i would like to take a moment to brag about how clever i am. i’ve been getting into electronics recently. actually, it’s nothing wildly impressive. it’s mainly just me being too cheap to throw away broken electronics gear.
case in point, my cheap-ass HP camera. i think i paid $140 or so for it at target, which for me is a sizeable chunk of change. then, a week later, right while i was in the middle of documenting an art project, i discovered that leaving the camera in your pants cargo-pocket is a good way of sitting on the LCD screen and breaking it.
three years later i figured out how to switch out the broken parts, using a junk camera i bought on ebay. the LCD screen was a modular part that popped into my camera without a fuss.
since i had the case open, i figured, what the heck, why not paint racing stripes onto the damn thing. now it works as well as the day i bought it, plus it’s got racing stripes.
anybody who knows me will agree that i really like my private time in the bathroom. i’ve got the final issue of the weekly world news under the sink, and "miss lulu bett" by zona gale, the pullitzer-prize winning author from Portage, Wisconsin.
and what would make that quality reading time even better? howabout a radio, tuned to the local classical music station, that turns on automatically when you close the door.
the radio cost two dollars at the local goodwill. add to that the simple switch soldered to its main circuit board and you’ve got a priceless BM.
but what’s really going to mark me as a genius among the most genius is this device which i want history to remember as the BEYBOARD:
i got the idea for this while i was taking apart my ancient dell laptop to fix its LCD screen (a fix which worked great, but i didn’t paint on the racing stripes, so no photo). there’s a zillion damn screws in them things, each one of a subtlely different length. when i put it back together, there were about five extra screws.
what the BEYBOARD is, is a whiteboard surrounded by magnetic strips. when you are working on a project, you can put the screws on the magnets, and label each one with where you got it from. that way you can keep track of the parts and the order they go back together. and it doesn’t matter how long you let it sit around, the BEYBOARD won’t forget the way the project came apart.
my next project (when i have the time, i already have all the parts) is to make the world’s first AM/FM eclair.