Specific Tools
I found out about basin wrenches a few weeks ago on Ask This Old House, which I’m sure was a contributing impetus to replacing my kitchen faucet yesterday. It was worth $20 (plus the cost of the new faucet!) just to see a specific tool do a specific job exceedingly well. Then I found out my new faucet had actually improved upon the normal tighten-up-a-nut-impossibly-far-up-underneath-your-sink design with a clever little screw-against-washer number that rendered the wrench unnecessary for the new install. It was still quite handy for the removal of the mild atrocity of design that previously occupied the space.
The “minor annoyance, expensively fixed” is quite the money trap as a homeowner, but sometimes it feels good to scratch the itch.
I remember the time when it felt so unpalatable to carry around general-purpose devices like smart phones. It’s fallen back a lot with time, but for a time one of my highest-PageRank blog entries was this little ditty, which admittedly has not aged well (and - I’d interject - carries a bit more of the mid-naughts blog acerbity than my current preferred blend). But it remains logically sound that you just couldn’t see the 4”-6” screen thing coming, with QWERTY options that avoid making you look like a drug dealer, and that purpose-built workhorses were the only thing approaching a usability threshold under those limitations.
There’s still a quaintness to the Sansa Clip, which has avoided whiz-bang/gee-whiz features like heart rate monitoring, mood ring coloration, pedometer functionality, and the like, despite it being generally fastened onto or close to your person. It’s nice to use something that can get caught on a tree branch and go swinging without eliciting existential terror. Battery life is fair, and every hour burned on it is an hour unburned on the phone.
I remember a time when an iPod Touch actually looked pretty good to me, kind of at the end of the high water mark era of the iPod. Now an iPod Touch is basically your previous cell phone without a SIM card. I would expect to use my Moto X as such a device at times, but in truth it will probably stay in the drawer as a backup phone most of the time.
And with all the charm of dedicated solutions, seeing something like this Radio Shack ad makes it clear that all-purpose has generally won, even to the point that the commercial momentum of tablets seems to have stalled in light of improving screens on phones. Pretty incredible how quickly it shifted.