Buy a thing, it stops working, throw the thing away, buy a new thing.

Seems like nobody fixes shit anymore. And yes, I know, companies make things as unfixable as possible. But I’m a weirdo who would rather pay a lot to fix a thing than throw it into the ocean and buy a new thing.

My wife’s 4K monitor died a few months ago. They’d been pondering a new one anyway, so that forced the decision.

So I took the broken one to work and asked my electrician buddy if he could run a multimeter over it.

One 8p capacitor later and now I have a 4K monitor as well.

I have one of those digital measurement calipers. I dropped it and the screen went wonky. I took it apart, one of the zebra connectors had moved a bit. Put it back in place, put the thing back together and I’m back to measuring with it. Didn’t cost anything except maybe 30 minutes of time.

I love the feeling of fixing shit.

I got an old-school caliper with a vernier scale because I was sick and tired of replacing the coin cell batteries in the digital ones.

If you buy a decent digital one, they actually turn off when you press the off button, and the battery lasts a long time. The cheap ones just turn the display off, and the batterty dies like every week.

These days, even if you pay more you still risk getting something that isn’t “decent” a lot of the time anyway, and I’m not willing to pay a lot more for something like Mitutoyo that actually has brand reputation.