Good eyesight doesn’t come cheap—and contact lenses are a perfect example. They rarely feel ‘used up’ when their official replacement date arrives. Maybe you’ve stretched a daily lens into three days, or worn your monthly pair for an extra couple of weeks. If nothing felt wrong, it’s natural to wonder: are we simply being nudged into buying new ones more often than necessary? Could this be a subtle case of planned obsolescence?
Or is there more to the story?
Last week, my to-do list hit me with one of those reminders that makes you just sigh:
“Descale Coffee Machine.”
Not exactly glamorous, but apparently adulthood means penciling in quality time with your kettle and coffee maker. So, armed with a bottle of descaling liquid, a jug to catch the runoff, and a podcast queue long enough to outlast the whole ordeal, I got to work.
But here’s the fun part: descaling isn’t just about saving your coffee from tasting weird or keeping your appliances alive a little longer. That hard, chalky, white crust we call limescale isn’t just ugly on faucets and tiles — it’s the byproduct of fascinating reactions between heat, water, and minerals.
Once you understand what’s really going on behind those chalky white stains, you stop seeing limescale as just an annoying crust to scrub off. It’s basically a chemistry demo happening in your sink, kettle, or coffee machine — and the more you know, the better you can prevent it, fight it, and even save your appliances from an early retirement.
So, let’s zoom in on how limescale actually forms, starting from something as ordinary as the water coming out of your tap.
I can’t remember the last time I tuned in to an actual radio station. Back in my teenage years, my parents showed me how to record songs from the radio onto a cassette. Then piracy and MP3s swept in, and radio faded from my life.
It wasn’t until I heard a podcast outro — “This is a podcast from detektor.fm” — that I suddenly wondered: What the heck is FM?
That tiny question led me down a rabbit hole into the world of modulation and carrier waves — the century-old tech quietly powering everything from your phone calls to your Wi-Fi.
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