There is a joy of maintenance that I feel like modern consumer electronics overlooks?
So my iPhone hasn’t been charging properly recently. It’s unreliable – it charges, then it doesn’t charge, then I wiggle the wire and it charges again. A pain.
I got a wooden toothpick from the drawer and dug around in the lightning port, carefully excavating a couple balls of impacted pocket fluff and miscellaneous fibres and dust.
Then: plugging in my phone had a new and reassuring thunk as the cable seated properly in the port, and charging reliability is once again top notch.
A satisfying process!
I do this every 6 months or so.
YET – I find myself labelling this task as a failure of the industrial design. Oh, the charging port gets fluff in it! Get rid of the port! Invent a whole thing for wireless charging!
Which is a shame.
Because in other worlds it is a marketing benefit to use oil in your car that makes it run better over time. It is a pleasure - and a performance benefit - to oil a cricket bat, or wax a violin bow, or season an iron pan. A vocation to prune a bonsai.
Stewart Brand, technology Merlin*, is writing a book about maintenance.
The first chapter is a standalone essay and a WILD ride about:
…the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. Its drama continues to echo half a century later because three of the nine competitors became legendary – the one who won, the one who didn’t bother to win, and the one who cheated.
It’s online at Stripe’s Works in Progress.
Their stories are usually told as a contest of wills and endurance, but at heart, it was a contest of maintenance styles.
Read the whole thing!
There are some lessons. e.g. if you don’t fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it is very likely to finish failing just when it is the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with, such as in the midst of a storm.
And such daily maintenance is also good for the soul.
But the main lesson is that there is one approach which is to over-prepare and aim for zero maintenance – but, it turns out, this is fragile.
(That, of course, is the strategy my iPhone takes.)
* or Comte de St. Germain, take your pick of catalytic immortals.
At this point I might make a connection to the long-lost movement of Adaptive Design and ask about phones and laptops which embrace and encourage end-user maintenance. What could we design differently, how would the commercials work etc.
Hello Fairphone, right? Maintenance is a route to environmental sustainability too.
However! I have justly been outed as a genre blogger:
In much the same way as the golden age sf short story authors, he has a fairly standard suite of conceptual strategies; the excitement of the form is seeing the transform that those strategies produce from whatever his starting materials happen to be.
(Thank you Paul Graham Raven, I am tickled and delighted.)
AND SO, in the sprit of the archetype, let’s imagine some smartphone maintenance add-ons.
Along with my 19 quid polishing cloth (for any Apple display, including nano-texture glass), could I please purchase:
A special formulation of 5G grease which, when applied regularly to the back of my phone, buffs into a lacquer that blocks rogue radio signals yet is utterly transparent to the specific frequencies and modulations of 5G, meaning that my baseband modem has less work to do, in its separation of the wheat from the electromagnetic chaff, having a positive effect on both battery life and bandwidth as measured in bits-per-second.
Instead of my wooden toothpicks, I would like a guaranteed lint-free defluffing pick, for the regular hoiking of detritus from various ports (charging and otherwise) perhaps a cutting-edge 3D printed ceramic or perhaps carved from the wishbone of an ancient bird.
A multivitamin supplement, to be taken with breakfast along with my daily handful of nootropics, that boosts the dielectric qualities of my thumbs, meaning that my capacitive touchscreen reads me more immediately and more precisely, leading to fewer texting typos and smoother, tighter, more impressive bezier curves in my sketches in the Notes app.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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There is a joy of maintenance that I feel like modern consumer electronics overlooks?
So my iPhone hasn’t been charging properly recently. It’s unreliable – it charges, then it doesn’t charge, then I wiggle the wire and it charges again. A pain.
I got a wooden toothpick from the drawer and dug around in the lightning port, carefully excavating a couple balls of impacted pocket fluff and miscellaneous fibres and dust.
Then: plugging in my phone had a new and reassuring thunk as the cable seated properly in the port, and charging reliability is once again top notch.
A satisfying process!
I do this every 6 months or so.
YET – I find myself labelling this task as a failure of the industrial design. Oh, the charging port gets fluff in it! Get rid of the port! Invent a whole thing for wireless charging!
Which is a shame.
Because in other worlds it is a marketing benefit to use oil in your car that makes it run better over time. It is a pleasure - and a performance benefit - to oil a cricket bat, or wax a violin bow, or season an iron pan. A vocation to prune a bonsai.
Stewart Brand, technology Merlin*, is writing a book about maintenance.
The first chapter is a standalone essay and a WILD ride about:
It’s online at Stripe’s Works in Progress.
Read the whole thing!
There are some lessons. e.g.
And such daily maintenance is also good for the soul.
But the main lesson is that there is one approach which is to over-prepare and aim for zero maintenance – but, it turns out, this is fragile.
(That, of course, is the strategy my iPhone takes.)
* or Comte de St. Germain, take your pick of catalytic immortals.
At this point I might make a connection to the long-lost movement of Adaptive Design and ask about phones and laptops which embrace and encourage end-user maintenance. What could we design differently, how would the commercials work etc.
Hello Fairphone, right? Maintenance is a route to environmental sustainability too.
However! I have justly been outed as a genre blogger:
(Thank you Paul Graham Raven, I am tickled and delighted.)
AND SO, in the sprit of the archetype, let’s imagine some smartphone maintenance add-ons.
Along with my 19 quid polishing cloth (for ), could I please purchase:
A special formulation of 5G grease which, when applied regularly to the back of my phone, buffs into a lacquer that blocks rogue radio signals yet is utterly transparent to the specific frequencies and modulations of 5G, meaning that my baseband modem has less work to do, in its separation of the wheat from the electromagnetic chaff, having a positive effect on both battery life and bandwidth as measured in bits-per-second.
Instead of my wooden toothpicks, I would like a guaranteed lint-free defluffing pick, for the regular hoiking of detritus from various ports (charging and otherwise) perhaps a cutting-edge 3D printed ceramic or perhaps carved from the wishbone of an ancient bird.
A multivitamin supplement, to be taken with breakfast along with my daily handful of nootropics, that boosts the dielectric qualities of my thumbs, meaning that my capacitive touchscreen reads me more immediately and more precisely, leading to fewer texting typos and smoother, tighter, more impressive bezier curves in my sketches in the Notes app.