Low-tech fixes for high-tech failures
By Paul Boutin The New York Times
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Behind the cash register at Smoke Shop No. 2 in downtown San Francisco, Sam Azar swipes a customer's credit card to ring up a purchase of Turkish cigarettes. The store's card reader fails to scan the card's magnetic strip. Azar swipes again, and again.
No luck.
As impatient customers begin to line up, he reaches beneath the counter for a small black plastic grocery bag. He wraps one layer of the plastic around the card and swipes it again. Success. The sale is rung up.
"I don't know how it works - it just does," said Azar, who learned the trick years ago from another clerk. Verifone, the company that makes the store's card reader, will not confirm or deny that the plastic-bag trick works. But it is one of many low-tech fixes for high-tech failures that people without engineering degrees have discovered - often out of desperation - and shared with one another.
A shaky economy is likely to produce many more such tricks.
"In postwar Japan, the economy wasn't doing so great, so you couldn't get everyday-use items like household cleaners," said Lisa Katayama, author of "Urawaza," a book whose name uses the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. "So people looked for ways to do with what they had."
Popular urawaza include picking up broken glass from the kitchen floor by wiping it with a slice of bread, and placing house plants on a water-soaked diaper to keep them watered during a vacation trip.
Americans are finding their own tips and tricks for fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and adhesive tape. Some, like Azar's plastic bag, are open to argument as to how they work, or whether they really work at all. But many home remedies for technical problems can be explained with a little science.
Your cellphone loses its battery charge too quickly while idle in your pocket? Part of the problem is that your pocket is probably too warm. "Cellphone batteries do indeed last a bit longer if kept cool," says Isidor Buchanan, editor of the Battery University Web site.
The body heat of a human, transmitted through a cloth pocket to a cellphone inside, is enough to speed chemical processes inside the phone's battery. That makes it run down faster. To keep the phone cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt. This same science can be used to preserve your battery, should you find yourself on a trip without your charger. Turn off the phone and put it in the hotel refrigerator overnight to slow the battery's natural tendency to lose its charge.
Your remote car-door opener will not reach your car from across the parking lot? Touch the metal key part of your key fob to your chin and hold it there as you push the Unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, said Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
"You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head," he said. "With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works."
Using your head can extend the key's wireless range by a few car lengths.
Your printer's ink cartridge has run dry near the end of an important printout? Remove the cartridge and focus a hair dryer on it for two to three minutes. Then place the cartridge back in the printer and try again while it is still warm.
"The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge," said Alex Cox, a software engineer based in Seattle. "When the cartridge is almost dead, those nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to flow will let more ink out of the nozzles."
The hair-dryer trick can squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge that the printer claims is empty.
You dropped your cellphone in the toilet? Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone's fragile internals. Then wipe the phone gently with a towel and put it in a jar full of uncooked rice. It works for the same reason you may keep few grains of rice in your salt shaker to keep the salt dry. Rice has a high chemical affinity for water: That means the molecules in the rice have a nearly magnetic attraction for water molecules, which will be soaked up by the rice rather than beading up inside the phone. It's a low-tech version of the "Do Not Eat" packets of crystals or powder packed you might have found packed in the box the phone came in, to keep moisture away from the circuitry during shipping and storage.
Your home Wi-Fi router does not reach the other end of the house? Do not buy more wireless gear tying to stretch your network. Instead, you can build a passive radio wave reflector in less than an hour out of kitchen items, including an aluminum cookie sheet.
Follow the instructions at freeantennas.com/projects/template. Place the completed reflector - a small, curved piece of metal that reflects radio waves just like a satellite TV dish - behind your Wi-Fi router. It focuses the router's energy in one direction rather than letting it dissipate its strength in a full circle. No cables, no batteries, no technical knowledge required. Yet it can easily double the range of your network.
You need to clean a skipping DVD or CD, but you do not have any cleaning fluids? Soak a washcloth with vodka or mouthwash. Alcohol is a powerful solvent, perfectly capable of dissolving fingerprints and grime on the surface of a disc. A $5 bottle of Listerine in your medicine cabinet may get the job done as effectively as a $75 bottle of DVD cleaning fluid.
Your cellphone's built-in camera flash is much too bright, washing out photos? You will wonder why you did not think of this yourself. Tape a small piece of paper over the LED flash. Experiment with different colors and thicknesses of paper to tone down the flash from superbright white to a more pleasing glow for evening photos.
Your PC's hard drive crashed and cannot be read? If all else fails, do not throw it out. Stick it in the freezer overnight.
"The trick is a real and proven, albeit last-resort, recovery technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard drive problems," Fred Langa, editor of Windows Secrets, wrote on his Web site.
Many hard-drive failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly so that data can be read from the drive. Lowering the drive's temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature, causes those parts to expand again.
"The mechanical contraction and expansion may help free up binding parts," Langa explained, "or the cold can help an aging, failing electrical component to remain within specs for a few minutes." That can be "enough time for you to recover your essential data."
That is the spirit of folk remedies: They may or may not work, but what have you got to lose?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/17/technology/ptbasics19.php
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