This is Technology Bytes, episode 116 for May 25, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I’m going off the reservation, so to speak, and I’m going to talk about maintenance of our technology.
Whether it’s low tech, high tech, whatever it is, there is a certain level of maintenance that is required.
And oftentimes, because of who I am, I tend to neglect that part of my technology.
I think that things should just work, and they should continue to work, and they should work forever, and we shouldn’t have to spend that much time trying to keep them in shape to work.
And I think a lot of that comes from my background in electronics where it’s not something that you need to necessarily fix.
I mean, solder joints should last forever, kind of, and you shouldn’t have to do any type of restructure or fixing of things inside of a technological device or something like that.
And then my problem is that I push that into the physical world, not that technology isn’t in the physical world, and I tend to ignore things that really require maintenance to perform at their best.
So a couple examples.
This week I have a three-day weekend, and most often on the weekend I will leave my iMac at work on and just let it sleep because I’m coming back in a couple days and everything should be fine.
There are some people who feel like maybe on a weekly basis you should restart your computer, even a Mac, and that may be true, but I tend to let my Macs run for long periods of time without turning them off or restarting them.
Some of that is because Apple comes out in a fairly regular cycle of updated software.
So it would be the operating system getting updated every few weeks or maybe once a month or something like that, and so my computer restarts when I do those updates.
So that’s often enough for the maintenance of the computer so that it can kind of clean out the caches and reconfigure itself to start.
But sometimes the software that I run needs the same thing.
I’m not going to say anything that anyone who uses a Mac doesn’t know, but restarting Safari every once in a while is probably a pretty good idea because you can clear memory, you can clear caches of that, and then Safari will just work a little faster.
And that may be true of other software or apps that you’re using on a Mac or a phone, iPhone or an iPad, or maybe even your Apple Watch.
I almost never restart my Apple Watch except when I install software or a new operating system, I mean.
And so in my technology world, those restarts happen as a matter of course.
But in other parts of my world where I use certain tech components, it requires me to take more action.
So one thing I’m not very good at is keeping a car washed.
And some may say that, you know, that’s okay because you don’t have to wash your car to make it work well.
But sometimes you do.
And since I bought my EV6, I have taken a higher interest in keeping it looking its best.
And I’m not 100% sure why it’s different on that than on the Civic that I had before.
But I think in my head, I feel like I’m going to hold on to this car longer than maybe I hold on to most.
And so maybe that’s some of it.
Some of it is that, I don’t know, maybe I’m proud.
Maybe it’s a problem.
I don’t know.
But I like to keep the car clean.
And there were times when I would take my Civic to the car wash, and I’d say, could you get that spot out?
And they go, it seems like it’s been there for quite a while.
I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get it out.
But you can take it to our detailer, and they can do buffing, and they can do this.
And then the maintenance of the exterior of my car becomes a lot more costly because I wasn’t keeping it clean on a regular basis.
And that same thing holds true for many components in a gas-powered vehicle because you’ve got oil to change.
You’ve got fluids to change.
You’ve got other things that have to happen.
So tire rotation is super important in vehicles.
And oftentimes, I might be slack in doing those or having those maintenance things performed as well.
With an electric car, the maintenance goes way down because of that.
But there are still things that you have to take care of.
Windshield wipers in the desert environment of Phoenix, that rubber just doesn’t last that long.
And if you want to maintain the integrity of your windshield without scratching it all up, you want to make sure that you have good windshield wipers when or in the off chance or the very rare times that you actually need them.
And so I think some of that maintenance of technology we tend to forget or neglect, or at least I do.
I know there’s others that don’t do that.
So I guess this is more of a warning for myself.
And oftentimes on a microcast, you find yourself talking about yourself more than anyone else, especially on a solo version as this one is.
And then this week, my wife said, our garage door won’t close.
And so it really is a case of it is facing restrictions that you can’t see that makes the motor stop so that it doesn’t burn out the motor.
And so I’m very thankful for that because the expense of replacing a garage door opener versus doing a little bit of maintenance is vastly different.
So the last time this happened, I just turned up the force with which the door closes.
Not a super good idea.
It did work for that moment and for some time, probably months, but it probably wasn’t the best of ideas.
And in the end, a $7 tube of low temperature grease that I just put on the screw of the garage door opener was the only thing that was needed.
Just a little bit of maintenance.
I think it took me seven and a half minutes or something like that.
Oh, so that’s like a dollar a minute.
But very little effort.
So now the garage door can work again.
And there are other things that happen along those lines as well.
It’s, you know, I remember our dishwasher failed and it wouldn’t go through a complete cycle.
And we’re like, what in the world is going on?
And how do we fix it?
And what is the maintenance?
And then you find out and you read the manual that you put a saucer of milk.
And I’m not kidding.
This actually works.
You put a saucer of milk in the top rack and you run a normal cycle.
And it runs through that cycle and empties that dish of the milk.
And it cleans out everything that needs to be cleaned out so that your dishwasher can then run for some time into the future.
I know it sounds weird, but it actually worked.
I have a reverse osmosis system.
Every month or so, you’ve got to change filters.
Well, every few months you change the filter so that your water is purified or at least cleaned up, you know, what the reverse osmosis system does.
But there’s also a drain that has to be cleaned every so often because some of the gunk that gets cleaned out of it clogs up that drain.
And I don’t know, I got to look and see if there’s a better reverse osmosis.
But the one we bought, that’s what you have to do.
So there are maintenance activities for technology that have to happen to keep it working.
And if you’re like me and you tend to neglect those things until it’s broken, you find that you might be spending more on maintenance than you ever intended.
When if you had been willing to just take some of your precious time and do a little bit of maintenance on systems that you expect to work on a regular basis, you will find that maintenance on technology helps technology and helps you live a much better, calmer life.
Well, that’s all I have for today.
As always, if you have comments or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
