First off, old business. I’m setting a firm end date for the fabulous taco quiz. You all have until 4pm this Thursday to give me your entries. Then I will tabulate the vast pile of submissions from wannabe taco masters and determine who is the winner.
So the same week that the world started to feverishly buy the iPad, I had to fix my six-year-old tablet PC. Years ago, when I was telling people I intended on buying a tablet PC, everyone clucked their tongues at me and told me that it was just one more thing that could break.
Well, they were mostly right. It broke. However, I am awesome so I was able to fix it.
First, I took the tablet apart, using my amazing beyboard invention to keep track of all the parts.
Then I isolated the problem. The swivel hinge that converts the tablet between keyboard and tablet mode is held onto the screen by four screws. There’s a lot of torque on those screw heads, and every single one had popped off.
It is at this point that I remembered finding screw heads falling out of the machine and thinking to myself, "it’s probably nothing important."
So I got to use my brand new file set to cut slots in the tops of the screws so I could back their stumps out of the holes.
It turns out the screws on the hinge were the same size as all the other ones holding the tablet together (God bless you, Gateway. Dell would have made every single screw a millimeter off). So now it works better than ever!
