardens in various states and countries. It presents me with this advertisement for what would be an original Thomas Kinkade if Thomas Kinkade hadn’t died in 2012 at age 54 (there was a great profile of him in New Yorker in 2001 before the magazine transitioned to an all-anti-Republican format):
It’s about $780 in 24×36″ size with a rose-colored frame, which I think looks better than the above:
Considering that $780 is on track to be the price of a Diet Coke soon enough, should we be collecting this limited edition of what would have been Kinkade’s original work?
For religious friends, how about these prayer and votive candles from Etsy?
For elite friends with massive fingerprint-magnet Sub-Zero refrigerators… How about this 18×24″ print to go in the middle of a 36-inch fridge or freezer door?
Here’s one for Brendan Carr, soon to be in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (nytimes)… a regulation that requires call centers to have caller ID so that they don’t hassle Americans with “What is your phone number?” questions. As far as I can tell, customer “service” call centers are the only users of the American telephone system that don’t have caller ID, thus leading to the annoying phenomenon of having to provide one’s phone number, the agent having to type it in, etc.
The worst offender in this regard seems to be General Electric. They have an automated system that has called me about 10 times regarding our fancy Monogram gas range. One of the things that we like about it is that LED rings behind each burner control knob light up to show that a burner is on. Or at least they did until the entire system failed. GE sent out a tech who, predictably, decided that parts were required. GE then began shipping out parts in dribs and drabs. After each shipment, the company’s automated system would tell me to schedule a return visit. Then I would press some buttons to talk to a human who would, after asking for my phone number (keep in mind that GE had actually placed the call and, apparently, no longer had the phone number that it had used) say, “We can’t schedule service until the parts are delivered“.
(I did ask “Why is your system programmed to make calls when a part is shipped and ask me to schedule with a live agent if you can’t schedule anything until after a part is delivered?” and, of course, the agents didn’t agree with me that there was anything suboptimal about GE’s system.)
I recognize that this would seem to be at odds with my general support for smaller government, but telecom is already heavily regulated, purportedly for our benefit.
Separately, I would love to know how roughly a dozen parts are required to fix what, in my humble engineer’s brain, must be attributable to the failure of a single component (none of the six burner controls has a working backlight and I think we have a full set of parts for each of the burner knobs, but I have to believe that the root cause is upstream from the knobs).
We live in the glorious age of AI. Here in our concrete block hurricane-resistant fortress we have a Ring camera in the back of the garage pointed at the door. It’s called “Garage” in the Ring app. Why isn’t it smart enough to wake up once every 30 minutes and, if appropriate, notify us that the garage door has been left open for half an hour? That doesn’t seem like a huge ask of our future robot overlords.
There’s an “AI” company here in Palm Beach County called Levatas that claims to be able to do stuff like this. Amazon/Ring presumably also has plenty of smart programmers. They claim to have delivered AI recently. Why haven’t they done the basics?
As the righteous in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, California, and Maskachusetts observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day and deplore the time when a hated Jew inflicted a Nakba on the entirely peaceful Native Americans, let’s look at the 21st century way to conquer a big part of the world.
From Microsoft, back in June:
I think this is because my desktop computer was running a CPU/chipset/motherboard configuration from 2015 that lacks some modern security features, such as a Trusted Platform Module.
I wonder if a lot of people won’t upgrade despite Microsoft’s threats. After all, improvements in computer hardware have slowed to a crawl (see GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?) in which we learn that the 2015 CPU had reasonable performance by 2022 standards. With Microsoft not bothering to continue with security updates and nearly every PC connected to the Internet, will a smart 10-year-old be able to take over a substantial fraction of the world’s computers? This is not an open-source computer program that folks other than Microsoft can debug and patch.
Circling back to Indigenous Peoples’ Day… remember that immigration wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to Native Americans, but Science proves that immigration will be the best thing that has ever happened to Native-Born Americans.
A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool:
By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a machine with a 5.2 cu. ft. drum.
It would seem obvious to build a front load washing machine with the same 27×27″ footprint, but nobody seems to do that. One of Whirlpool’s smaller front loaders is advertised as “closet-depth” and, in fact, is about 31.5″ deep. Their bigger front loaders are over 33 inches deep with the door closed. If you scale down to a “compact” front loader, as seen in Europe, the footprint is 24×24″ and capacity drops to just 1.9 cu. ft.
What’s the engineering challenge to making a front loading washer that exactly fits the footprint of a legacy washing machine and, thus, fits into an older American house as it was originally designed?
(Our house is an example of one in which 27-inch depth is the limit. The laundry room connects the family room/kitchen to the garage. A machine deeper than 27 inches will stick out beyond the door frame (top of the figure below) and obstruct access into the garage:
In fact, the only way to have 27-inch deep machines not poke into the hallway is to dig into the 4-inch drywall behind the machines, e.g., to make water and gas connections. Everything must be perfectly positioned for the machines to sit flush on the baseboard.
In other fun appliance news, an architect who redesigned our Harvard Square apartment’s kitchen notched out cabinets to precisely fit a particular LG fridge that we bought back in 2013. The fridge has French doors, which introduces another point of failure beyond a conventional side-by-side fridge or bottom-freezer fridge. The “mullion door” or “flapper door” in the middle of the French doors had a failed spring. I thought about buying a replacement, but was concerned that the notches wouldn’t work for the new fridge and also I couldn’t find any current fridges that had stainless steel sides as the old one did. Thus, it was time to think about repairing the minor problem with the 11-year-old fridge.
I was renting it out on AirBnB, couldn’t get up to Cambridge to fix it myself, and didn’t want to hassle my friend from MIT who is a mechanical genius but has his own 130-year-old 3-story wooden house to maintain. I called LG service and they offered a fixed $399 flat-rate repair fee. I gave them the model and serial number in advance and told them exactly what the problem was and what part was needed. The technician came out to the apartment, diagnosed the problem as the flapper door, and then said that no replacement part was available (the LG Parts web site showed a compatible replacement and eBay had the exact part number available from an appliance store that apparently had a lot of old stock). While monkeying with the fridge, he managed to short out the control board so the fridge went from “tough to close” to “completely dead.” The flapper door actually has an electrical connection to the control system in order to run a heater that prevents condensation from forming on the door. I then asked a series of people who answered LG’s 800 number with thick Indian accents whether I could perhaps get a refund of the $399 repair fee since they themselves acknowledged that they hadn’t repaired anything. They never simply refused to refund the money, but always said that it would be considered by some other group and that someone would get back to me. Of course, nobody ever did get back to me and LG never did issue any refund.
A friend was one of the first to order and receive an Apple Vision Pro headset. He’s had it for about six months. He’s a great programmer and a sophisticated user of technology. I asked him what he’s done with the $3500 device. “I use it to watch streaming movies,” he responded. Does it have a full two hours of battery life? “I don’t know,” he said, “because I always use it plugged in.”
AR is the technology of the future and always will be? Apple claims to be the company that makes everything useful. (They’re bringing us AI next, which is upsetting when you reflect on the fact that the iPhone isn’t smart enough to correctly oriented a picture of an English-language museum sign nor can it fill out an online shopping form with the owner’s name and address, despite having seen hundreds of similar forms that all get filled in with the same info.)
Readers: Have you figured out what to do with one of these?
One possibility: ForeFlight Voyager, a free “playground for aviation enthusiasts” from the flight planning nerds who were acquired by Boeing. It includes real-time traffic. This was purportedly being demoed in the Boeing pavilion at Oshkosh, but I didn’t see anyone with the headset on. The ForeFlight folks were happy to talk about it, but didn’t offer to demonstrate it. I wonder if it is too cumbersome to get a new user into and out of a Vision Pro. Or maybe people throw up as soon as they are in the VR world?
During coronapanic I decided to save our beloved planet by paying $71,533 for a Tesla Solar Roof to sit on top of our house in Maskachusetts and provide backup power for the week or so per year that we would typically lose power. About six months later, Tesla told me that the price would be changed to $84,137 (see Tesla Solar Roof (the price is not the price)) and about six months after that they offered to install the roof for $71,533 as originally contemplated (by which point we had sold the house and escaped to the Florida Free State).
In retrospect, considering the raging changes in price that were happening in 2021 (not to be confused with “inflation”, which is a figment of conservatives’ imaginations), I’m surprised that the price bump was so small.
Apparently, there was a class action lawsuit around this debacle. Without having taken any action or signing up for anything, just this month I received a check for $100 for my role in the small drama. What did the lawyers get? $1.5 million.
I actually wish that Tesla would make a Spanish barrel tile version of its roof and then we could re-roof in Florida with their product. I’m not sure that it would be worth paying for their batteries, though, given that we lose power only for a few minutes per year. Maybe the batteries would be great during a once-every-20-years major hurricane, but $20,000 for batteries could buy a lot of hotel nights in Orlando.
(Solar gear on top of a Florida roof is an idea that frightens roofing professionals.)
Spend the $100 on a trip to Titusville, Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch? Or how about one of these EMF-blocking hats so that I can stop lining my own hats with aluminum foil (not a “tin foil” hat liner because those are for the paranoid)? Facebook’s AI correctly discerned that I would be a likely customer for this product, named after pioneering Scientist Michelle Faraday (maybe a “no brain fog” hat should actually be named “the Dr. Jill Biden, Ed. D. hat”?):
If I’m going to hold an EU passport I should probably learn something about cheese and wine. While in Portugal on this recent trip, I decided to try to put the cheeses in “10 Portuguese cheeses you must try” in front of an expert panel (includes two tasters aged 10 and under).
For Serra da Estrela, we got what the lady at the Continente hypermarket across from Gare do Oriente, the main train and bus station next to the public aquarium said was equivalent: Casa Matias SEIA‘s Quejinho de Ovelha (the same company also makes the cheese identified as “Serra da Estrela”; I think the nomenclature has to do with the precise fields in which the sheep graze). Kids rated this cheese “excellent”. Azeitão cheese is a more challenging flavor, but nonetheless rated “amazing” by the 10-year-old panelist.
El Corte Inglés is where a banker told me to shop for cheese. When I asked for Rabaçal, the ladies gave me the following:
I’m not sure that this is Rabaçal (might not even be the right milks), but it was a huge hit with the kids. It’s smooth and unchallenging. The opposite might be said of São Jorge, which was available aged 3 months, 4 months, 7 months, and 12 months. The cheese section lady recommended 4 months and that was rather sharp/sour/bitter.
The Queijo de Nisa, from a town to the east of Lisbon, is sharper and not as creamy as Quejinho de Ovelha. Nobody on our tasting panel liked it as much as the Serra da Estrela. Evora cheese: rejected by all (too sharp). Terrincho was rejected by the young tasters.
Here’s a cheese that isn’t on the “10 must try” list, but we loved it: Ovelha Amanteigado (“buttery soft sheep’s milk”?) from Serra Gerês. It was kept more or less at room temperature in a mini-market in the mountains near Portugal’s only national park. The consistency was more like a dip than a cheese. Everyone on our panel loved it. The web site referenced in the label below didn’t have any further information. It seems unlikely that this will show up at Publix or Whole Foods.
Here’s another cheese from the same area that we enjoyed at a restaurant, this time from cow milk:
And, to complete the circle, Serra Gerês goat cheese (excellent):
An expensive cheese at Pingo Doce that I didn’t love was Quinta do Olival. It’s a “cured” goat’s milk cheese that has won a lot of awards, but it tastes too smoky/sour (I don’t think it is actually smoked). The family was more positive regarding this one.
If you’re desperate and need some cheese that can be found in even the humblest of markets, Terra Nostra (from the Azores) proved mild and acceptable to the kids:
How about some wine to go with the cheese? Daily drinking in Portugal need not be costly. The typical bottle of wine for sale in a supermarket seemed to be 3-5 euros. We found 5 liters (6.7 bottles’ worth) in a name-brand box for 8 euros at a small town fruit market. If you’ll go through more than 5 liters between supermarket trips, here’s 10 liters for $11 (supermarket in Terras de Bouro, a mountain town named after the Buri people). That’s 13 bottles of wine for less than $1/bottle.
Garrafeira Estado d’Alma, the wine shop around the corner from our Lisbon hotel, recommended a 19-euro Syrah-based wine from south of Lisbon (i.e., not from the famous Douro region; apparently this entire Alentejano region produces excellent Tuscan-style wines):
I served it to a discriminating law firm partner and he pronounced it excellent. The wine merchant also said that Madeira wine lasts longer, once the bottle is open, than Port. If immigration hasn’t made the average European rich, it certainly seems to have helped the elite. I asked if it wasn’t damaging to leave a 6,800 euro bottle of Champagne in an upright position. Portugal is the world’s leading producer of cork and shouldn’t he realize that the cork could dry out and start letting air into the bottle? “You’re right,” he said, “but we’ll sell the bottle within about two weeks so it doesn’t matter.”
He was kind enough to take us (including the 8-year-old member of the panel) to the basement to see the 10,000 euro bottles:
After trying about 10 more wines during the three-week trip, I concluded that I prefer Alentejo wine to Douro wine. So does IKEA, apparently because that’s what they serve at their Michelin-starred cafe in Braga:
A mid-priced Alentejo wine that I found in Continente and enjoyed is Pêra Doce. Their “premium” wine costs about $5 in Portugal and was rated 91 points in Wine Enthusiast (I found this out after tasting their $15 “special edition” wine, which was marked down to $6, so the rating did not affect my opinion).
Even allowing for the government-limited market for imported cheese here in the Land of the Free Market (TM), I can’t figure out why Portuguese cheeses and wines aren’t widely available in the U.S. I’m guessing that there is too much fragmentation. Serra Gerês cheese is good enough to compete in the American market, but probably there isn’t enough made to supply even one U.S. state. Therefore, it would be tough to get a return on investment from educating American consumers about these superb cheeses. Murray’s in NYC carries just two Portuguese cheeses, neither of which I noticed for sale in Portugal:
(the prices have to be at least 4X what these cheeses cost in the domestic market)
I guess we also do have to factor in the import barriers imposed by our government at the behest of the dairy industry (we would call them “cronies” if we were talking about a Third World country). Given these barriers maybe it makes sense to import only those cheese with which American consumers are already familiar and willing to pay a big premium.
We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:
Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!
Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?
Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:
this got talked about a lot when I worked on google maps.
I would personally love this feature, and it’s technically feasible.
here’s why I fought it loudly every time it came up
(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)
WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.
Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):
(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)
I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.
