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.

Music software that shuffles entire albums and plays them end to end before switching to another random album.

I used to ask “what did you do?” when there was a guy just buying a bouquet. Got a few chuckles.

I grew up in Virginia. When I was in the 3rd grade, Jim Gilmore won on a “no car tax” campaign in 1998. Funny how we still have car tax hmm…

The best smelling one.

I just re-read Man in the High Castle which was written/takes place in the 60s.

One of the characters wants to know the name of the naval vessel that is currently in port in San Francisco. To do this, he has to call the local newspaper office on a telephone and ask them. Then they call him back with the answer.

Many parts of the book are anachronistic (because in this alternate reality, the Nazis are colonizing Mars), but I believe that part was accurate because I don’t know how else you could get that information.

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

Old Spice was not long for this woeld.

This is a really incredible product. Unlike a lot of engineering-for-kids stuff, this provides just enough assistance to get out of the way, and I imagine it’d be a blast to play with as a kid.

As someone who used to get blisters trying to cut cardboard with scissors, I wish I had this as a kid.

Will it overflow? Will we have a -32768chan?

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?

How about the processor optimization as your 8 bit number needs to be packed and unpacked every time you want to use it?

I you read the responses here, there’s enough ambiguity about the choice of 256 users to maybe put a damper on the reflext to gatekeep computer science from a journalist.

A single username will use up more memory than an 8-bit limitation to the number of users will save.

I’m typing this on a 64 bit device. Why anyone would limit something to an 8 bit number in 2025 is really odd.

I also suggest putting ketchup in the soap pump dispenser. Really throws them for a loop.