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Land lines A lot of land lines don't go directly back to the CO anymore. They go through muxes or concentrators that are powered at the site, and have batteries for backup. If the utility service and the batteries fail, you no longer have service, even though the CO is still operating. We...

Panels Unless that Square D panel is really old, there are basically two model series, Q0 and Homeline. Both are still made and your favorite big-box hardware store carries breakers for them. Replacing them is not that hard (but SHUT OFF THE MAIN first!) I have a Q0 and I put in a 20A GFCI...

Caller ID is pretty much worthless now. There are lots of Internet services that bridge calls to the phone system using Asterix or some such, and they will let you put in absolutely anything you want for the caller ID. Lots of scammers use this to make it look like it's a local number, or a...

If I answer a call from a number I don't recognize, and I don't hear anything on the other end, I won't say anything. I'll wait a few seconds and if no one on the other end says "hi", I hang up. Most of the boiler rooms and robocall outfits use a "dial-ahead" mechanism. It dials your phone...

What brand is the panel?

The K-Mart in Albertville, AL will close after Christmas. This is the last K-Mart remaining in Alabama. http://whnt.com/2017/11/03/last-kmart-store-in-alabama-set-to-shut-its-doors-in-january/

I've had it pointed out to me by people that have kids that if you have more than two young ones (or, say, your kids and your neighbor's kids are car pooling), it's pretty much impossible to legally carry them in a sedan. Not only do you need a car seat for each one, with the requisite belt...

A lot of places are converting their fixtures to "full cutoff" as they go to LED lighting, which as an amateur astronomer I appreciate. But yeah, sometimes they don't get the right diffusers on them, and then you get the alternating light and dark areas that produce the strobe effect as you...

I grew up at the opposite end of Alabama from pulltostart. Sears only had a catalog sales store here until they opened in the then-new Heart of Huntsville mall in 1961. At the time it was the best example in town of that now-deceased breed, the whole-family department store. I think about the...

I don't recall that I've ever looked in a Spiegel catalog; if I did, it was decades ago. However, I recall that they used to be big-time advertisers on game shows.

I had an uncle whose house had some kind of low voltage system. The switches were rockers and they were huge -- there was no faceplate because the rocker covered the entire box. The surface of the rocker was clear Lexan or some such, and there was a mirrored finish underneath it. The house...

When you stop the machine by pushing/pulling the timer knob, whichever applies, it kills the power to the water valves and they close. There was a Blackstone model that had a timer driven off a gear train from the main motor, which ran all the time. The water valves were purely mechanical and...

I found this old thread Reply #9 contains a good rundown on the history of Universal. http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?62040

The neighborhood we lived in when I was a young child was a '50s neighborhood where most of the houses have rear entry garages. The driveway led to a turnaround pad behind the house, which almost inevitably wound up doing double duty as a basketball court. There was a small pad off to the side...

Using the machine for dyeing I remember my mom doing that. The ad notwithstanding, you had to boil the dye to get it to dissolve, and then add it to the wash water. It had to soak for a while, but it also needed to be agitated every few minutes so the dye would take evenly. And she did two...

Yeah, I drove to Pikeville, in eastern Tennessee, which was near the center of the totality path. Very strange experience. Got dark really fast just before totality. Streetlights came on and crickets were chirping. Birds were very confused afterwards.

I knew one family that used Tied. They had a Frigidaire and I remember the lady of the house saying that she liked it because it didn't suds up... she had tried Tide in that machine at some point and had a major suds lock that came out around the edges of the lid and ran on the floor.

Yeah, I was in elementary school back in the 1960s, when no self-respecting American primary school was without an intercom. The building was new and lacked either a bell system or clocks, so the intercom did everything. The principal read announcements in the morning. Every hour on the hour...

Laundry rooms started disappearing from homes in the southeast U.S. in the late 1960s. By about 1975, the trend was to either put the laundry in a separate, unheated room off of the carport, or cram it into the smallest possible space in a basement hallway or some such, with bifold doors that...

The high school I went to wasn't a single building; it was a small campus of several buildings. The main classroom building had been built in stages between about 1920 and 1930, and both the floor plan and the systems had been revised numerous times since then. It was bit like the Winchester...