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Flourescent lamp manufacturer in the US used to use mercury that was poured into the dosing machine by the gallon. (That's a very heavy gallon, btw.)

Eventually they switched to tiny glass capsules with the miniscule amount of mercury that's actually necessary.

As part of this transition, they got a new (at the time) tool, an XRF spectrometer, and started checking to see what parts of the facility were mercury contaminated.

OMG - unsealed concrete floors, it's everywhere. Have to seal the floors, no way to clean it without making the problem worse.

Then they started checking workers' gear - aaaaaaah, those boots - they go straight to hazmat disposal!

Then they started checking the workers' houses. They could tell which people took off their boots and put on slippers, versus who just walked in and sat in their favorite chairs - literally could see the patterns in mercury embedded in the carpet.

Lots of folks got their rugs replaced by the company that year...

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If you can, add one of the many browser extensions which append "&UDM=14" to all Google search queries. This turns off the AI slop nonsense and gives old-style search results.

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Back in the days of Analog television in the US, the standard was known as NTSC (it didn't really stand for Never Twice the Same Color, but it should have.)
It was an amazing method of sending a color TV signal in a way that was completely compatible with the old black and white sets (whose designers had not considered color being sent at all, thus had made no provision for it in the specifications.) It also allowed for a color set to show a black and white broadcast without odd color artifacts showing up.
That's where the color gamuts and phosphor choices first reared their heads - and part of the issue was how much color signal you could transmit using NTSC. This wasn't much of a problem when everything was analog from camera to set - you turned a dial at the camera to make sure the colors weren't too bright, all good.

In the mid 1980s, we started to see digital paint systems that could make frames of broadcast TV. They had the ability to make way, way more colors than NTSC could show, because they were directly coupled to the RGB inputs of the monitors.

We realized this problem when our graphics started going on air and we got phone calls from the satellite providers - the images had such high color signals that they were affecting the next channel over, and you could see Station 1's image as ghostly blurring on Station 2.

We then had to train the Paint operators on the concept of "illegal colors" and the size of the FCC fines involved. Fun times!

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The other one like that was when Sweetie gave Nephew a Furby. She said "Be sure to take the batteries out before you go!"

I'm like "Eh, Furby, it'll be fine." Packed it in the back of the car, Nephew in the car seat behind me. Off we go, again several hours of driving.

As we're driving, some bump wakes it up. It doesn't just have a motion sensor, it's got a whole suite of sensors, sound and light and orientation as well.

It starts with various "Gooo" and "HaHaHa" noises because it just woke up and it's being moved around.

Pretty soon, it's saying "Me no see you!" "Light on please?" "You hide light!" "Maybe me scared!" - having a little Furby meltdown in the wayback.

Within minutes of this, Nephew's having a larger kiddo meltdown because we're torturing Furby by locking it in a bag in the dark like some sort of animatronics kidnappers...

That was _not_ a pleasant trip.

Lesson here is: When she says "take the batteries out" you TAKE THE BATTERIES OUT.

(I'm sure this lesson is more generalizable, but I have yet to learn that part.)

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Nephew had a shape-sorter in the form of a big clear plastic snail that the shapes dropped into. Every time you dropped in a square or cylinder, it would play a jazzy little 8-bit tune.

Because it had to sense when a kid dropped a little plastic piece, it was very sensitive to motion.

Very sensitive.

Very, very, sensitive.

Oh, so sensitive.

Packed it in the back of the car once for a 4-hour trip. Right at the bottom of the pile of luggage and toddler stuff.

The whole way, every time we hit a bump or a stick or a leaf or crossed over the paint on the highway, the cursed thing would go "Deet-a-deet-a-beep-beep-beepy-beep"

Of course, no off switch - in the house, it worked pretty well as an intrusion detector, set it anywhere near a door and just walking in would start it going.

Freaking nightmare fuel.

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Well, a couple years of "This browser is now broken for my workflow and nobody is fixing it" and there's no going back. I dropped FF for that reason, switched to PaleMoon.

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There's an Asimov short where scientists reverse-engineer how to do math by hand on paper rather than using machines - the ultimate goal is to remove the vulnerable, expensive computer guidance systems from missiles and replace them with a human who will make the calculations on-the-fly, as it were...

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My half-brothers would never eat tapioca pudding.

That's because our father, at that point in time a single dad, bought a box of tapioca pudding mix. The recipe on the box said "scald 2 cups of milk" - he knew that scald was another word for "burn", so he cooked the milk until it was black, and proceeded with the rest of the recipe (although he did have to add some water to get everything to dissolve.)

Life-long memories of horrid, black pudding...

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My favored laptop (Asus TUF 17 with AMD and physical buttons under the touchpad, running Linux) came with a horrible Broadcom WiFi/BT card. Dropped out often, slowed down for no reason, sometimes just disappeared needing a power cycle.)

Changed that out for the Intel AX210 - it has been all but perfect ever since. With luck, you'll have no issues with your setup now.