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My Personal Rules For Undertaking An Attempt To Repair A Piece of Tech Without Expertise

Sometimes it feels worth making an attempt to repair some piece of technology even if I don't know anything (or not much) about how exactly it works or what's broken. Either something that used to work until I broke it or something that I picked up from the street because I didn't think it should be thrown on a pile of scrap and dismantled. A vintage kitchen helper found on the street, an expensive looking radio from the 1980s a friend wanted to throw away, an electric saw that worked for two weeks before breaking (which is when I understood why it was so cheap), a remote control that was powered while wet for a while, an annoying printer that tasted my boots to give it a reason not to work properly; You know, some thing that you don't know anything about, but since it's already broke, you may as well ruin it completely by taking it apart and not remembering which part goes where. I like taking that stuff apart (if I have the time) right after deciding to throw it out. That way it doesn't feel like I'm loosing anything except time, but I may gain knowledge of how it used to work and experience in taking apart devices.

Over time I gathered rules that I give myself when doing this, to minimise the possibility of wasting time and an easily repairible device. I ususally ignore at least some of those rules. But I believe that they are good and make sense. They are no special insight and nothing you couldn't come up with yourself. But I needed to think of them consiouly before I was able to take advantage of them. So I recommend adapting them when doing similar repair attemps that are above ones experience level.

1 - Wait until you have the (right) time.

If you're stressed, don't have a few hours to waste, can't stop thinking of something else, etc. then it's not the right time to make an attempt to repair a device that you don't know. Without taking my time, I tend to ignore the rest of the rules and end up with a pile of frustration and 20 pieces of an even more broken device than before.

2 - Clean your workbench before starting.

Whether you have an actual workbench or use a table or the floor, make sure you have the necessary space to line up different pieces, modules, boards, plates, springs, cables, etc. in an orderly fashion, the extra room you may need for a soldering iron and other large tools as well as a collection of smaller tools and then have enough space left to comfortably work on the device from all angles.

3 - Prepare a container for screws and other small parts.

It doesn't have to be one of these magnetic dishes. Sometimes it shouldn't be one, because cetain parts shouldn't be magnetised. But it should be capable of keeping at least 5 or 6 groups of parts separate. A medizine magazine works. Don't forget to label which screws are for what. That container should be out of reach of your elbow, tool's cables, etc. For large enough screws you can stick them in a piece of blank cartboard and scribble any sort of description, grouping information or remarks on it.

4 - Take pictures. Take more pictures. Take better pictures.

You may be able to remember how any part was positioned before you started working on it. But you may not remember all of them after an hour or two of tinkering with and looking at a completely different part. Also it's not uncommon to overlook a possible ambiguity in how parts go together. When you notice during re-assembly that you aren't sure which way an almost symmetrical piece of metal goes into another piece of mechanics, then you'll be happy to have good pictures.

5 - Make sure there is good lighting onto the work area.

This means more light than you would be comfortable with/need for watching something on a screen or navigating the room as well as light from the right angles (and not only from one angle). This helps with seeing small details better (or at all), increasing contrast between different parts, seeing e.g. markings and labels more easily. Thereby it prolongs the time it takes for you to become frustrated. If there isn't good lighting at your work area, best fix something up before you start so you don't have to fiddle with torches and phones jammed between books and a water botter or something while trying to do the actual work on the broken device.

6 - Stop before you're frustrated.

If it turns out to not be simple and quick to fix something (as it usually does) then it can be helpful to recognise the moment in which motivation starts for fall beneath the threshold that you require to continue working on the device properly. If you're getting sloppy it may be better to stop for now before you bend something out of shape, loose a tiny screw, fry some electronics or something like that. Especially if you're working on something that isn't completley broken, it's important to spot your frustration in time so you can still put it back together without breaking more than you were able to rapair.

7 - Do research before you start.

Even if you can't find any information at all about the specific device you have, there might good guides on how to do something on similar devices or you can look at people repairing the general kind of device that you want to work on, or read about common causes for your issue or similar issues. There usually are some tips to be learned from other people's experiences; Even if they were as inexperienced as you before they made a repar attemps. Nowadays most of those experiences are found on YouTube. For some areas it makes sense to search web forums or Reddit as well. Sadly, information on personal web sites are rearely presented by search engines.

An Example

I picked up a car radio with tape drive and 5x CD changer from a curve. After drying it (it was filled with rain) it worked, but the magnetic head sounded dirty and CDs weren't always recognised. After being annoyed by not being able to listen to CDs for the enoughth time, I opened up the device, cleaned the laser's lens, and it worked. That was lucky and I was glad that I ignored the advice from a more experienced person who said: "If you don't know exactly what you're doing, don't try to repair a CD player. You'll brek it even more." Then I started putting it back together because I had to remove some metal pieces to get to the laser lens. The phone that I used for lighting fell from the bottle I balanged it on and tipped a glass of water with the intention of destroying my laptop. Because I had put all the metal pieces onto one pile (onto other things on the desk), I wasn't sure which one I had to put on first. Since I hadn't taken any pictures I just tried it the wrong way first. Then I had to take two pieces off again because the order was wrong, during which I lost a spring of uncertain importance. When I wanted to put the last piece back on I noticed that I didn't have enough screws of the right size. Neither in the pile on the desk nor on the floor. After replacing some of the screws and distributing them in a way that made the whole thing look sturdy enough I put the lid back on, turned the device on again and was thanked by a crying DC motor that tried to rotate a long chain of gears, of which one seemed to be stuck. I tried to find which part blocked what by touching the gears in question while it was trying to move. There would have been safer ways to find the cause of the new problem. But I didn't have the patience. I touched the caseing with a PCB, the device went off and never back on again.

I think I don't have to list or point out how abiding to the above rules would have helped in this example.

I hope that you find joy in learning something from failed repair attempts wether you abide any of these rules or not.

"Children absorb knowledge like a sponge." — Umm, a sponge doesn't absorb knowledge at all. You can't teach it fucking anything by talking to it or giving it a book. That's why children are stupid. Grown-ups assume absorbing skills where there are none.

As a child I used to play with old PCs, take them apart, assemble different parts to new PCs, etc. One day when I was 12 I was carrying a 486 Desktop PC to a friend's house, who lived in a different part of the town. On my way there a man stopped me and asked me if I'm interested in computers. He told me he has lots of computers and computer parts at home and I could look at them, pick anything I wanted and take it home to keep. I just had to come home with him and I'd get all the computer parts I wanted. Sadly I couldn't, because my freidn was waiting for me and expected me to bring the 486. So the man gave me his phone number and told me to definitely call because he would soon have to through away good comuter parts if I wouldn't take them.

Back at home I told my mother about the man. For some reason she thought that it was a strange thing to stop a child in the street for and that I shouldn't call him. I replied "He's liek 80 or 90 or something and he said he has to throw the stuff away if I don't take it." I'm not entirely sure whether it was more the age esitmation or my fear of good tech getting thrown away that let her give him a chance to explain himself. So, I called him, took a train to his house and you may guess what happened there, or continue reading, or both.

He lead me to his basement. It was huge. It seemed larger than the already large house. And every single room of it, including the hall in the center, was filled with PCBs, monitors, PCs, racks, more PCBs and cards, software packages (those thick ring binders with manual, diskettes and sometimes printed source code or other notes ticked in an even thicker cardboard box), ICs and other small parts in transparent boxes, empty boards and all the chemicals needed to make your own PCBs, some unfinished projects, home-grown microcomouters, printers, cables, and so on. A retro computer fan's paradise! He was in my home town because he visited a medical specialist. I'm guessing that he knew or suspected that he didn't have much time to get his hobby stuff into the hands of somebody who'd appreciate it. The latter was certainly his goal and did appreciate the tech, which seemed to make him very happy. But I only realised many years later how much more there would have been to appreciate. Back then I wasn't interested in ISA memory extension cards. They were slow and small compared to even SIMM modules. I didn't care for his software collection at all. And I didn't see what I couldn't have done with a custom build computer for which no software existed except what you write yourself. I had no use for his chemical laboratory, hard disks with less than 100 MB of space or electronic parts like logic gates. An 8086 PC was just a worthless piece of too slow hardware to get any fun out of it. I used an MFM drive solely to open it up and take it apart to see how they built these things.

Recently I was thinking, that old man met me too early. My interest in computers was not developed enough at the time. But he did die soon after I visited his house. So for getting some of his computer stuff to somebody who'll at least do something with it before it gets thrown out it was just the right time. I didn't know him, just met him once after his suspicious chat-up. But his wife actually thanked me after he had died. So maybe I didn't come across as greedy or too selfish.

3mm LEDs (Macro Picture)

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To the extent possible under law, steeph has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Just a photo of 3mm LEDS that I took a while a go. I like it for it's simple techness, rainbowness, high resolution and general look (glow).

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My Further Experience With (Trying To) Use Astro Slide As My Main Phone

This entry is referencing the entry 'Planet Computers' Astro Slide'.

After having owened and used both previous PDAs by Planet Computers (the Gemini PDA and the Cosmo Communicator), I partly knew what to expect from their new modal, the Astro Slide. I knew it wouldn't be a robust, top-notch state-of-the-art smartphone. Planet Computers makes devices for a pretty small niche and needs to sell these devices for a reasonable price despite their low quantity. After having used it as my main phone, I've come to the comclusion that there are reasosn to be disappointed by the outcome of the device anyway.

I've written about my initial impressions of the device. This entry just adds what further experiences I made while using the device as my main phone for ~42 days. tl;dr: I'm still disappointed.

The build quality is relatively low. But I underestimated and/or misremembered how annoying those buttons with no pressure point whatsoever are. Thy aren't even protuding, nor do they have a different color or texture from their surrounding. That means every times I want to turn on the screen of the phone without opening it, I have to either stumble around the edge of the device with my finger for a while, or I need to have a close-up look at the side of the device to locate the button, then fumble around with my finger for just a little while. That turns of the touch-screen. But unlocking it by using the touch-screen doesn't always work. Sometimes the touch-screen just doesn't seem to be in the mood to respiond to being touched in certain places. I also forgot how annoying it is to have a phone without working adaptive sc reen brightness. I have to turn of the brightness way up, above a sensible poiunt, to make sure it's readable in sun-light. Sometimes, adaptive screen brightness just turns it to 0 for a while, which effectively means it turns off the screen. I guess there's a reason why automatic screen brightness is turned off by default.

The screen is okay, but not very bright, hardly readable in direct sunlight. Colors aren't very accurate. And sometimes contrast and colors shift as if some filtwer was applied, for no reason. The speakers are small and not very loud, lack low frequencies completely (no bass). The headphone output is prone to CPU noise while the screen is turned on. The fingerprint reader is so unreliable it's best treated as if it didn't exist. It's useless. The sliding mechanism feels surprisingly sturdy. I didn't break it yet. But I'm sure something will break or come apart soon, as it was the case with my previous Planet Computer PDAs. The software isn't much better. Ecven though there are security updates available and a notification makes sure to permanently inform me of that fact, no updates can be loaded. The OTA update is fundamentally broken. Apparently Planet Computers didn't think it would be a necessary feature to be able to update Android!

I don't know if it's the Mediatek chipset that the device uses (Maybe Android support for that chipset really is that bad.) but using Android on the Astro Slide is just as buggy on the Astro Slide as it was on previous Planet Computers PDAs. Some apps aren't available for the platform. After every time Android boots some internal app whose function isn't clear to me crashes. Sometimes notifications disappear for no reason. Sometimes a notification sound plays for no reason. Sometimes the screen turns off and locks for no reason. Sometimes the device reboots for no apparent reason. It can be said that Android does run on it. But it's not the experience one expects from a system that is supposed to be native to and ships with a device.

The camera quality is just beyond embarassing. The sensor was obviously chosen by number of megapixels and price only. It's been a long time since I've seen such smushy and noisy pictures even from a <100€ phone. Battery life isn't as good as you might expect from a clunky devoce like this. My Google Pixel 4a with not even half of the battery capacity, despite being over four years old and in daily use, lasts longer than the Astro Slide with (very roghty and estimated) similar use.

When backing the Indiegogo project, my intention was to use the Astro Slide as a small Debian laptop for my packet. A mobile machine for SSH, FTP, some web stuff and for texting. It would have replaced its predecessor, the Cosmo Communicator, in that role. But Planet Computers stopped supporting any OS other than Google Android. Not only is there no official buld of any Linux distribution, the package mirror that used to provide DEBs for the Cosmo Communicator also quietly diasppeared. There doesn't seem enough interest in the device in the Sailfish community. Maybe some Linux support will come from users at some point. But I don't see any on the horizon.

With the previous Planet Computers PDA, the Cosmo Communicator, I had a fallback use case: an occasional PDA for SSH stuff while travelling, sometimes a tiny fileserver at events. But lacking availability of any non-googley OS, I feel compelled to ask: What is the Astro Slide for? I, personally, don't seem to have a suitable use case for it.