Category: Meta

How can you tinker?

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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.

Tinkering with Coffee… and everything else

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For 18 posts, this blog has focused on tinkering with phones, keyboards, computers, and fountain pens, but tinkering is not exclusive to a relatively small group of technology nerds or an even smaller group of people who like fountain pens. I wrote about tinkering with phones, keyboards, computers, and fountain pens because I like all of those things and found enjoyment in both increasing the pleasure they are to use (like tinkering a fountain pen to be perfect for me) and also just spending time using and tinkering with something I love. But I have also tinkered with something else I love: coffee. 

 

There are three main categories of tinkerable aspects of making a cup coffee: the “beans,” the “brew,”and the “bonuses.”

The “beans” are the coffee itself, and they are distinguished most often by the “roast” and fineness of the grind. The “roast” (usually known as dark, medium, or light) refers to how long/at what temperature the coffee beans were roasted before being ground. The difference in roast is flavor, and though hard for me to describe, it is noticeable. The fineness/coarseness of a coffee bean makes more of a difference in the strength of the coffee when you brew it; finer coffee grinds make stronger coffee, and coarser grinds usually make lighter coffee.

There are many different methods of brewing coffee, some of which (like a typical coffee maker) are better at larger batches, and others (like a Moka, small french press, or pour-over) are better at making smaller batches. There are also differences in flavor as a result of brew time and water temperature during the brew. 

The bonuses come mainly in the form of milk and other things you can add to coffee to augment the flavor. I often enjoy adding hand-frothed whole milk to my coffee when I have time, but when not, I use a little bit of half and half. While I don’t usually sweeten my coffee, I have come to find that adding brown sugar instead of white sugar gives the coffee and warmer and more toasty flavor.

 

After years of cup-by-cup tinkering, I found the way I like coffee best: a light, finely-ground roast, prepared as pour-over with frothed milk and brown sugar. Though a cup of coffee might not seem important enough to think too much about, let alone tinker with, making and drinking coffee is a daily ritual I care about and am willing to tinker with.

At its heart, tinkering is trying to improve something, and as a tinkerer, you should be on the lookout for things in need of improvement. Beyond coffee, pens, and computers, being a tinkerer provides a valuable mindset with which to view the world: seek out things that can be made better, then enact change. Look not only at your own habits or frequent activities that can be made better with tinkering, but also look into your community and find places of injustice and seek out things that are wrong. Once you have found something that needs change, go forth and tinker.

What is “tinkering,” anyway?

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I define tinkering as the process of creating positive change in things you already own. Rather than constructing something entirely new, tinkering is altering the condition of an item that already exists. This might range from repairing a broken phone screen to finding an application that makes computer workflow smoother, or setting up a physical workspace to meet one’s needs, or using a Dremel tool to reshape a nib on a fountain pen.  

Without an end goal, “tinkering” is nothing more than “fiddling.” The end goal of a tinkering project can take many forms, and tinkering often begins at a stumbling block or frustration in one’s daily life and aims to remove or remedy that frustration. 

Through this blog, I hope to share my experiences with tinkering projects, describe the troubleshooting process, offer advice and resources for tinkering, explore more eccentric applications of tinkering, and make a case for the right to repair. 

For my opening blog post, I would like to share my Three Tenets of Tinkering to establish the goals and showcase the broad applications of tinkering.

 

Tinkering Tenet 1: Disrepair is not the end.

The most obvious frustration solvable with tinkering is a broken object. In our throw-away society, most people don’t even consider fixing broken items, opting instead for immediate disposal and replacement. This mentality is harmful for our environment and deprives people of the delight of resurrecting a once-broken device. Tinkering is about seeing potential and striving to restore functionality. 

Inevitably, some attempts at tinkering will not end successfully. Sometimes you will be better off than you were before, but not fully improved. Sometimes you will be worse off. What remains constant is the opportunity to try again. Even a state of greater disrepair is a starting point for more tinkering.

 

Tinkering Tenet 2: “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it.” (iFixit)

Many people are content to never see the inside of their devices. However, when you understand how your device works and how to fix it when it breaks, you gain full control and flexibility (you own your device.) Unfortunately, understanding how your device works and how to fix it has become steadily more difficult as manufacturers have deliberately made devices less repairable. 

As computers shifted from large individually constructed desktop towers to laptops, phones, and tablets, the ability to customize and repair those devices dropped dramatically. Unlike desktops with easily replaceable parts accessible with a screwdriver, phones or tablets (and even some laptops) are glued, with discrete components soldered together, and parts are almost completely unstandardized between brands and even models within a brand.

Movement toward less repairable devices does not necessarily make repair impossible, but increasingly often a repair will be impossible by independent tinkerers. I believe tinkering necessarily involves advocating for the Right to Repair to maintain the opportunity to have an understanding and ownership of one’s device that can only come from repairing it.

 

Tinkering Tenet 3: Tinkering is a push toward ideal.

Nothing is so perfect, nor so small, as to not benefit from tinkering. Now, the ideal is not necessarily achievable, but movement toward ideal most certainly is. “Ideal” has deeply personal connotations; thus, tinkering is also personal. For example, my mother, perfectly satisfied to write with a cheap ballpoint, cannot understand my obsession with restoring and customizing fountain pens. 

Frustration is the easiest starting point when considering a project to undertake, but tinkering can take something from satisfactory to wonderful. In other words, tinkering does not stop at mitigating frustrations. Tinkering can add whimsy and spark joy.