Technology

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.

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.

What does pitching a zipper even mean?

This is TERRORISM in the United States!

-Trump's NSPM-7 which classifies ANTI CAPITALISM as TERRORISM!

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.

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.

This is great and I love repairing things. I wish that repair skills would be taught in schools.

You might as well. If you’re going to trash it anyway, good odds you’re not going to hurt anything by loosening some screws and seeing what’s what.

Spoiler. On fixable things, it’s usually the on/off switch. I think they deliberately make them out of cheap plastic that will eventually break. Plug in oil heaters. Mixers. Lamps with foot switches. Etc.

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.

"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?

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!

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.

It seems these repair cafes are very popular these days. Even my village of 7000 has one.

Radical as fuck

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 :(

If I can't fix something..instead of throwing it away, I save it to bludgeon the people responsible for creating something I can't fix.

You better make sure I'm gone when you go into the bunker. I'm looking for air vents with company logos on them. I'll have my deluxe HP ready, hung on a leather strap slung around my back.

...when "Squint" & "Cheesecurd" drag you from the depths of Mt. Florida, it'll be me, "Ink Cartridge Empty" bringing the full weight of my HP2500XLRS down upon thine head!!!

This reminds me that I just repaired my old Eastern bloc made speakers, a pair of Videoton DCR 2520A. The woofers have out-of-spec surrounds now since the now for real co-op (?) that bought the tools from Videoton during the robber-privatization worn out the tool needed to make the up-to-spec surrounds. They still had the tooling for the midrange speakers, and after some modification I could use some general purpose surrounds from Aliexpress.