I love this line in the post: "The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible."
There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.
It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.
Great post.