pastellexists

pastell

@pastellexists

may death never stop you

trans and queer lesbian just trying this thing out

~♡~

19 - gemini - US
english, toki pona

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i maintain @precious-tiny-things

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letterboxd | storygraph | backloggd

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pastellexists
@pastellexists

i fixed a lamp the other day!

cheap LED lamp i was using for light at my "messy" desk, started flickering real bad. somehow i have acquired enough intuition to immediately think bad capacitor? and incredibly, i was right! bad capacitor right before the transformer in the power brick. found it because i figured that's where a cap would go bad, and tested it first. then tested a bunch of other caps both on that board and just in my parts organizers to make sure i was testing it right. then i happened to have a capacitor that matched it that i had harvested from something else, and i swapped it in! and it fucking worked!!!!

fixing stuff is genuinely one of the most rewarding things i do. on top of the pretty widely understood rewarding feeling of developing a skill and solving problems, it's nice to be able to fight consumerism, even in a very small way.

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in reply to @pastellexists's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

wooooow I never would have guessed that was the problem haha, major props! It's so cool that even cheap electronics are still made of interchangeable parts, given the right skillset anyway.

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pastellexists
@pastellexists

thank you! i honestly don't know how i guessed that, i'm really not very good at all of this stuff. but yeah, there's this sort of weird valley-shaped graph when it comes to repairability. really cheap stuff doesn't have the money to spend on fancy things you can't get replacements for. usually the housings will be tough to get into without breaking but thats more a result of that being a really cheap way to make things than a malicious one. then once you get into like proper brand-name consumer products, the budget goes up and the various anti-repair stuff comes into play. but once you get into professional grade stuff, A/V equipment and servers and things come to mind, no one buying that kind of stuff has any patience for anti-repair practices, so it's much less common again.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

don't second guess yourself so much, okay? it's really easy to fall into imposter syndrome in tech, but the honest truth is, even the best people in tech just know how to make correct guesses more often haha. You get full credit for this! it's not just luck, it's skill-reinforced luck! :)

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