For my last post for this blog on tinkering, I want to leave you with a few ways you can use tinkering in your life.

Start by Looking for frustrations:

The best place to start tinkering is fixing the things that cause frustration in your life. This is not the only place where you will find things that need tinkering, but these are the places where tinkering opportunities are the most obvious. 

For technology, start with software:

Something we all have to deal with every single day is software. It runs our phones and our computers, and for many students is the portal into classes and assignments in school. Sometimes there are unchangeable quirks or problems with the operating systems and applications we use, but there are also many aspects that are changeable and can vastly improve your experience. Look through the settings and preferences and make changes to make your software better suit you.

There are also many other utilities and small apps that can change the functionality of your devices solely through software, rather than hardware modifications. On my Mac, I use software to snap my windows to certain parts of the screen (Magnet), change the contents of the Touch Bar running above the keyboard (BetterTouchTool), control the fan speed manually (MacsFanControl), and disable certain hardware features (like TurboBoost, which increases the speed of the CPU given temperature headroom) that consume too much power from my battery when I can’t be plugged into a charger (Turbo Boost Switcher). I also change the way my computer looks with custom icons for many of my applications and an application that updates my background to an up-to-date satellite image of the United States.

Unlike physical modifications, any change you make in software can almost always be changed back as easily as it was switched in the first place.

Try new things with old things:

Tinkering works especially well with older things. You can tinker with them to give them new life and new usefulness, or even just as practice. There is nothing to lose when you tinker with something that you no longer use. 

You could repurpose a broken laptop into a makeshift desktop computer station, or even salvage parts from something old or broken to use for a project down the road.

Remember you don’t have to be the one tinkering:

Even as a self-professed tinkerer who loves both fiddling with and fixing things, I don’t always tinker for myself. During quarantine, I had two repairs done through an Apple Authorized Service Provider under warranty: the replacement of a faulty Butterfly keyboard on my sister’s old MacBook and the replacement of my AirPods Pro, which had a known problem with clicking in the audio. 

Paying a professional is not always the best option. Self repair can often save a great sum of money, but there are other great reasons to have someone else tinker for you. These were both repairs that I was not able to, or not comfortable with, completing myself. But they were also both completely free, covered under extended warranty programs from Apple. A free repair is a great reason not to tinker with something yourself. But if you are not comfortable deconstructing a phone or computer to repair it, don’t have access to parts, or just can have something repaired for you by a professional for free, there is great merit to allowing someone else to do your tinkering for you. Just make sure the tinkering gets done. We have lived in a throw-away society for our whole lives, but there is great merit–especially environmentally–in fixing something, rather than disposing of and replacing it. 

Remember that tinkering is not only for technology:

There are a lot of things in the world that need to be tinkered with and improved, not just the things that affect only yourself and fit into small categories like electronics or pens. Look into your community and into the world at large. Figure out how you can tinker the world to be better for other people, as well as for yourself. Look for where change needs to happen, then tinker it into existence.