Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder: Made By Hand from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.
A discussion from Dangerous Minds with Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of Make magazine and co-editor of Boing Boing, about his book Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.
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I’ve previously mentioned the importance of librarians having the skills to repair their own tech hardware and the Maker’s Bill of Right’s. Now we have the ability to better enact those rights, thanks to iFixit.
iFixit provides free repair manuals for a variety of technological devices, allows people to share their own experiences, provides access to the required tools, and encourages people to recycle.
How did iFixit start?
We started out fixing an old iBook together. There were no instructions on how to do it, so we started the way everyone does: the hard way. We tinkered. We fiddled. We broke some tabs and lost a few screws. But we fixed it!
We attempted to fix some other laptops but had trouble finding parts. So we bought a broken computer on eBay and stole parts from it. Then we decided to start selling the parts ourselves, and iFixit was born.
But that’s not the whole story. All of our customers still had to do things the hard way, just like we did. Easy-to-use repair instructions didn’t exist — yet.
So we wrote some instructions the first chance we got. And we posted them online, for free. For the first time, it was easy for someone with no technical background or experience to take apart a Mac. Our step-by-step instructions were enabling people to repair Macs they wouldn’t have been able to repair on their own.
We thought the instructions would be useful to our customers — and they were. But it turned out that they were useful to a lot of other people as well! We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids. From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff. They saved money, they kept their Macs out of landfills, and they did it completely by themselves.
So if you ever break the glass panel on that new iPad, now you know that you can fix it yourself.
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This has been an exciting week so far!
On Wednesday I attended my first class for the Free Geek Toronto computer build program, and as the name suggests, all the classes are free! Free Geek describes the program as follows.
Computer Build
Enjoy learning the entire process of building computers from parts, take the class … and take the 6th computer you build home. Yes, you’ll also be testing computers built by others, to ensure a great out-of-the-box experience for yourself and your neighbours in our community.
This is basically becoming your own technician, for the low, low price of your time and travel, and learning to keep it running safely and securely. At your pace, this program typically takes 60 hours, and is extremely popular with those budding hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers who don’t like to depend on others, empowering themselves along the way.
You can learn more about the Free Geek movement and other cities that have programs here.
Thursday I had the pleasure of attending Mitch Altman’s Learn to solder class at the Site 3 CoLaboratory in Toronto, which attracted a capacity crowd. I met great people, had a lot of fun and started soldering Mitch’s Brain Machine kit. I will post images of the project when it is done.
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An example of trying to engage with the dominant device, the Humane Reader is a new project that helps bring online content to homes with no internet connection, with a unit that could be produced for $20.
Only approximately 20% of the developing world are internet users. The remaining 80% do not have access to online reference sources such as Wikipedia, online libraries of books and information to improve literacy, nor access to a computer to develop technological skills.
The Humane Reader device addresses this gap by providing the equivalent of a 5,000 book library in content at very low cost to households, libraries, and schools. No internet connection is required – the Humane Reader requires only a television set.
Books and text are stored on a simple SD memory Card – the type used by digital cameras – which are relatively low cost (~$4 for 2GB in bulk) and can hold the equivalent of thousands of books. The Humane Reader allows a user to access the contents of the SD Card for display on a common TV set.
Given that the focus is on offering materials to help maintain or improve literacy while showing an awareness of local conditions, it may offer an interesting alternative to the more ambitious but problematic One Laptop Per Child Program.
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As librarians begin to think about purchasing ereaders and tablets like the iPad for their libraries, it might be a good idea to tape the Maker’s Bill of Rights on your wall and see if the new hardware you are thinking of buying can meet all, or any, of its requirements. As budgets are cut the more we can take care of our own hardware, the better. Remember Mister Jalopy’s mantra, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it”.
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Library Bazaar is now closed and the blog has moved here.
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