So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
Andy Farnell's latest article says that Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, claimed that a "[p]erson who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who is bound to have some characteristic of quality."
That literature also inspired Thomas Grzybowski, who wrote about Pirsig's influences on making of communities in relation to Free software [1, 2]. Years earlier Grzybowski explained why "Free Software Freedom is Not Linux" (inspired by something Bob Young of Red Hat had said in a conference).
In light of recent experiences I've had (at shops and with screwdrivers, no soldering gun or spares though) I realise appliances became a hot mess. Computers can outlast them, but it wasn't always that way...
Some of the appliances we use every day are more than 3 decades old. The audacity of these!
As a kid, when a cassette tape or some gramophone had some issue (usually mechanical) we could fix it ourselves. Even kids could. The tools could be as simple as duct tapes. In cars, before power windows, mechanical repair works were feasible. They could take some time, but once repeated (experience, training) they would no longer take long; you could, in turn, help friends and neighbours (or vice versa). The pre-appliance era of bicycles was the same.
The electric windows are automobiles' trajectory towards "smart" mess (more and more computers, which are error-prone due to age, jittery conditions, exposure to sogginess, and difficulty in access). Go back to the early 90s or 80s and one needn't see an electrician for every simple error in one's car (and let's face it, those were rarer back then).
Nowadays there are people who would insist they cannot run without some worthless gadget. How sad. Pathetic even...
Quoting key portions from Farnell's article: (about fixing his own washing machine in 2025)
The right tools were surprisingly simple, a cross-head screwdriver and some wire cutters to snip a cable tie. Putting down a towel to avoid scratching the floor tiles and catch any water from the condenser pipe was also a smart move.Listen. It's a tough universe. There's all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything. If you're going to survive out there, you've really got to know where your towel is. – Ford Prefect
I removed top of the dryer, which seemed the most obvious entry point, but couldn't see anything like a heater. Also the drum fully filled the cavity and blocked any parts below it. So I started to remove a side panel, with just 4 screws. It seemed very much like repairing a giant tower PC, which boosted my confidence as I've probably built a couple hundred of those.
As I did so there came a moment of "tumble dryer forensics", noticing that not all the screws were exactly the same. Then a memory returned. It had actually been repaired before, back in 2018 costing fifty quid for a new drum bearing after it became very squeaky. The last engineer had used some slightly different cross-heads when reassembling.
With a PC one can never be sure to pick the correct side to open. I got lucky with the right side first time. But still no heater. All the familiar components were there, a clockwork timer, a motor and capacitor, but no heater. Following some wires, I soon realised the heater is actually outside, within a separate housing. I removed the heater shroud and only at that point realised it would have been possible to repair the element with push-fit spade connectors without taking the whole dryer apart! Doh! But I was happy anyway as replacing the cable (a new one was supplied) all the way back to the internal loom seemed the right thing to do.
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The design of the Indeset/Hotpoint unit illustrates the amazing power of generic, simple, serviceable design, backed up by an available market in replacement components. This is how technology should be!
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We engineers love our machines. And that love naturally extends to the people who use our machines. I can remember great system administrators, before the Eternal September and the era of the Help-Desk, who proactively went around asking "How is your machine running? Is everything okay?". I can remember network administrators who saw their domains not as battlefields swarming with vile aliens, but as peaceful gardens to tend.
Yet something has changed. Today we seem a million miles from that connection to technology, and we must reclaim it urgently. In the deco era of the 1930s we made radios not merely useful but as beautiful walnut furniture.
Now our devices are cold slabs. They are the exploitative weapons of "tech bros" who delight as their machinations harm other people. Extraction, surveillance, manipulation and intrusion are their purpose. Silicon Valley 'values' have not merely betrayed billions of people, they have betrayed technology itself. To the extent the Chinese and Asians have copied our ways they have drunk poison every bit as harmful as in the opium wars.
Apple is trying to criminalise not only repairs; it tries to prevent people from running programs Apple doesn't approve of. This is where they lead us. █