I buy a trash can with a foot-opener — not a cheap one. Three test kicks — it doesn't open anymore. Turns out to be manufacturing. It gets picked up — cool! — I buy a different model or another brand. That one opens smoothly but it doesn't stand flat on the floor which makes it quake when I kick the pedal. A hammer is needed to fix it — I risk voiding warranty from self-repair to save another return, waiting, digital paperwork. I buy an affordable DVD player with HDMI output to improve on the DVD playback on PC nightmare - copy protection trouble way too often. While the player is shiny and makes audio CD playback more fun than Audacious and a notebook, it plays one out of the four DVDs I feed to it. One out of four. One — Four. Besides other shortcomings. Another return. I browse through HDMI DVD players at Amazon.de: noisy drive, doesn't play half my disks, bad video quality, disks don't come all out, slow in menus, sometimes reads disks or not, playback stops somewhere in the middle of a movie, replacement unit as bad as first try, off-on needed to make disk read — all over the place, no exceptions, not just foo and bar company, but Toshiba, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, LG, Pioneer — companies that at least achieved to nail their names into my head (though Sony mostly in bad ways: rootkit audio CDs, limited rights and illegalizing a run of GNU/Linux on hardware you own, dust inside a cell phone display, dust inside a display!). My recent Amazon orders prove: the only thing I can buy that really works... is a book.