By Camas Frank
The universe is full of small coincidences. Some might call it serendipity that almost all of the electrical and mechanical products in this Millennial’s life have started to show their age just as it comes time for him to celebrate another trip around the Solar system.
Some might just see it as example of hyperawareness; the same reason people see patterns in celebrity deaths or come up with trends in seemingly unrelated national news. Whatever the cause, they always come in threes, depending on which events are ignored as the outlier.
The week started, quite literally Monday night, with TechBrew, April 11 at the Grill House on Higuera St. in Downtown SLO. A monthly event put on by Softec, the nonprofit clearinghouse for networking professionals in all things technology, their TechBrew often features speakers doing a little something different.
On this particular occasion, co-founders of iFixit, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules came down with their crew to inspire some hands on tinkering. They brought with them an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, which had been torn down and rebuilt in the spirit of increasing public knowledge about what makes these hot new gadgets work.
While the Oculus is the latest and most recently hyped little device after a public release by Facebook, which bought the rights from a start-up funded through Kickstarter, locals might remember that iFixit has been doing this in one form or another since 2003.
In 2010, Tolosa Press readers of long stead might recall, Wiens waited in line at a store in Japan to become one of the first to publicly get his hands on the iPhone 4. At the time he praised the internal gyroscope, something many take for granted in every new smartphone, as holding the key to vast potential.
As he explained in his TechBrew presentation, the company is still focused on disseminating information to consumers to empower us to fix our own devices with a little help from experienced technicians.
When they get their hands on the latest iPhone and find out what’s inside, they can start selling tools and aftermarket parts on the website. Having all the pieces ready to sell doesn’t do much good without folks knowing how to use them. The obvious passion that company bloggers show on the site and their giddy enthusiasm in videos isn’t just a public service, it is good business.
Incidentally, the teardowns have become a popular feature among investors who clamor to see what the tinkerers find inside the devices and who’s chips are being bought to do what.
The way devices are built and repaired has changed lately though. The iFixit folks’ second lives as advocates and activists for the “Right to Repair” is becoming ever more important. It’s not just the iPads getting reviewed on the site that get poor reparability scores, there’s a manufacturer pushback on the very idea of “user serviceable parts.”
With the stage set, back to illustrative examples via serendipity.
When vehicles, smartphones, and cameras started to break last week around the Frank household the first thing to get fixed was a bicycle chain.
That’s the type of knowledge that did not require an iFixit manual. Aside from a few different sizes, the technology is basically the same the world over. Swapping a corroded link out is much easier with a small tool from Bell, sold at several shops on Los Osos Valley Road alone. The specific tool isn’t even required but it makes the job much easier. That’s basically where tinkering starts.
The 2004 Nissan Sentra with a damaged swirl control valve was throwing a “Service Engine Soon” code P1138. Thanks to general industry standardization, freedom of information on the internet and a 2014 memorandum of understanding between the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association, Coalition for Auto Repair Equality, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, and the Association for Global Automakers upholding the tenants of a Massachusetts, “Right to Repair Act” across all 50 states, local repair shops and a reporter with a broken car all have the ability to find out what P1138 actually means.
That’s not to say that Nissan felt obligated to make the job easy. The part in question is built into a much larger, and more expensive portion of the lower intake manifold.
Luckily information is power and better living through chemistry enabled a temporary reprieve by blasting out all those nasty carbon deposits with a solvent and a very, very long straw.
Would that tracking down an issue with a shorting out SIM card in an three year old cell phone from LG or replacing the jamming shutter curtain deep inside a 14 year old Canon EOS Rebel digital camera were made simpler by government and corporate understanding. Ebay is filled with poor old cameras being sold off for half of what would otherwise be their value, over an err99 code. That’s Canon equivalent of a check engine light that can’t be solved without a teardown.
Ironically enough iFixit is a wealth of knowledge on both devices, right down to Taylor Whitney’s eerily coincidental April 12 article specifically about the pain of saying goodbye to her trusty old Canon Rebel and the unbearably of seeing it go to a scrap heap after all these years.
By and large, LG and Canon both receive good marks for being reparable by a skilled technician. In many of the LG models batteries, SIM cards and memory expansion slots are even easily accessed by the consumer, contrary to the way Apple designs their devices.
However, as Wiens will tell anyone who cares to ask, or sit through a quick presentation at a Softec event, there’s no reason devices can’t be modular, easy to repair, or at least recyclable, or even reusable, at the end of their service life.
The company even drafted Jeff Buckingham, president of Norcast Telecom and a board member of Softec, to appear in a video explaining the problem to the US Congress.
Their work to get a right to repair, and to recycle, embraced as a social value goes beyond appearances at local venues. Last year they took the show on the road to the European Parliament in Brussels and showed members of that body how to get their hands dirty with iPhone battery swaps and some of the simpler techniques that they showed off recently in SLO.
As Julia Bluff described it in a post to the site, their trip was, “part of massive effort to put Europe on the path to a circular economy—an economic system where materials are designed to recirculate back into the marketplace at the end of their lives as opposed to being tossed into a dump or incinerated.”
Back on the home front, with at least two older smart devices that could be recycled, if they were reliably stripped of personal data and another two DSLR camera bodies that don’t seem like they should be consigned to the scrap heap, the idea of all devices being given a chance at dignified reincarnation has a certain appeal.