It’s hard to top the inkjet printers I’ve owned. I still can’t believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.
And they’re making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time… Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn’t needed a new toner cartridge.
I bought my parents a laser printer after years of them being incredibly frustrated by inkjets. I got them the same model as me, as well as a spare toner cartridge.
I’m still on my original toner cartridge, and I’ve had it for probably six years or so.
My parents are in their late 40’s and early 50’s. I think I might have accidentally gotten them a lifetime supply of printing.
I got my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
Considering the volume businesses need weekly vs a private household I wonder why the very same cartridge lasts for >5 years
If you’ve owned more than 2, those are on you! 🤣
But yea, consumer printers suck.
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
Everything is better with lasers. Prove me wrong…
Sharks with laser beams on their heads?
Fricken, better.
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it’s the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it’s a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn’t die.
I should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don’t want to commit seppuku after using it.
I’ve never owned a better inkjet than the one I’ve had in the late 90s on all measures; build-quality, print quality, speed, operating noise, ink consumption, ink price, overall price, usability. Everything has got worse.
The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
Oh shit, I remember those. They “cleaned” by using an abrasive spray to “polish” the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn’t make sense really.
– forgets everything
Many mother boards have a battery on them that is used in retaining state. May need to be replaced.
I checked the CMOS and ended up replacing it. I thought that was it too. Same issue.
I paid 100 bucks for this server 5 years ago, came with 4TBs. Only thing I ever did with it was run private game servers on it for my friends. Maybe I’ll try replacing it again just for laughs and poop.
Was it a cleaner or one of those “Resurfacing” things with the crank that just scratched the hell out of your discs in a circular pattern?
You needed to use the lubricant that came with it. I used mine hundreds of times with incredible results.
Oh I followed all the instructions, used the fluid & all that. Still had to track down a new copy of Street Fighter EX…
Being a teenager I tried it, but it burned.
I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was “rated” for 800 sq ft.
Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.
Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!
Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.
I said “Nothing. Make a better product”
I wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn’t produce ice because it couldn’t pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
From my understanding, a lot of the products on amazon are resellers that buy stuff from alibaba and then resell it at a markup so it would not surprise me if that was the case.
They all looked the same when i was last on there searching for one.
100%.
I’m constantly seeing the same items with different branding all at a similar price point - it’s all AliExpress garbage. And if the AliExpress version suits your needs you’re better off ordering from AE directly as it’s significantly cheaper. AE shipping speeds have improved over the years too, I’ve gotten items within 1 week several times now
A smart egg tray. It was in fact quite stupid. Mainly purchased it because of how absurd it was.
Main issues:
- it was constantly wrong about how many eggs were in the tray
- it was wrong about the eggs age.
- it took 6AA batteries that only lasted a month at best.
That really sounds absurd. Both the idea itself and the fact that they somehow screwed up the execution of such a simple thing that much.
The egg that stays fresh for a few hundred years is kinda lame for an SCP
I dunno, does it warp probability around it so that no matter what, the egg is always fresh? How far does the effect extend? Does it affect people or just physical interactions? If people ask these questions are they under the effect and contributing to the egg’s defense and therefore continued freshness?
That sounds eggceptionally stupid, eggregious even.
Wow. Nicely done.
eggcellent
Hahahahaha omg that is horrible
Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.
The Cuecat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Came at a time when there weren’t barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn’t exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.
The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn’t be associated with it.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona’s ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in “fraudulent Chinese ballots”.
He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
It also looks vaguely like a dildo, which is cool.
I completely forgot these existed until you just mentioned it!
I think I still have one somewhere in a box of “I might need this” along with a parallel port ZIP drive and a bunch of FireWire cables.
Ha, I had one and it’s what first came to mind too. Pretty useless.
A Canon printer. Not just a simple one, but a big (wide) one with real ink tanks, about 20 years ago.
Under Linux, I could only access basic printing services with that, and this only by using a default driver not made by Canon that happened to work. So I contacted Canon to get a proper user manual to create a proper device driver for this (something I could have done without problems), and basically got the answer that they would not support this, as “open source is theft of intellectual property”. They also had some very choice words about Linux in general.
I assumed I just got an asshole on the phone, so when I attended Cebit a short time later (back then the biggest trade fair in Europe for things like that), I went to the Canon booth, explained my issue, and basically got the same reply. So I sold the Canon printer and bought an HP one. At least HP supported Linux and supplied working drivers. Sadly, they have really gone down the drain since that, so the next printer will be a different brand again…
Try brother. They’re usually quite good, though I’ve only had their laser printers.
It will probably be either a Brother Inkbenefit or an Epson Ecotank model.
My last Epson is a model from 2009 and still somehow works perfectly. Every Canon I’ve owned was garbage.
Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.
Ink stinks, but I’ll condone the toner. Inkjets are so unreliable compared to lasers. Good luck, but I worry you’re stacking the deck against yourself a bit with the ink and would hate to see you lose here.
Don’t worry, I consider lasers, too.
I have a brother color laser + scanner. Love it.
I’ve had it for 8 years now, and so far it’s only on its second set of toners etc.
The only warning I give to brother printer owners is don’t leave them on. The capacitors in them aren’t the best and your printer will either not turn on without a long power off, or like mine it will turn on and off randomly all day and night.
So now I only turn it on at the wall when I need it, and unplug it after
Buy an industrial laserprinter. Anything consumer will fail you intentionally
I grabbed an HP 3055 that my work was throwing out almost 10 years ago, along with two spare laser cartridges.
We don’t print much, but I’m still on the initial cartridge it came with.
It also has been set up in an often dusty, sometimes smokey garage, and hasn’t had an issue yet.
3055 was good.
1012 and ilk were also good, from the same era. I still have one of those running.
My LJ4+ lasted 21 years, the first part in an office setting and the latter a retirement in my home (and about 12 house moves). For its 19th I got its RAM filled. Woo! But we decided “as a household” that we didn’t need a reliable energy pig printer for a few pages a month. It made the lights flicker and the UPSes report a brownout. But it was a good printer.
Now we have an m404n and it’s everything today it needs to be.
I got an HP printer and it’s prints reliably when connected via USB but that’s about it.
Samsung appliances. Fridges. Washing machines.
Got them as part of the rental unit. They’re very new looking. But every month is some new mess up.
God I would replace them if I owned this place.
I used to be a big fan of Samsung, but over the past couple years it has become a do not buy brand for me. They keep doing anticompetitive stuff with their phones so my next phone won’t be one.
Start of 2024 my Samsung TV that wasn’t that old up and died. And my less than a year old Samsung monitor is flickering.
My watch 6 classic is my favorite smart watch I’ve ever had, but in order to get it working well on a non Samsung phone you need to go through a bunch of bullshit hassle.
I used to be a Samsung galaxy note diehard, but I stopped at the 10+. The quality just gets worse every time.
Got a Xiaomi Redmi Note and it’s basically everything I used to love about Samsung phones.
The adds and lack of support is worse though
I’ve only had ads in the themes app, which samsung also has.
The friggin ice maker on the fridge. Plus the drawers are falling apart and it’s only been 7 years.
I don’t understand fridges with ice makers. You can just make ice in the freezer without any further complex machinery.
Yeah it being broken is definitely a first world problem, hence why it has stayed broken for 5 years.
smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)
or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn’t muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.
but least they worked together in failure.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
I can’t speak for ring but I know as long as my Google nest is connected to WiFi it will update software automatically.
At first I thought your doorbell was a eufy. The failure sounds similar.
i tried the eufy afterwards and it wasn’t better. when the eufy crashed daily, it doesn’t restart itself. but when it worked it was super fast.
Google Home. Bought them for $40 CAD and back then they were great. Responsive, did quick google searches, played my music all over the house.
Over the years they’ve lost functionality. Mine no longer accurately respond to voice queries and no longer complete google searches. I can still play music on them manually from my phone but when I ask it something, it responds back in French or does something completely different than what I had originally asked.
Worst part is that I ask it something, it does something different, and then when I say “hey Google stop” it just keeps going and going. Have to manually pull the plug for it to stop.
Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it’s gathering dust on a shelf.
Though it was nice to say “Hey google, tell me today’s news” and get a few different news updates while making coffee.
Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?
I’ve factory reset every Google home of mine multiple times over the years. Never had any effect.
Have you tried “arrete?”
I have the ring doorbell and a home blob which I only use to play the doorbell tune in the house. It is 50/50 luck if the tune plays when someone presses the doorbell button.
“Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black”
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I’m not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I’ve owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won’t help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they’re connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Or worse: it’s in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the “call” because there’s no other reasons the microphone could be on.
Good to know, thanks!
Thank you for explaining that far better than I could!
Imagine your grandmother ordering one of these from QVC and calling her grandchild to come over and show her how to work it…
I remember that thing… My grandpa had one. It was … Interesting.
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
Oooh I had an Intel Atom Vaio Netbook as my first ever computer I actually owned, given to me as a gift by parents for school. I asked for a gaming laptop, so I was real bamboozled by it.
Somehow though I managed to grief my friends’ Minecraft server with /set 0 and enderdragon spawn spam while talking to them on Skype, but it was painful, opening a web page took literal minutes sometimes and my internet wasn’t the fastest back then but it wasn’t too bad either like 5-10mbps easily. But it wasn’t the worst.
That honor goes to an MSI gaming laptop. It was actually really powerful, quad core, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, MSATA SSD and a 1TB HDD that is still alive and in a JBOD setup with mergerfs in my server today serving me shows to watch thru Jellyfin.
In 2014 it was nothing to scoff at, the 880m ran GTA V on almost the highest settings at 1080p and it had tons of storage.
But as a computer it was just fucking terrible, the screen is the dimmest, most TN LCD blue filter shit you’ve ever seen, it was all I had so I watched things on it, and it just always made me depressed that I was watching beautiful films and shows and playing games through this awful blue filter that had no warmth, everything looked like some movie dementia flashback.
USB port melted itself and made some random parts of the case have an electric surprise for you sometimes, keys popped off if you breathed on em but not like you would want those keycaps to stay on because they were disgusting, speakers sucked in dust and vibrated it inside, making all audio feel like earrape at any volume, headphones jack flew out, touchpad was off to the side because of the dumbass numpad, ethernet port fried entire cables, DVD drive wouldn’t read disks, dumbass UEFI firmware locked down to shit, took forever to disable secureboot and the setting would get lost randomly.
About 3 years later, the AC port fried itself and would work like a pair of dodgy earbuds and I had to sit there rotating it like I was finding a radio signal in class, battery was long gone by then so it would shut off at random, which made android app dev I was doing at the time on it somehow even worse of an experience.
Still have many fond memories of my times with it but man did I not miss it at the time.
I replaced it with a 2010 ThinkPad X201 I got for 50 bucks and loved it, I proudly used and abused it and showed it to everyone like it was my first dress with pockets until I eventually blacked out on xanax and procedurally took the entire thing apart and flashed ??? onto the firmware chip and couldn’t put it back together ever again.
Just writing to say that I admire your tenacity
ThinkPad X201
I still have mine, what a great machine! I once accidentally stepped on it when hastily getting out of bed and nothing happened, it just continued to work.
I have a x220 that fell 1 meter lid first (and open) on the floor and… all I got was a crack on one of the posts inside the lid. Still fine to this day, in fact, still my number one laptop lol.
Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.
My wife has a dress with pockets and she didn’t notice that for months because she didn’t think to look for them and they weren’t obvious. Same with a nightie. As someone who wears cargo pants, I was amused at her excitement.
and couldn’t put it back together ever again.
I did this to my X201. Somehow i have like 7 screws that I couldn’t find where they belonged (even though I tried to document each screw). I also broke part of the bezel. So I did put it back together again, but with poor structural integrity. The thing still works but I do not use it. Sadly that era of laptops just run too warm and the fans are too noisy.
Power Glove
It’s so bad.
Having issues hacking time?
Ya but it looked cool as hell imo and I still want one.
So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.
HTC Vive. Not necessarily this specific tech itself, but VR gaming more broadly. My friend and I were ginning ourselves up for years before it came out. I dropped a lot of money on a gaming rig for it. And when I put the googles on… I fucking hated it. I didn’t like standing and gaming. I didn’t like being so isolated from everyone else in the house. And the games were glorified tech demos slapped together with unity assets. By the time Half Life Alex came out, I had no more fucks to give.
The porn was fun though.
I liked it. Unfortunately aside from valve, no serious studio has put any resources into making a good vr game.
Sitting games could be big on vr. Flight/space sims could be awesome.
The only game I really liked in VR was Euro Truck Simulator 2 which wasn’t even a VR game.
Can’t you already fly with VR in MS flight sim?
Also I believe Asseto has VR support.Yeah you can. Although it’s hard on the computer, and depending on the type of plane, it might not be really playable in terms of controls (an airliner for instance)
Games like Elite Dangerous or Star Wars Squadron are really fun in VR though
I played a lot of Elite Dangerous until I realized there was not much to do besides “do the profitable thing over and over before it gets nerfed.” And by the time Squadrons came out, I also ran out of fucks to give.
VR is too expensive and too rich white boy centric. Let me tell you something; if your business is gaming and the teenager children in China and India can’t afford it, your market will NEVER be able to compete with mobile gaming and PC (M&K) gaming
Right now? I’d say first alert smoke alarms. The batch we bought all has failed in an “alarm always, and don’t stop” kind of way. They are only two years old, and I’m frustrated.
First Alert, ask questions later
Failing to an alarm on state is preferred to an alarm off state. So at least no fire can sneak up on you. I think they sell ones now that are 10-year sealed battery with a 10-year warranty.
I agree. If it fails by alarming constantly you replace it. If it fails by not alarming at all you never know, because who actually tests their alarms?
My building has these and 2 of them failed in the first year. Can’t replace the battery so had to replace the whole thing.
