The Lance J. Technoweb

Inexpensive cellphone charging cables, commonly sold online, at drug stores, and at discount stores can exhibit poor phone charging speed. Some times the charging performance is so poor that people think their phone has gone bad. Here, I'll show how cheap cable construction can compromise charging performance. Verifying Cable Quality The following experiment is designed to show how bad cables ruin charging speeds. I will be measuring various USB extension cables to experimentally show how poor cable construction can have a significant negative impact on smart phone charging rates. In order to standardize the experiment and eliminate variables, I will be using a genuine Apple "1 Amp" USB charger along with a genuine Apple USB lightning cable. These components were delivered new by Apple with my iPhone 11, so I know they are "legitimate" (not clones or counterfeits). They are name brand components sold by a reliable retailer. But I'm not here to test these w...

A friend of mine gave me a dishwasher he was throwing away.  It looked great and it was relatively new, but it wasn't cleaning well.  He decided to punt and buy a new one instead of fixing it. I figured I needed a dishwasher for an apartment I manage, so I took it.  Now it is installed, even before I attempted to fix it.  Despite its looks, I still know that it is still problematic.  Now I want to figure out what's wrong.  I guess it is easier for me to figure out its issues when it is hooked up. Step 1: In-situ inspection It looks very dirty.  It has been sitting around for about a year and is covered with construction debris and etc.  A little cleaning will hopefully make it look better.  Fortunately, there are no dents! There is one weird thing: the top dishwasher rack is somehow binding to the back of the dishwasher, where the water feed connects to the central arm. Step 2: Diagnosing the rack binding issue. I remove the upper rack, and t...

My dishwasher hasn't been cleaning dishes well.  It is about 12 years old... is time for a new one?  The short answer is no. A new dishwasher will not fix my problem.  It turns out that my kitchen's hot water flow is very low, and so my dishwasher is not filling up with enough water.  Buying a new dishwasher won't fix this, so therefore I won't be buying a new dishwasher. [ UPDATE!  After a 12+ months of suffering, I solved all my dishwasher problems by flushing my kitchen's hot water plumbing!  See this post for more information. ] How the Dishwasher Inlet Valve Works My dishwasher fills up using a timed water valve. Given reasonable water pressure, my dishwasher accurately accepts about 3 gallons of water per cycle in 95 seconds.  If the water flow is very low, then less water comes in over those 95 seconds.   If water pressure is decent, the dishwasher fills until a float switch is triggered.   If the dishwasher doesn't get enou...

I believe in soap.  I believe in glue.  And I believe in the chemists and chemical engineers that design them and make them. There are a lot of cleaning products on the market that purport to be "green" and "all natural", but all their claims mean nothing if they can't prove that they work and that they're actually better than the real deal. In short, I'm going to trust a "Tide" or "Cascade" long before I trust a "Ellen's Hypoallergenic Natural Suds".  Because Ellen is certainly trying to sell me a line, and Ellen's is sold by someone that knows nothing about what natural, hypoallergenic, or cleaning means. Sure, some (all?) chemical companies have had major problems. But a no-name brand that almost certainly buy all their ingredients from the same chemical companies has an awful lot to prove.  They'll have to show the science, engineering, and double-blind studies to convince me that they can do what they claim....

Everything we buy gets thrown away.  99.9% of what your grandparents bought is gone, as is 99% of what your parents have purchased.  Most of it went into a landfill, or was burned, or recycled, or whatever. I'd say roughly 99% of what I bought before 2005 is gone. Sure, some of it is still around.  Most of it is gone, including the vast majority of consumer electronics.  All those CRT TVs, radios,  and early generation "flat panel" TVs are gone, with few exceptions. But here I want to predict and/or review how long stuff lasts.   Necessary Widgets  Let's assume for a moment that anything we buy is a necessity.  I know that's not true, but this is more of a practical thought experiment than an attempt to model a so-called "ideal". Obviously, a necessary widget that has a useful life of 10 years is going to produce half as much waste as a necessary widget that lasts 5 years.  Here I'm just going to list some things that I own (or have owne...