beyond trivial issues

I’d argue that 10-15% of issues are trivial issues and are worth investigating even without a schematic if the alternative is just throwing something away.

I can top that. I got a broken $100 BlueYeti microphone for $10 on eBay. The USB cable they shipped it with was bad.

You don’t have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it’s not that hard to try.

pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.

My point is that in a better world, people could fix this kind of thing themselves. Like offer a discount for their trouble and have them or their mechanic aunt come by and fix it.

Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.

I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn’t boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn’t anything too important on it that I hadn’t backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).

All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).

I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.

She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

Yet there’s zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn’t work, trash it.

Scroll through maker TikTok

This guy might be looking in the wrong places.

The best smelling one.

TIL thanks

I assumed they were generally against the concept of sex not strictly for the purpose of reproduction.

• Auswitch statement
• V2latile variable
• Goebboolean
• Zyklon C++
• Left shift, Reich shift
• Open and close Parenzer
• Iron Cross-compiler

I’m aware. Just funny that you can’t have sex for fun apparently when you’re pregnant.

While not every player is not privy to the nightmare of every person in their game becoming with child, those who have the bug are finding a large number of Sims randomly marked as pregnant.

Who the fuck wrote this?

Once a character is pregnant, they can’t Woo-Hoo anymore,

Never pegged The Sims for being so Puritain.

Old Spice was not long for this woeld.

Based on the description, my guess is that the script solved the problem of having the line interrupted by only doing a single 56k transaction per phone call.

Lots of times, phone calls were billed $$$ for the first minute and $ for every minute after that. If her script only did one transaction per call and not even using the full minute, that could add up fast.

And, given that it took a month for the bill to come, she could have been doing something wrong even during the day. Nobody would have noticed until the bill, and the 1am calls stood out the most when the bill finally came. Maybe there was a local exchange that didn’t require long distance?

Also from this fine media establishment:

• Warning: 73% of garden soil contains hidden drain chemicals affecting families for 18 months
• I tried this 2-ingredient summer mask at 53 and my dark spots faded 70% in 3 weeks (dermatologists explain why)
• Cold plunge warning: this 15-second exposure raises senior blood pressure by 40 mmHg

Also, for a writer named “John,” he seems to really like wearing women’s clothing

And I don’t know where he finds the time to get dressed considering he’s written 18 articles so far today some in just 14 minutes.

If I remember from my USB product design days, as long as they don’t include any of the official markings on the product or packaging, they’re in the clear.

many book scanners use a wedge shape and two angled cameras to scan the pages when the book is held open at about a 5 degree angle

I’ve seen this kind of post a few times. If I survived a near-death experience, you bet I’d be glued to my phone telling everyone I was ok as soon as I could.

A birdwatching friend of mine has decided that if he ever discovers a new species, he’s naming it “seagull” regardless of where he finds it or what it looks like just to piss off all the ornithologists.

Very well executed, though not sure how I feel about the glass plate squishing the pages down like that.