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A drafting pencil is a mechanical pencil with a long (~4mm), thin tip called a “lead sleeve” that makes it great for scribing along the edges of rulers, also making it easy to see what you’re writing. Unfortunately, the thin lead sleeve gets damaged very easily when the pencil is dropped, breaking the brittle graphite inside as it’s forced through. Although it’s usually possible to un-bend a bent sleeve by pushing it on the edge of a table, a particularly violent impact can cause an unfixable dent. (Based on my experience, drafting pencils are a poor choice for emotionally volatile…
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The event was held at the Museum of American Heritage from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM. First, I worked on a Technics SL-MC7 CD changer. It had a magazine into which up to 60 CDs were loaded and a sliding carriage to select and play discs. When plugged in, the machine showed “checking discs” on its display and made various mechanical noises as it attempted unsuccessfully to move the carriage. The problem (as with many old CD players) was that the belt driving the carriage was loose and had to be replaced. Fortunately, there were plenty of spare belts on…
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This Fixit Clinic was held in the Hayward Public Library from 11:00 to 2:00 PM. I took on the unwise challenge of attempting to repair a person’s VHS VCR, a task probably best left to someone older with direct experience with these devices. Luckily, I had watched a few YouTube videos on the subject so things weren’t as bad as they could have been. First, given that the year is 2024, let me put a brief explanation of how VCRs work, taken from pages 260-261 of The Way Things Work, a wonderful book that you should read. Like a …
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Some time ago, a lighter in my house ran out of fuel and I decided to take it apart despite “common sense” (i.e. a blind and baseless fear of fire) telling me not to. To be fair, the last time I took apart a lighter, there were hair-singeing consequences, but this time, I verified that the lighter was completely empty of fuel to avoid this risk. The lighter is disassembled by removing a single screw towards the back, a press-fit collar towards the front, and prying the two halves of the glued-together case apart. Inside, there are two levers: a…
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Introduction Last summer in Hong Kong I bought a steelyard scale from Lee Wo Steelyard on Shanghai street. When asked how to use the scale, the store owner told me to “ask my mom, she knows”, but she didn’t. I then consulted my grandfather, who gave a partial explanation of how to use the scale and read the weight. Aside from him though, nobody else (even among my Hong Kong relatives) knew exactly how to use it and read the weight. What would have helped me at the time is a specific English guide on Chinese steelyards, but since I…
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Gedit (the GNOME text editor) has a word counter plugin available on GitHub (here), but I didn’t really like it since it couldn’t display the word count of a highlighted section of your document. To do that, you would need to highlight something, and then use the Document Statistics tool from the dropdown menu. I forked the plugin and changed some code so that if anything is highlighted, it instead displays the word count of the selection. In addition, the definition of a word was changed so that words with apostrophes were counted as one and not two …
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The Humanity icon theme for Ubuntu does not have an icon for STL files and other 3D modeling files, so I decided to create one. Using the default empty file icon, I added a cube with gradient fill and the letters “stl” underneath with LibreOffice Draw. Then, I went to /usr/share/mime/types to find out what mimetype STL files are — they are of type “model/stl”, so I created a new theme (instructions here), named the icon “model-stl”, and put the icon there. Here is the LibreOffice Draw file if you want to edit the icon or make a similar …
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The Idea Is Born In my opinion, an ideal alarm clock should: have an easy-to-read time display, produce a very loud and annoying ring, be able to set alarms with multiple criteria, and, of course, tell the time accurately. Most alarm clocks on the market satisfy no more than two of these criteria: very basic analog alarms are very loud and have good displays, but are technologically very “dumb” and are not exactly accurate, digital alarm clocks also have good displays and decently loud alarms, but are similarly dumb and inaccurate, and “smart” alarm clocks like Amazon’s Echo line are…
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I recently added a contact form to my website and was told by my parents that it would lead to a lot of spam. Here’s the first one I’ve received, a few days after the form was launched: Name: Christie WooEmail: woo.christie@gmail.comMessage: Have you seen this rice thing? It’s melting it off! https://youtu.be/ISxPEZkLk6g Note to spammers: rice cannot melt off fat, and even if it could, I am happy with my body and do not want to “melt off” fat from it. If I did, I would stop giving in to the multimillion-dollar industry that exists to make …
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The Fixit Clinic is an event in which “coaches” help people repair their broken household items with a focus on teaching repair skills rather than actually getting the item in question repaired. I, along with another person spent the entire 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM period helping to repair a leaking Nespresso Inissia. This coffee machine forces hot water through coffee pods at high pressure to produce an espresso brew. After spending quite a bit of time disassembling, testing, and staring blankly at the thing, we found out that the leak came from where the cup-puncturing piece connected with the…
