Kitaab

Learning through Experimentation

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published 2022-05-12 18:25

updated 2022-05-12 18:25

I'm fairly certain I just broke my pinecil, in the very first attempt to use it. I'm not particularly familiar with electronics, in fact the reason I got a pinecil was to finish off my first electronics project (Building a monome norns, including the SMD bits, because, I am a masocist), and this sort of thing happens to me often. I won't lie, I was a little upset that I managed to break a new tool / toy, within minutes of using it, but I've come to accept that's how I learn things. I was the kind of kid that took things apart all the time. When I got my very first computer, the first thing I did was unscrew the back case and take out all the bits that I could, and then put them back together so I felt like I understood it. That was before even turning it on for the first time.

Lately it's been weighing on me that nearly everything I own is in some state of disrepair. My laptop (a 2nd hand Thinkpad x270) doesn't have a working keyboard, and if I press on the left side of it too hard, it glitches and freezes up. My Onyx boox won't turn on unless plugged into the power supply. My phone screen is broken. My table isn't even bolted onto the legs, it's just heavy enough to not move when I use it. To be sure, lots of these aren't due to experimenting with things I don't know about, but wanting to fix these problems instead of replace them with shiny brand new machines that do effectively the same thing, is the experimentation. I've replaced batteries on my phone, on my smart watch, on my laptop. I've frakenstiened together PCs from old ones lying around. I repurosed my first computer into a home server. Previously this desire to fix things had embedded in it the quality of learning. But once you've replaced things a few times, there's no more learning to be had. It becomes a chore, another thing to have to do in endless list of things to do to keep my life going. I'm trying to find joy in the act itself 😊


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