25 years ago.
Nah - much more recently than that. My Canon, I’ve just realised, is something like 7 or 8 years old and still fine. Admittedly its usage is light, though I’ve been through many sets of third party ink cartridges in that time. The Colour BubbleJet I had before that probably lasted over a decade and IIRC I only ditched it because I needed a new scanner and decided to move to a combined scanner/printer.
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That’s so terrible, and glorious.
My cheap Brother B&W laser has been bombproof for years. It’s still going off the same damn cartridge I bought it with -like some voodoo was cast on it for endless print jobs. This one: https://www.amazon.ca/Brother-HL-L2320D-Monochrome-Printer-Printing/dp/B00LEA5EHO/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=brother+laser&qid=1591980557&sr=8-5
What drives me crazy is that the filter warning is set to go off after exactly 6 months. For a dumb filter this is arguably a reasonable heuristic, but for one integrated into the fridge it should have no trouble counting exactly how many liters of water pass through the thing. The lifetime of filter should be measured in liters, especially on an in-line solution like this. GE had a chance to make the alert accurate and instead spent their energy on some dumb DRM nonsense.
The reason people turned to brands like GE is to avoid this kind of garbage. If they were ok with it they would save their cash and buy some cheap Chinese knockoff instead. This sort of bullshit is how good brands die.
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I think consumer inkjets are just a scam: the printer is cheap. But then anyone buying these must resign themselves to feeding the machine hyper-expensive ink as long as they own or use it. They might as well have a “feed me ink!” sticker on the front of it. For the very few things I need printed in color, I just have the drugstore do it, or use an online service. If you print color stuff in quantity, or are doing it professionally, you need a better printer anyway, and hopefully one with a better per-page cost.
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“Power to the People!”
The first company to produce a filter that can reliably detect when it has truly reached the end of its useful life (as opposed to relying on hours of use, gallons of water filtered, or some other imprecise metric) will get my business.
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He wrote about this today on his new blog.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate
Unauthorised bread comes that bit closer. 
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It has long been recommended that carbon filters be replaced every 6 months because of possible bacteria growth, this way predates the very existence of these obnoxious refrigerators.
The problem is the expensive proprietary filters, not that it wants you to change them when you should.
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I have been wondering why he was absent and I never saw any explanation for it and I thought that was very strange.
It also happened around the same time I started noticing a lot more intrusive ads on this site and a lot of general cheesy hawking of crap on the BB store where it used to only have cool stuff.
I like the look of this new site simple no discussion interesting links no bulshit ads to load it’s respectful of my privacy.
Maybe that’s why it was never discussed- I was wondering why he was allowing this atrocious behavior that he was always against to occur here, maybe he left over a disagreement with advertising and the infomercial style hawking of stuff at bb store.
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Not much of that in the US that I have heard of. But there’s probably not much model crossover.
Our appliances keep getting larger And larger. Most would not likely fit into European living spaces.
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Flammable water has also been recorded in Australia in some areas where fracking is carried out. Well OK, it’s technically not the water that is flammable, but when people are able to ignite the mixture of water and contaminants coming out of their water taps, it sure looks like the water if flammable.
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Yes, this is kind of emotional ice service labor. I’m not proofing out as the genius that Sato Sano was as whacking the ice once and getting consistently profligate piecing in only one year of trying. I mean, no threat monk is nice, but getting it down to 5 seconds of thwacks is not passing into the mode.
More importantly, where are my Amy Sedaris fridge messages. It was fun when she wrote in fingerpaint on top of the fridge, but the ‘7 days to replace filter’ thing definitely needs to be ‘7 out of 10 firemen agree your baking is coming along!’ or ‘7 fates await! The dairy compartment!’ or ‘7 Seiyuu yet defend among the lemons’ or ‘7 grains is the incoming water hardness.’
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The problem with that is the sensor. Sensors for that kind of thing do exist, but like the one in your CO alarm, they have a limited lifetime. After being unsealed and exposed to air/water they only have so much time before they are unusable. It’s one more consumable component to replace, or build it into the filter, and double the filter price?
Th justification for everything from the nag lights to the drm rfid filters is safety and liability. An activated charcoal filter used too long, can possibly become a medium for bacteria to grow on, or, once expended, become ineffective and even start releasing what it’s been filtering out back into the water.
So they want to be able to say they made every effort to get a customer to change the filter, and use a genuine one, rather than a defective ebay substitute so customers can’t sue if they get sick.
Really they should build in a bypass switch, with a bunch of warnings that the user is taking on responsibility if they disable the warnings.
The river that divides our city burned, and it indirectly caused the EPA. Yay!
But then, it got gutted this presidency, so, nevermind…
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I’m using a 12 year old Xerox color laser printer. When it finally does kick-off I won’t feel cheated.
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You should be able to measure filter efficiency with a pressure differential sensor from the inlet and outlet. I can see that low usage could cause bacterial growth, although if that’s the case I’d expect to find it in various other parts of the fridge water system (inlet valve and ice maker).
Before filter, bacteria are stopped by the chlorination of the water. After the filter bacteria are possible, but flow and the right surfaces make it unlikely that bacteria build up. A spent carbon filter though, still can deactivate the chlorine, but it’s a high surface area growing medium for bacteria. Not sure how much flow rate is affected in a carbon filter if there isn’t particulate being caught in it.
In a low usage situation, probably best to flush some water through if it hasn’t been used in a while, even with a good filter, the water at the outlet is likely nasty.
