Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. My FX-888D started acting up after maybe 300 hours (the temp reading got all weird). I ended up switching back to my old Weller from the 90s that I found at a garage sale. That thing is a tank. I feel like a lot of newer tools, not just soldering gear, are built with cheaper parts even if the outside looks nice. You might have just gotten a really good one.

Oh wow, that's a cool trick... my uncle used to throw a handful of sand into his mortar mix for the same reason, said it stopped his chimney from spalling.

Check the glue's solvent, not just the hoof.

Right? It's like they think wire is wire. Then you get to play detective for free when their cheap stuff fails. My favorite part is when they argue that the price was too good to pass up.

That line about it being a record of how people read the news really got me. I always saw old sites as just broken pages, a hassle to use. But looking at my local paper's old site, with those tiny pictures and the guestbook link, it clicked. It shows what was normal, what we put up with. It changed my mind from seeing it as just old data to seeing a real snapshot of the time.