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from the making-broken-vacuum-cleaners-suck-again dept.
If you've ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there's hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.
The movement's foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.
[...] "One of the things that makes it challenging and interesting is that we don't know what people are going to bring," Ray Pfau, an organizer of a Repair Cafe in Bolton, Mass., said in an email.
Lamps top the list of items brought in to be repaired, followed by vacuum cleaners, Mr. Wackman said. The types of repairs offered vary by location and reflect the particular talent in a community, he said.
New Paltz [in upstate New York] has a repair person with a national reputation as a doll expert. It also has a "Listening Corner" with a psychiatric nurse "because being listened to is a 'reparative act,' " he said.
The cafes invite people to bring their "beloved but broken" possessions to the gatherings, which are hosted in church basements, libraries, town halls and senior centers. The cafes make no guarantees that items will be fixed.
"All we can guarantee is that you will have an interesting time," Mr. Wackman said.
The gatherings tend to draw professionals, retirees and hobbyists who volunteer as repair coaches.
None in my area but I would be tempted to show up and help. I like to fix things and have a decent success rate, just coaxed some more life out of our ~30 year old garage door opener.
Similar article at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/repair-cafe/ and the main website is at: https://repaircafe.org/en/about/ (also available for NL, FR, DE & ES)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:39PM
Luckily I have a spare power supply for the Latitude I have. Unfortunately both of them behave the same. I've been debating whether it's worth trying another brick, or maybe take the laptop apart and see if there's anything obviously wrong like a broken solder connection.
I have 3 Latitudes (one is my employer's), and I think at least 4 power supplies of different sizes, so it's easier to figure out where the problem is like that. I had one Latitude (I still have it, but it's in pieces and not counted above) which doesn't work with any power supply; the problem is on the motherboard. So it's entirely possible you have a problem there. FWIW, I looked for broken solder connections and other easy problems and couldn't find any; it looks like some kind of component failure in the power section on the motherboard. Since I don't have a schematic and don't feel like taking apart an identical machine, I didn't bother searching any further, and just bought another one. Keep in mind, this was an old E6400 which was already probably 5-6 years old when it failed so it's not like I was out any real money. I ended up buying a used E6420 on Ebay which I use now. I loaded Linux Mint on the other E6400 I had and loaned it to a friend who doesn't have her own computer and couldn't afford a new Mac like she wanted, and so far she loves it and hasn't had any problems, and it's been probably 6 months now.