6 ms·

i've fantasised about something like this before my neighbors are consistently throwing away perfectly fine electronics where 90% of the problems are a blown e

i've fantasised about something like this before my neighbors are consistently throwing away perfectly fine electronics where 90% of the problems are a blown electrolytic capacitor there is a place in our apartment complex where we place electronic rubbish and just two days ago i noticed a tablet with a destroyed screen i popped it open and everything inside looked pristine so i bought a new screen for some ~20$ and am now waiting on it to arrive i've fixed a toaster oven with a busted resistor, 50in plasma tv with a blown capacitor i now use as a monitor for my laptop when working at home, a blender with a broken container and blown capacitor.. an older blender model that actually has a standard thread size so i am able to use mason jars as a, what i think is superior, container i think repair should be taught in schools, a la 'home ec', educationally its a three`for : repair, basic ee, basic applied maths when i was living in squats in london part of the squat culture was to slowly accrue enough bike parts in the hope that you could one day open your squat doors as a bike repair cafe i have thought quite often something similar for basic everyday electronics would be great for educational and environmental concerns there is so much unneccessary eWaste, even if something is beyond simple component swap repair it can itself be used to source parts for other fixable devices the idea that we toss away a salvageable device, or even its sometimes hundreds of functioning discreet components, because of a single blown capacitor, frayed wire or dislodged headphone jack is upsetting

chrisseaton 8y ago
> there is a place in our apartment complex where we place electronic rubbish and just two days ago i noticed a tablet with a destroyed screen ... i popped it open and everything inside looked pristine so i bought a new screen for some ~20$ and am now waiting on it to arrive Note that taking someone's rubbish without permission is considered theft in the UK (there is precedent). If you sell it it's even worse because it's handling stolen goods.
- mannanj 8y ago
  So it's theft unless the trash companies do it? Essentially sounds like unless you're a company, i.e. you're doing this personally, you are stealing (unless of course people pay you as a company to steal their stuff).
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    You're giving the bin companies permission to take it because you have an agreement with them and have placed it in an agreed location. If a third party bin company you had no relationship with took it it would also be theft.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  In the US, it is legal to take garbage. And there is precedent for that as well. Although there can be trespassing issues if you don't have permission to be there. (like digging through a private dumpster at a business).
  - lloydde 8y ago
    Is there an Internet law that says that for every reasonable rule there will be one US jurisdiction where it doesn’t apply? My understanding is that in almost all jurisdictions in USA possession end when the trash is moved to the curb, put in public space. I remember reading at some point that at least in some part of Texas possession is transferred from the individual to the trash collection agency. This was interesting to me from privacy/search warrant perspective.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  oi mate where's ya rubbish licence
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    It's not about a 'licence' - we don't have licenses for rubbish collection - it's about permission from the person who owns the rubbish.
- justifier 8y ago
  ha! depressing though i doubt the people i was living with who would break into abandoned buildings to establish residence are all that too concerned with your rubbish 'theft' precedent the tablet salvage was in the states and unfortunately i'd be unsurprised if there are equally uncharitable precedent here as well .. as an aside, i would be interested in reading your referenced precedent, i agree going through someone's bin to get personal info or to file false credit card offers on their behalf should be illegal, but i'd be interested to read the ruling if it is literally a broken electronics salvage
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I think it's this way so that people can't steal things and say 'oh I thought it was rubbish'.
    - justifier 8y ago
      sure, got a link though?
      - chrisseaton 8y ago
        This talks about some of the multiple precedents that have been reinforcing this for centuries. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13037808 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13037808
        justifier 8y ago
        precedent is a court document you linked to an article pretrial the person in the article took food from a bin stead ewaste i tried to find a followup article or court decision but was unable i did find a similar article from iceland where people were charged under an 1824 vagrancy act which was ruled unworthy of prosecution(o) your linked case reads like a power tripping manager to me this practice was part of the squat culture as well: every few days we would do a 'skip hop'.. skip being the term for a large trash bin.. we'd go to grocery stores who were legally bound to throw away food that expired that day at the end of the day as well as forbidden from giving away 'rotten' food, so the employees would stack the food items carefully in separate trash bags from the 'actual' rubbish and put these bags next to the bins pageantry of plausible deniability is a hilarious thing (o) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/29/skipping-food-waste-supermarkets-dumpster-diving https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/...
- briandear 8y ago
  Squatting in a residential building is also illegal: https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law
agumonkey 8y ago
What I don't get is that the trend is increasing. Every Month i Can find vast amount of things.
aasasd 8y ago
Meanwhile, in Russia the repair culture never went away, for obvious reasons. It's inconceivable here that people would just throw away all broken things without attempting to fix them. Repair shops are everywhere―there are even more for phones and laptops now than for other stuff.
QML 8y ago
Is most of consumer hardware built on top of open source or on proprietary tools? I would love to see a movement where companies build products and then give away implementation details, but the cynic in me says repair costs is the analog of advertising revenue for these companies.
- dbalatero 8y ago
  A lot of analog synths from the 70s and 80s have full service manuals with complete circuit schematics, so repair is actually very doable. People even clone old hardware from tracing these circuits and laying them out on new modern pcbs.
fraudsyndrome 8y ago
This is something I'd love to do except it sounds like you said, it requires some basic knowledge of EE etc. Maybe the basics isn't too hard but with the vast diversity of different types of electronics - it troubles me just thinking about troubleshooting what of the 100s of internal parts could be the issue. I've done my own repairs for phone screens/boot loop issues etc. but they were considered super easy because they were popular phones (galaxy/iphone) and as such, guides were plentiful on youtube. I can't imagine similar resources would be available for, say, a random branded tv or a blender. Screen fixes are super easy for phones as it's usually a take apart and replace the cables and put back in deal. Anything remotely difficult was fixing a bootloop issue on a galaxy s4 which required a multimeter to confirm the issue and a soldering iron but again, a guide on the exact issue told me exactly what to do.
- justifier 8y ago
  i hear you electricity should be treated with respect but i made a point to emphasise that the majority of problems are blown capacitors this is a prevalent problem(o) that is easy to diagnose and easy to fix for the listed examples my only diagnostic tool was my eyes, when a capacitor blows you can tell.. that is it looks like it failed in some way to replace it you have to desolder two connections and solder in a replacement the capacitors usually give you all of the information you need right on them: capacitance, rated voltage, positive and negative lead; so without needing to know what those things are or why they are important finding a replacement is straight forward and replacing is plug and play, with a bit of solder, if you keep track of how the original was oriented but like all things it takes time to get comfortable and you get better with more exposure, which is why i emphasised a desire for basic ee to be a part of early education first time i worked on a car myself i was driving on the highway and my car just stopped, roadside said it'd take 2 hours to get to me, i was unfamiliar with car mechanics but i thought 'i'll just look at it and see if i can see what's wrong, maybe i can fix it', i popped the hood and looked at the engine, it a took a minute to suss it out but when i found the problem it was glaring, the air intake for the engine had popped off, the screw band had rusted and failed, i just pushed the tubing back on the intake pipe, used a dime to screw the rusted band on enough to get me to a hardware store to replace the screw band i knew i'd be unable to disassemble the transmission on the side of the highway, the first time i opened a car hood, in less than 2 hours, but those expectations were too exaggerated, all i had to do was push a tube on a pipe i think repair cafes are less about having an in house solution to all problems and more about having broad solutions to the problems that occur the most, and like a bike cafe it could be a hands on experience where there are people there who can help, showing you how to troubleshoot and repair (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

chrisseaton 8y ago

> there is a place in our apartment complex where we place electronic rubbish and just two days ago i noticed a tablet with a destroyed screen ... i popped it open and everything inside looked pristine so i bought a new screen for some ~20$ and am now waiting on it to arrive Note that taking someone's rubbish without permission is considered theft in the UK (there is precedent). If you sell it it's even worse because it's handling stolen goods.

mannanj 8y ago
So it's theft unless the trash companies do it? Essentially sounds like unless you're a company, i.e. you're doing this personally, you are stealing (unless of course people pay you as a company to steal their stuff).
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  You're giving the bin companies permission to take it because you have an agreement with them and have placed it in an agreed location. If a third party bin company you had no relationship with took it it would also be theft.
jjeaff 8y ago
In the US, it is legal to take garbage. And there is precedent for that as well. Although there can be trespassing issues if you don't have permission to be there. (like digging through a private dumpster at a business).
- lloydde 8y ago
  Is there an Internet law that says that for every reasonable rule there will be one US jurisdiction where it doesn’t apply? My understanding is that in almost all jurisdictions in USA possession end when the trash is moved to the curb, put in public space. I remember reading at some point that at least in some part of Texas possession is transferred from the individual to the trash collection agency. This was interesting to me from privacy/search warrant perspective.
nyolfen 8y ago
oi mate where's ya rubbish licence
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  It's not about a 'licence' - we don't have licenses for rubbish collection - it's about permission from the person who owns the rubbish.
justifier 8y ago
ha! depressing though i doubt the people i was living with who would break into abandoned buildings to establish residence are all that too concerned with your rubbish 'theft' precedent the tablet salvage was in the states and unfortunately i'd be unsurprised if there are equally uncharitable precedent here as well .. as an aside, i would be interested in reading your referenced precedent, i agree going through someone's bin to get personal info or to file false credit card offers on their behalf should be illegal, but i'd be interested to read the ruling if it is literally a broken electronics salvage
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  I think it's this way so that people can't steal things and say 'oh I thought it was rubbish'.
  - justifier 8y ago
    sure, got a link though?
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      This talks about some of the multiple precedents that have been reinforcing this for centuries. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13037808 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13037808
      - justifier 8y ago
        precedent is a court document you linked to an article pretrial the person in the article took food from a bin stead ewaste i tried to find a followup article or court decision but was unable i did find a similar article from iceland where people were charged under an 1824 vagrancy act which was ruled unworthy of prosecution(o) your linked case reads like a power tripping manager to me this practice was part of the squat culture as well: every few days we would do a 'skip hop'.. skip being the term for a large trash bin.. we'd go to grocery stores who were legally bound to throw away food that expired that day at the end of the day as well as forbidden from giving away 'rotten' food, so the employees would stack the food items carefully in separate trash bags from the 'actual' rubbish and put these bags next to the bins pageantry of plausible deniability is a hilarious thing (o) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/29/skipping-food-waste-supermarkets-dumpster-diving https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/...
briandear 8y ago
Squatting in a residential building is also illegal: https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law

agumonkey 8y ago

What I don't get is that the trend is increasing. Every Month i Can find vast amount of things.

aasasd 8y ago

Meanwhile, in Russia the repair culture never went away, for obvious reasons. It's inconceivable here that people would just throw away all broken things without attempting to fix them. Repair shops are everywhere―there are even more for phones and laptops now than for other stuff.

QML 8y ago

Is most of consumer hardware built on top of open source or on proprietary tools? I would love to see a movement where companies build products and then give away implementation details, but the cynic in me says repair costs is the analog of advertising revenue for these companies.

dbalatero 8y ago
A lot of analog synths from the 70s and 80s have full service manuals with complete circuit schematics, so repair is actually very doable. People even clone old hardware from tracing these circuits and laying them out on new modern pcbs.

fraudsyndrome 8y ago

This is something I'd love to do except it sounds like you said, it requires some basic knowledge of EE etc. Maybe the basics isn't too hard but with the vast diversity of different types of electronics - it troubles me just thinking about troubleshooting what of the 100s of internal parts could be the issue. I've done my own repairs for phone screens/boot loop issues etc. but they were considered super easy because they were popular phones (galaxy/iphone) and as such, guides were plentiful on youtube. I can't imagine similar resources would be available for, say, a random branded tv or a blender. Screen fixes are super easy for phones as it's usually a take apart and replace the cables and put back in deal. Anything remotely difficult was fixing a bootloop issue on a galaxy s4 which required a multimeter to confirm the issue and a soldering iron but again, a guide on the exact issue told me exactly what to do.

justifier 8y ago
i hear you electricity should be treated with respect but i made a point to emphasise that the majority of problems are blown capacitors this is a prevalent problem(o) that is easy to diagnose and easy to fix for the listed examples my only diagnostic tool was my eyes, when a capacitor blows you can tell.. that is it looks like it failed in some way to replace it you have to desolder two connections and solder in a replacement the capacitors usually give you all of the information you need right on them: capacitance, rated voltage, positive and negative lead; so without needing to know what those things are or why they are important finding a replacement is straight forward and replacing is plug and play, with a bit of solder, if you keep track of how the original was oriented but like all things it takes time to get comfortable and you get better with more exposure, which is why i emphasised a desire for basic ee to be a part of early education first time i worked on a car myself i was driving on the highway and my car just stopped, roadside said it'd take 2 hours to get to me, i was unfamiliar with car mechanics but i thought 'i'll just look at it and see if i can see what's wrong, maybe i can fix it', i popped the hood and looked at the engine, it a took a minute to suss it out but when i found the problem it was glaring, the air intake for the engine had popped off, the screw band had rusted and failed, i just pushed the tubing back on the intake pipe, used a dime to screw the rusted band on enough to get me to a hardware store to replace the screw band i knew i'd be unable to disassemble the transmission on the side of the highway, the first time i opened a car hood, in less than 2 hours, but those expectations were too exaggerated, all i had to do was push a tube on a pipe i think repair cafes are less about having an in house solution to all problems and more about having broad solutions to the problems that occur the most, and like a bike cafe it could be a hands on experience where there are people there who can help, showing you how to troubleshoot and repair (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague