Like me, a lot of you are hunkered down or even bunkered in, doing the “social distancing” thing to keep ourselves safe and beat this pandemic. And over the next couple weeks shit’s gonna break, systems will fail, but we don’t want to spread this pandemic by takin’ it in to be fixed or inviting the repairman whose been in a dozen homes today over to fix it. Then there’s the lack of official medically approved Personal Protective Equipment and stuff we weren’t able to get before hunkering down in our current abodes… What can we substitute?
I come from a long line of undegreed “engineers”- Give us a shoe box, an incandescent light bulb, and some wire and we’ll build an incubator… Grandpa Shobe kluged that together for my premie mom back in 1927, and I probably wouldn’t be here otherwise. Uncle Del built his own roll off truck, and they and the rest of the tradespeople in the family spent the depression turning a couple room shack into a neat 2 bedroom house with garage and porch. The other side of my family spent the depression getting paid not to grow peanuts in northern Minnesota… We can hack the bureaucracy too! And me… If I’m outa TP those 20 rolls of paper shop towels will do fine, this 6 year old iMac boots just fine off an OS on a thumb drive, and my 2nd car has had a yellow Check Engine Light on for a couple years and a warped brake disc… Maybe when I get bored after a week of isolation I might fix some of the above.
So I’ll throw open the discussion- What’s breaking and threatening your breaking isolation? And hackers, techies, and folk engineers- Got any favorite workarounds, fixes, and maybe even actual repairs to share with us?