Ashes Ashes: Ep 76 - Self-made

July 21, 2019 12:19 AM

For once we thought it would be nice to look at a culture of building things up, rather than the slow collapse of everything around us that we normally discuss. We find this culture in a huge variety of different fields from repair in the home to hacking and building in farming fields to careful experimentation on our bodies to filling in gaps in the beauty world to digging deep into the source code of the software that runs everything. In so many worlds this vibrant idea of "let's do it ourselves" has empowered people, spurred innovation, saved lives, and helped to end the alienation that society so frequently forces on us in our modern economic system. This week is everything DIY as Ashes Ashes digs into the culture of creativity and seeks to learn why this idea is so powerful and pervasive.

Chapters


05:10 David Does It Himself
11:09 Farming
17:42 Repair Cafes
21:09 Beautiful Hair
42:07 The DIY Body
1:00:36 Free Software
1:25:24 D I Why
1:31:46 What Can We Do?


A full transcript is available as well as detailed links and sources (plus credits and more) on our website ashesashes.org.

Find more information along with relevant news and links on your favorite social network @ashesashescast.

CC BY-SA 4.0

posted by the man of twists and turns (1 comment total)

I'm only partway through listening (so maybe this is addressed further on) but I'd like to see laptops rated according to how easy they are to repair for various issues. When my old laptop (probably 8 years old at that point but still very functional) started overheating, I read up on replacing the heat sink which seemed doable but my god, getting to the heat sink involved disassembling the entire laptop. Like I had to take off the keyboard before then flipping it over to remove something from the bottom, back and forth. But I could temporarily fix the freezes by removing the battery which was right there on the bottom, unlatch its little compartment, pop it out and count to a hundred or whatever, restart.

So I got a new laptop with an SSD, no overheating. It's new. But just in case, I looked up how to replace the battery. Dear god, it's the heat sink all over again. This one is a major operation to get at and laptop batteries do need to be replaced. This is the same manufacturer, even the same middling line, just an updated model.

I know every component can't have priority access but I wish new laptops had a rating along the lines of A) easy to replace hard drive, RAM, etc B) difficult to get to motherboard, battery. Just so the buyer can evaluate what repairs they might want to do themselves.

Okay, on to the DIY beauty stuff which I'm also interested in.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:18 AM on July 23, 2019