Thinking about the manufacturing of consumer tech is so fucked, sometimes.

$5 for an optical mouse. A PCB, injection-molded outer shell, fasteners, an optical mouse sensor (which is basically a low res camera and computer vision algorithm in a chip), a wireless radio and receiver, the cardboard packaging surrounding it, and everything else inside this product. For $5.

I dunno if it's good, but, christ. How the fuck did we get here.

I was apparently a raccoon in a past life, or something, because I just love digging through e-waste. Every tech company I've worked at has had a bin somewhere that, if you're persistent, you can get some real goodies out of. An Xbox Elite controller, an entire working 2-in-1 laptop, parts for projects, all things I've fished from the bin.

Recently my work had an employee e-waste event where people could drop off their own stuff. And in there, I found this thing - a Cricut Mini.

For those who don't know - Cricut makes a series of cutting machines with the same form factor as like, a printer. You load in some material and a cutting blade drags across the surface, cutting out shapes for craft projects. It's a neat piece of tech, and so finding this one discarded, I figured I'd take it home and see if I could fix it.

Minecraft, especially with mods, tends to make real world processes seem way simpler than they are. E.g. combining three bundles of wheat to get a loaf of bread. That said, making brass really is just 'melt these two things together', huh.