-
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 …
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 …
-
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 …
-
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…
-
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 …
-
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…
-
My room’s door doesn’t have a lock. It doesn’t need one. But cars probably don’t need to go above 130km/h either, yet they can, for… reasons. So for… reasons, I made a lock for my door that is very simple and requires no modification of the door’s current hardware. My door swings inward, so to prevent someone from coming in, I have to prevent them from pushing the door into the room. This is accomplished by bolting the door to the doorframe, using the strike plate (the little hole that the latch goes into) as a point to latch onto,…
-
Line AC power is a lot more dangerous than low-voltage DC power. As such, it requires different methods of connecting wires together temporarily. For example, you can use the same wire nuts used for permanent connections, though it’s not particularly fast or repeatable. You could just twist the wires together, but just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should. A modest step up in safety is wrapping the twisted wires in electrical tape, but that’s not particularly convenient or safe. You can use things like crocodile clips, but I didn’t have any on hand and many are…
