Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/REGoa

I still use a Roku that was gifted to me, but only thanks to also having a pihole. The amount of logging & ads it blocks on the Roku is insane. If that ever stopped working I would ditch the Roku in a heartbeat.

I used to be on a team of 10 people that installed & managed roughly 3,000 servers and associated networking gear. We got hit hard in the early 2000’s by the Capacitor Plague and it fell on me to identify around 700 faulty motherboards and manage their replacement.

I don’t miss that at all…

Part of the problem is how insanely complex modern cars are. Modern cars can have 30+ different ECUs, and knowing which ECU does what can be difficult to figure out. Programming ECUs is also a bit of a dark art, and a model line of cars can go through a number of ECU versions over time.

I used to own a car that the battery regularly died on. Eventually, after multiple dealer visits, a couple replaced batteries, and hours of internet research, I found two service recalls that described my cars symptoms perfectly. The problem for me was my cars VIN fell outside both recall notices. But I took printouts of both recall notices to a dealer and they agreed to look into it. They confirmed my car had buggy firmware, annd ended up installing updated firmware on two different ECUs. I never had a battery problem again after that. I’ve worked in tech for 30+ years and I wouldn’t have wanted to tackle that on my own…

Bluetooth? I got mine from a dial-up BBS via a 1200 baud modem.

The water softener & filter in our house has built in monitoring & alerted me when one of our toilets wouldn’t stop running. Very helpful feature.

Definitely make sure all of those are set up properly. I would also look up the IP address of your mail server on services like this. It’s possible your ISP/provider has a bad email reputation, and if that’s the case then there’s not a whole lot you can do short of switching providers or using a third party SMTP relay that has a good reputation, like smtp2go.com.

Don’t be afraid to make detours. My wife & I have done a few such trips, and on one of them we passed a sign for a memorial & museum of the Tuskegee Airmen. We took a detour to check it out and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Painting is of a river in Pennsylvania. The artist painted it while there, then displayed it in the UK. Many who saw it, not being familiar with the fall colors of the northeast US, thought it was fake.