My favorite dumb machines
in which i show you a picture of my rice cooker
2026/10/28
As a software developer, there are few things I despise in this world more than software. I’m not sure if you could conceive of something more harmful to the repair and maintenance of things you own than the software that ships on most commercial appliances.
It’s a completely opaque binary blob which must run on a board packed with fragile, irreplacable components invisible to the naked eye. Plus, such devices often eschew usable, physical controls for mobile apps which inevitably break down when the brilliant company behind “a rice cooker but you can use it from your phone” goes belly up and shuts down their servers.
Instead of complaining, I’d like to show you some perfect, dumb machines1 from my life which I love. They mostly run on batteries, and rarely connect to a Real Computer. And I love them. Please send me your perfect, dumb machines to newsletter@spader.zone.
While you read, please enjoy Michael Hurley performing They Took Away the Diesel2
PetSafe feeder
Look at this thing. This big bulky plastic piece of shit has one purpose, and that’s to vomit out dry cat food every four hours until either the heavy D-cell battery which serves as its beating heart dies, or the universe decays once again into unformed hot entropy. Given that I haven’t changed the battery since I purchased it, it’s unclear which of those will come first.
Zoom H6
This is the big daddy. The greatest machine I’ve ever owned. It’s a recorder; you can plug a microphone into the top, like the little hat in the picture, and you have everything you need to record high quality audio. Zero cables. Zero computers.
Or, you can connect up to four simultaneous inputs. Do you know what you can record with four inputs? Fucking anything, that’s what. Podcast? Yeah, no problem. Singing, playing the guitar? Sounds fantastic. Oh, what’s that? You want to record music with a friend? And your friend wants to sing harmony?
The physical controls are perfect, but the best part is the controls for the software. Look at these buttons:
The button labeled MENU opens the menu, and then serves as your back button. Meanwhile, the nubbin springs back or forward to move through menus, and then clicks to enter them. With these four controls, you can do almost anything you need, including most of what the giant mixer below does.
When your hubris outgrows even this nearly unlimited power, you’re a couple button presses away from it turning into a proper audio interface that’ll pipe raw audio into your DAW of choice! All of this on four AA batteries, or power it via the single USB port. Seriously, you can plug this thing into a god damn iPhone and have a tight setup.
A little piece of shit rice cooker
This little guy is truly a cheap piece of shit. Aunt Kathy bought it for me, for Christmas, from one of those stores where you might buy off brand kettle corn for a distant cousin’s birthday, or a pair of headphones wearing a snuggie.
And yet, it’s perfect. Just look at it. I don’t know what AROMA means, but I have to assume it refers to the aroma of perfectly cooked, piping hot grains, because that’s the only goddamn aroma this thing knows. How does it even work? I have no idea. There’s one button on it, COOK. You press it when you want to cook rice, and when the tiny machine elf which inhabits the machine’s soul determines that the rice is perfectly cooked, the button clicks up and it stops cooking.
How does it know? Better question: How could such a machine even break? I guess an ill fated suicide attempt might short something inside the thing. But otherwise? There’s nothing to the machine. One button, an indestructible cheap metal pot, and hell, the elf is union…
Mackie ProFX8
One day, Tom came back from a weekend in his middle-of-nowhere central Georgia hometown and handed me a box. The music shop in said hometown was going under, he said, and they were practically giving stuff away. Thus I came to own this machine.
This is a mixer. You plug stuff into it, and then connect the outputs to speakers, or a PA system. You can tweak every input individually, which makes it perfect for a small band playing live, or cutting down the god damn hurricane blowing through the windy mid-Atlantic pier where your wife’s family has inexplicably chosen to host the come-up-and-share-into-the-cheap-mic-that-Thomas-rented segment of your mother-in-law’s wake3.
Don’t get me wrong. Real audio engineers, live or in a studio, are wizards. But there’s something comfortable knowing that with this big black rectangle, some cords, and a few rented speakers, I can comfortably run the audio for just about any event in my life without depending on a software license and a half dozen individual pieces of hardware.
Speed Queen
I bought this used for the price of a new, low end dryer from Home Depot. Four years later, one of the fins inside came loose and in taking apart the chassis I used one socket. They built this big beautiful lady with exactly one kind of bolt. If NASA operated this way, my deep redneck uncle Jeff could disassemble the International Space Station. And he’s an alcoholic4.
I firmly believe that if we sent the component parts of this dryer back to, say, 1830, along with a wiring diagram, it’d be up and running in a week.
Korg TM-50
I bought this combination tuner and metronome when I started playing the guitar, back when my smartphone was a little too junky to give a good tune. Time wore on, and I succumbed to modernity. I downloaded an app that did the same thing, on the device I already carry!
A couple years ago, though, the app started to show me ads. A guitar tuner app. Started to show me ads. I tried a few more, and I’m sure there’s a tuner app out there built by some lovable mook like myself who built it with love and care and put it on the App Store for free, but this machine is categorically incapable of showing me an ad.
It even comes with one of the most delightful surprises, one of those things you think “man, it sure would be nice if this thing could…”, flip it over, and see that yes, it can prop itself up!
Anyone who has the urge to point out that all of these machines have some kind of software in their guts can suck it ↩︎
From the liner notes:
Not so many years, ago, there was a pleasant, commodious little busy-body of a one-car diesel that churned its way daily from Easton and Belvidere, at one terminus, to Trenton, at the other. This train served commuters all along the way who had good reason to go either to Philadelphia, or to New York, via connecting trains at Trenton.
It rattled happily along the tracks, hitting the little community station of Raven Rock at approximately 6 in the morning (down- river run to Trenton) and returning at approximate- ly 6 in the evening (up-river run from Trenton to Belvidere). Commuters were very fond of it, and the country it ran through. They could count small herds of deer moving in lowland thickets between its tracks, and the Delaware River; they could watch countless migratory birds in the spring and fall of each year, and observe still waterways where wild ducks and great blue herons dropped down for sanctuary. They could chat and exchange news with the conductor, who favored his travelers with an occasional song. They could move into the baggage compartment on cold mornings and gather around an old heater.
But, as Mike reports, when it came time for the railroads to stop competing with whatever they were competing with, the diesel was withdrawn from service. An official reason was given out that it was “antique” – over the many signed protests of frustrated commuters who peti- tioned for its continuance.
Antique or no, its return would be celebrated – perhaps by another song. Like all of Mike Hurley’s songs, “They Took the Diesel Away, " is based on something that really happened. It might very well serve as theme song to all the vexed and disappointed commuters of New Jersey, who in the past few years have had to suffer from removal of one train service after another, until now there is virtually no way to get from any where in New Jersey to any where else, unless one wishes to cope with the heavy, early morning traffic of throughways, highways, turnpikes, parkways and all other conveniences of high-speed, high-risk auto travel.
No antique runs like that! ↩︎
It’s all in the midrange frequencies ↩︎
Terminal is too strong a word, but so is functional ↩︎