I had a VCR that I had to toss, many years ago, because some crappy little plastic gear had lost teeth. Replacing it would’ve cost almost as much as a new VCR. I could see someone with a 3D printer could build one without a lot of effort now.
The concept of these repair cafes are great. I’ve volunteered in a couple. But some of the things that people bring in… pair of 10$ flats that the sole has fully fallen of. The damn glue costs more than the shoes. A run of the mill blender from the 90s that just should be retired. Damn t shirts with holes. Please just use the shirt as a rag at this point.
Other things made sense. Laptop hinges, bikes, outdoor power equipment. Holes and buttons in jackets and sweaters.
What does pitching a zipper even mean?
A new euphemism for seeing a hot woman on the bus? “Man she really makes me pitch my zipper!”
Checks out
It’s an old racist term for when English sailors would throw an Asian person overboard. This came from old English doctrine that thought they brought jaundice, and this was the best solution. I’m just messing, this is all BS.
Now this is unironically what I think of when the tiny, near-dead embers of patriotism in my soul get a whiff of oxygen.
Great Depression 2.0 is here, what did we do back during the first one?
Well, lotta people fuckin’ starved and died, got terrible diseases, died before the age of 2, or in child birth, etc.
But, we also formed co-ops. We took a random sad sack of broke and broken people, and their stuff, people with no proper wage work available to do, got em together and said ‘anything useful you can do, for anybody else, is better than nothing’
We talked to those people. We commiserated. We built solidarity with others, face to face.
We fixed shit, we jerry-rigged shit, we made things that were completely broke into things that were only slightly broken.
We took shotguns to local foreclosure auctions, and not so subtly implied to anyone other than someone who’d promised to just gift the home back to the homeowner, that the shotguns were loaded.
Nowadays… call it recycling, upcycling, right to repair, what the fuck ever… stop wasting your money on stupid shit that won’t last a year or even ever be used by you once.
You don’t know how expensive food or fuel is gonna be in a month, 3 months, etc. Could triple by next year, who knows.
Build your life around trying to plan for that.
You got a storage unit full of shit? A walk in closet full of stuff you ain’t worn in a year?
You don’t need it.
Somebody else probably could use it. Figure out how to find that person, and get it to them, with as few or at least as fair middlemen involved as possible. You get a fair price, or maybe even a haircut or week of babysitting, fuck, a pound of flour… they get some barely used clothes.
Every random plot of possibly usable garden space, make it bloom. Fuck your yard of useless grass that literally is a traditional offshot of nobility having so much land they could show off making some of it not productive.
HOA in the way? Learn their bylaws and just investigate them by way of malicious supercompliance. Chances are high they’re doing some kind of money laundering or fraud.
… We’ve done this kinda shit before, our grandparents at least.
Most people actually get joy and purpose not from accumulating wealth, but from feeling like they’re actually some kind of important, in the service of others, in some kind of real and tangible way.
The system has failed us, in every possible way…, it will eat us alive if we do not build our own.
In the words of Adam Savage:
“I reject your reality, and substitute my own”.
We do not have another choice.
Hey, great accumulation of well articulated thoughts!
Maybe a tangible reflection of what many currently feel inside but struggle to focus and express. In a way, a community service you’ve done for others, in the spirit of the broader message here.
Cuba has developed a rich, mature DIY culture after several generations of trade isolation by the US and the collapse of the USSR. With a very limited inflow of tech goods, they basically don’t throw away anything. People cobble together all kinds of machines from pieces of other machines, The maker culture is much more than a hobby, it’s the predominent way of thinking.
As … immensely ironic and basically ideologically cruel as it is, we should absolutely emulate this attitude, learn from them.
They get starved and blockaded, we get flooded with hypereffective digital marketing, insane overproduction of single use garbage, horrendously overpriced cars full of more factory defects than a t34 from 1942, that is half illegal to repair on your own … while almost no one makes anything built to last any more.
Again, very ironic, but this actually results in a very similar situation for most normal people, at least once all the credit cards stop working.
This was very well written. This message resonates with me deeply. Thank you. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Thank you, but my writing ability, in this sort of way, is nothing in comparison to… Charlie Chaplin.
To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-The-Final-Speech-from-The-Great-Dictator-
I still cannot watch or even just read this without being moved to tears.
We need a new story to believe, now that the ‘American Dream’ is so thoroughly broken.
We need hope, placed in the right direction… in ourselves, and in each other.
Wow, sounds like you’re some sort of commie terrorist.
Maybe a CRT Trans Obama Marxist Hunter Biden Laptop terrorist even…
Think about it, the number 7. So you have seven, the base “sev” as in “sever”, by also “to save”. So from save and then the end of sever, combined you get the word “Savour” which of course is close to “savior”, which for them is the DEVIL…
Savior is six letters - 6
Savour is six letters - 6
And what is a savior? Jesus. Jesus’ dad is god, and he wears loose robes and he doesn’t have super tight, ripped, sweaty abs like Jesus, but he looks good for his age - like Zeus and the little mermaids dad, but more of a dad bod because he sits on clouds a lot and doesn’t swim in the ocean all day.
Dadbod is also six letters - 6
Do you get it now?
666
They want a savior (Satan), who will savour (eat) the dadbod (god)
Wake up.
Oh no!
… I am quite sure they will call me ‘some sort of crazy person’.
That kind of society sounds kinda sweet
A computer shop once laughed in my mom’s face for asking if they’d repair her printer. The accepted practice is to just throw the whole thing out when you want new ink or it stops working.
Eventually she tracked down a guy in another town who fixed printers, and he fixed the printer (a bottle cap was jammed inside, in case you were wondering. He returned the bottle cap).
That was 20 years ago and things aren’t better.
Man I know it.
I’ve definitely bought a new printer before because it was cheaper than ink. More than once.
Nowadays I’ve got a Samsung B&W laser that gets most of what I need to print, and a brother MFP inkjet for the rest. I’m keeping my eyes out for a color mfp laser when I visit thrift shops…I’d gotten one before and it worked well for a while but it was an HP so it broke and became non-economical to repair (and really, I didn’t need/want a giant corporate LaserJet in my home office).
But I don’t even really print in color…very rare that is even needed. If it is, it’s probably stuff like kids birthday invites and I’m gonna be better off sending it to a print shop like Staples or Kinkos or just order it online, anyway.
In fact I’m fairly sure the heads on the inkjet are a solid glob now.
If you, for some reason, need a printer that can make colored things, i highly suggest Epson ecotank printers, they cost a lil more than many inkjets but the ink last a lot because it’s a fucking tank where you put a lot of ink instead of a cardrige with little to none ink
I found my pair* of Brother color laser MFPs on Craigslist, being listed by a small business that was getting rid of them. I think you’ll have a lot better luck finding them via some method like that than by checking thrift shops.
That said, they are pretty giant, being designed for small/medium office use. However, I’m not sure there even is such a thing as a “small” color laser, since they inherently have to contain four sets of rollers instead of just one.
(* if you find somebody selling more than one of the same model, definitely get two so you have one for spare parts.)
I literally learned to solder so that I could replace some cheap popped capacitors on a speaker preamp this week.
Worked like a charm.
We’re quickly moving towards a Warhammer40k world where “old stuff is better”. Just like digital services become increasingly enshittified, late-stage capitalism incentivises companies to produce things ever more cheaply just to squeeze out some more of that precious shareholder value. Plastics, electronics, garments - everything is so thin nowadays that it will crack, break and tear quickly.
Case in point: here’s a picture of two types of copper wiring.
On the left, you can see the original wiring of a defunct LED light. Further examination showed that the wiring had simply broken in parts of the cable. So I went to the scrapyard and scavenged the wires off an old 1960s lamp plug (that’s the wiring on the right-hand side). These wires had 3-4x the amount of copper strands as compared to modern wires and will not snap easily. I soldered them onto the lamp - now the lamp lives to light another day.
I can only encourage everyone to get a simple soldering iron, some screwdrivers, or a bit of sewing equipment and get to work. You have nothing to lose from tinkering with your stuff (almost*) . If something was broken before, chances are you’d have discarded it anyway, so you can’t break it much more. But the dopamine hit you get when something previously defunct suddenly jumps back to life and serves you for several more years - that’s priceless. Also, fixing your shit is an erect middle finger to the capitalist logic of ever-decreasing product life cycles and the ever-increasing amounts of deliberately produced waste - all that at a time where we’re more painfully aware than ever that resources are finite, and the so-called first world is squandering a lot of them at the expense of everyone else.
So do your bit. It’s thrifty. It’s fun. And it’s the right thing to do.
* Unless you’re dealing with batteries or high voltages, in which case you want to be careful and do your research; house fires are no fun.
Just so you know, the larger gauge wires were to carry more current required by the old halogen bulb and are unnecessarily large for an LED light. A better comparison of how shit is crap these days is that a lot of electronics don’t even use copper wire but instead copper clad aluminum that’s subject to corroding withing 5-10 years of use. But I love to see you repairing things and “upgrading” along the way with thicker gauge wire! Just wanted to point out the larger power consumption of older appliances is often why they have larger gauge wires. There is nothing better for the environment than fixing and reusing what we have rather than replacing !
Just so you know, the larger gauge wires were to carry more current required by the old halogen bulb and are unnecessarily large for an LED light.
Thanks for the insight! Yeah, I could’ve thought about that. Yet, thinner wiring also comes with much poorer wear resilience. Looking at you, headphone and charger cables…
What sort of wear was your LED light getting? I’d not think that the wires would have any sort of flex or give in them on a well designed lamp. Sort of like my house wiring, it’s not like it’s flexing around all that much.
Sure, the wires are larger because they needed to be, but they are still functional, which is what matters.
I’d say one of the issues with repairing things these days is that everything is getting smaller and smaller. Where thick gauge wires were required before, now they use much thinner wire. Where thinner wires were used before, printed circuit boards are often used now. New circuit boards are chock full of miniature surface-mount components which are much more difficult to replace compared to the much larger circuit boards of the olden days. Every step of miniaturisation makes repairs require more skill.
Ugh, that description triggered my PTSD acquired during the latest repairs on a Lenovo Yoga. Tons of printed and taped-on PCB in place of once solid construction.
I guess that’s why nowadays, whenever I need to buy new, I first watch a teardown video to see the insides. If things look finicky and hard to access/repair, I’m not buying. Refuse > repair.
Ribbon cables with sub-millimeter slots to insert them into
Mmmmh! And ribbon cables that you need to manually fold so they’ll fit into the slot - what a great chance to break the sub-millimeter copper wiring inside!
I swapped screens on a touchbar mac a couple years ago. the screws are so tiny, i either had to use a magnifier or touch to tell which side was up. my phone has bigger screws in it.
Oh God here’s to hoping my 9ish year old yoga doesn’t give up the ghost anytime soon… At least my Lenovo products have always been rather stout! Only time I have taken it apart was to redo the thermal paste on the cpu cooler and when I did that I realized if something important breaks im probably gonna replace the laptop 😢
the larger gauge wires were to carry more current required by the old halogen bulb and are unnecessarily large for an LED light
To be fair, just because the controlling factor is mechanical strength rather than current capacity doesn’t mean the need for heavier gauge wire isn’t legitimate.
This is great and I love repairing things. I wish that repair skills would be taught in schools.
If you went to a school in a poor school district - they did. It was self-taught
I sewed a patch into my pants today instead of buying new ones!
This is the mindset that keeps the world going!
The hacker mindset exists beyond information technology.
Thinking now of the old SNL sketch where John Candy has a repair shop for fixing things most people throw away. Two women come in with a piece of toast they dropped that landed butter-side down on the rug. He decides to freeze it down in some liquid nitrogen and take off the fuzzy side with a belt-sander. Missin’ you, Johnny boy!
“Anticonsumerist”… kinda a shocking/clickbait way to put it. I wouldn’t call myself an “anticonsumerist” just because I’m cheap, I don’t want to pollute the environment with more tech waste, and I expect the stuff I buy to last. I mean, these people bought it in the first place, right? Maybe just anti-disposable tech?
God, I was just enjoying some cyberpunk-adjacent media yesterday and laughed at the satire of an in universe news outlet complaining about “anticonsumerist terrorism”.
Something something torment nexus
No they kick you in the shin and make slurs at you the entire time you are trying to fix your stuff. They really want you to feel bad about being a consumer.
Radical as fuck
I would love to do this. I’m great at changing out motorcycle tires and changing out brake pads, but I would love to learn how to solder or even diagnose bad diodes on a board.
It would be a great exchange of knowledge.
Go to Hacklab / maker space to teach and learn while making, fixing or tinkering.
Know anyone that’s into gaming? Modding old consoles is a great way to get into diagnosing board problems and fixing the crap PCBs in small electronics is fantastic for learning to solder. Two weeks ago I didn’t know shit about the eldrich slab of charms and runes inside electronics. Last week I successfully tested two power units for a playstation 4 and correctly diagnosed that mine has died due to APU overheating. Took about 2 hours, two videos, and a $15 continuity tester.
Unfortunately, mine’s dead in the water until I find someone who can reball the APU for less than the cost of a new system. In the mean time, I’m doing a tear down and mod on my Xbox 360.
Be the exchange you wish to see!!!
I absolutely lament the enshitification of youtube. It used to be easy to find a video on how to fix nearly anything, but that’s bad for the algorithm, because then you turn the screen off and go about fixing the thing, as opposed to watching more videos :(
Yeah absolutely. Whatever search algorithm they have heavily promotes newer videos over old ones. And that really sucks because there’s a lot of creators with really excellent back content libraries like reference quality material but it gets buried because it’s not new
It seems these repair cafes are very popular these days. Even my village of 7000 has one.
First I’ve ever heard of it.