• Repair or Replace a busted iPhone? [NYTimes.com] – “I reached for my phone. I dropped it and it smashed on the concrete floor.” Hoping to find an economical fix, he decided to try his hand at replacing the shattered screen. He purchased parts, first from eBay, then from a local repair shop, and got to work.After polishing his method on the phones of a few willing friends, it wasn’t long before he had improved enough to charge for his services. Mr. McElroy began offering to replace shattered screens, and eventually expanded his menu to include broken SIM card trays, cracked covers, water damage and more mysterious glitches, like unresponsive buttons. “There’s rarely a phone I can’t fix,” said Mr. McElroy, who estimates he’s worked on a thousand iPhones since June. “There was once a guy whose phone was thrown out of a 10-story window. The entire thing was split in half, but the motherboard was fine.” The worst phones aren’t the ones dropped from great heights, Mr. McElroy said. They’re the ones that are dropped in the toilet.

• "Hack things better" with malleable silicone SUGRU – "Why are so many products just so bad? Uncomfortable tin openers, leaky trainers, they get our goat! Why should you have to spend £20 on a designer tin opener? You shouldn't! Hack the one you have instead. Power to the (handy) people! Sugru is like modeling clay when you take it from its pack. Once it's exposed to air, it cures to a tough flexible silicone overnight using the moisture in the air. Working time = 30 mins. Cure time = 24hrs (3-5mm deep)" The sugru website includes a blog that features product improvements achieved through its use.

• Appliance Anxiety – Replace It or Fix It? – Perhaps economic conditions are leading people to different tradeoffs about repair vs. replace, although the company support for parts is ridiculously poor. Reminds me of the appliance client we had years ago that wanted to design great products that would move people to "want in" instead of the traditional "wear out."

Cupid’s Span, under repair. I think cartoonist Don Martin would have liked this.

See all observational ephemera.

The Seattle Monorail is no longer the dream it once represented

Repairing the monorail is not always easy. Some parts are unique. After the collision last fall, the scene shop of the Seattle Opera was hired to build new monorail doors.

Wow – I guess that’s the get ‘er done attitude I wrote about before, but also the challenges of non-standard designs that seem common in transit infrastructure that I also wrote about earlier.

I replaced the hard drive in my Dell laptop yesterday. I knew that most desktop PCs were pretty straightforward for opening up and swapping out components (although my recent foray into replacing a hard drive in my deskop was a bit of a challenge, requiring going to find some archived discussions from others who had the same model computer), but always assumed that laptops were sealed and ready-for-technicians only.

Dell actually includes step-by-step instructions on how to do it. I had to remove the keyboard, the palm rest panel, and then the drive itself. The instructions seemed to miss a step but I figured it out. It was fairly easy and it worked right the first time. Kind of a neat design thing; making it non-trivial but straightforward enough that a non-mechanical and timid (but desperate) type like myself could actually do it.

Now I wonder if I can replace the drive in my old Sony VAIO 505 laptop; and make a backup system for myself?