tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
I only used one for a few years, and never thought to laminate the pages because they didn't need it -- dye-sub wax-printed pages were already suitable for outdoor maps because the wax repelled water, and they held up where inkjet pages became a smeary mess immediately.
We definitely did wash our hands before and after loading ink blocks, I remember being cautioned about that.
Oh well. I guess my memories are better than the tech deserved. Won't be the last time.
And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone.
I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Whenever I stopped on the public access channel, it was reruns of city council meetings and stuff. I've heard about all sorts of wild and wooly productions by teenagers and weirdos, but never saw any myself.
Having spent some time as a cellular tech in Detroit, scrambling up half-wrecked stairwells in long-abandoned buildings to service the radio equipment still running on the roof, those accounts make it sound downright tame. I'd visit in a heartbeat next time I'm in DFW.
The landscape is so spacious, I hesitate to call it urb-ex. Rur-ex?
Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000.
What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.
Speaking as a co-founder of a large community hackerspace, we don't have the volunteer bandwidth to manage the additional overhead of tool lending. Please, please, please let the libraries offer more alternatives. It's exactly their mission.
Yeah, it's a significantly trickier proposition when the pads aren't there.
The contacts are in the connector, you just need to bring them out and get the resistor on them, which is frankly a pain I shouldn't have to endure when USB-C has been out for 12 years. None of this is rocket science, the manufacturers just aren't feeling the pain.
The thing is, making a 5v-only device PD-compliant is literally one resistor. It costs well under a penny.
It's pure ignorance, not a decision, but the lack of one. Lack of caring, lack of having an actual engineer involved, just slapping an oval-shaped port into a product where a trapezoidal port had been, and blindly thinking that magically makes it spec-compliant.
Or not thinking about the spec at all.
I return these devices too. Lots of them. My e-commerce returns over the last year are probably 50% PD non-compliance, 50% all other defects combined.
Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom...
tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.