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Why Fight for Right to Repair

Blog #0007 - Why Fixing Your Tech Shouldn’t Be a Crime.

From smartphones (Apple's Error 53) to farm equipment (Farmers had to hack their own John Deere tractors), corporations have turned repair into a privilege (only wealthy people have chance to repair)—not a right. For over a decade, the Right to Repair movement has fought to reclaim ownership of the devices we buy.

When electronics go smaller and more digital, it enables manufacturer to:

  1. Make proprietary parts without documentations, so no one else other than their "prestigious" repair centre can fix it.
  2. Lock down digital assets, so that when we buy a product, we only own the hardware, where the company can keep charging us to get the software updated or fixed.

When you buy a device, you think you own it. But manufacturers use those two key tactics to maintain control.

Company can give irresponsible lies such as:

  1. "Proprietary repairs are to ensure safety"

    Reality: Skilled independent repairers fix everything from GPUs to pacemakers daily. The real issue? Companies hoard repair manuals and diagnostic tools, forcing experts to reverse-engineer fixes.

  2. DRM (Digital Rights Management) to lock down softwares are to prevent pirated softwares?

    That does make some sense if we're using a fully online services like Spotify. But the Right to Repiar Movement started by farmers who unrightly being charged to repair their tractors software locked down by manufacturer. When we own such hardware, we should expect it is actually ours. The company shouldn't have power to keep us paying them, especially we don't even know what is going on in their software.

Companies are definitely using these tricks to keep us under their control. Every consumer should be aware of these and make a more informed choice, often for a more ethical alternative.

Free Up Windows Space

Blog #0006 - Uninstall apps cleanly with BCUninstaller.

It’s common to hear people saying they don’t store much stuff on their laptop/PC, yet disk space is always full until their PC crashes due to out of space for system stuff.

But they might still be keeping those 5 useless video editing apps (because of misleading ads) they downloaded for a one-time event and never used again.

BCUninstaller, a free and open-source tool, let you uninstall multiple programs and delete all the leftover dependencies, plugins, etc., all at once.

Why not use Windows’ built-in uninstaller? Because it doesn’t fully remove the app. It leaves behind dependencies, user data, and other junk. Why? Supposedly to make future reinstalls faster.

Apparently we uninstall apps because they’re useless, not because we plan to reinstall them someday.

  • in Growth
  • 1 min read

Everything is a Story

Blog #0005 - Stories in our mind, shape how we see the world.

To make sense of anything and store it in our mind, we subconsciously convert it to a story. The stories shape who we are, categorized by Dr. John Delony as:

  • Inherited (cultural, familial, political).
  • Imposed (by others' judgement).
  • Experienced (real events like loss, success, trauma).
  • Self-Told (internal narratives about identity and purpose).

Conversely, we can also shape the stories, by re-examine it. You'll realize how much of it in the stories are actually gaps, and we fill it with imagination. This is not just useful to break through the trap of negative thinking, it is also crucial to see the world clearly.

Luke Smith wrote about Science of the Gaps, showing how things we treated as facts, can be imaginations. We always have the illusion on scientific certainty, such as most people weirdly confident in Darwinian evolution. We do have evidence that point towards evolution as a possibility, but they are far from undebatable. Even if so, the mechanism is still unknown (e.g. gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium).

I don't lean towards evolutionist or creationist, and I think only those who deeply studied in these fields can pick a side if they wish. Whenever something is still under debate, let's be honest, it's often straw/steel man each other point of views. In the end of the day, we still have to admit the best we can say is, we don't know, yet.

Why Blog Daily

Blog #0004 - Is blogging daily a useful habit or a waste of time.

Kieran Macrae made a good point on why his daily blogging was time wasted. If you do it just for a sense of satisfaction and a status of "daily blogger", you're wasting your life. Always remember it is about bringing value, reach your audience and making impact.

Yet it also takes time, it is a fake dream to focus on fancy SEO while your content is still hollow. Grow from your origin story and build up personal branding through storytelling with authenticity.

Then it can grow into a community, or a movement:

  • Seth Godin has been daily blogging for over 20 years and inspired many through the words.

  • Wiwi Kuan through sharing his passions on many platforms and many years, is even quoted in a University Computer Science Lecture, although his background is a pianist!

  • Xuan, Isshiki, Tony, etc. These alumni from Zhejiang University has this inspiring community of sharing knowledge and notes through their personal website.

Blogging is not the single medium, it can be through videos, forums, or even real-life events. I choose to blog as it is the natural gateway for me.

Who would be my audience then? People interested in utilizing tech as a means to human flourishing, to build smarter tools and better lives.

  • in Growth
  • 2 min read

Speed Reading

Blog #0003 - How human read (non-fiction/research paper) faster and understand better.

A review of research: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? on Journal "Psychological Science in the Public Interest".

Classic speed reading courses, like those from Jim Kwik, centred around reducing subvocalization, using peripheral vision to reduce eye movement, or more contemporary Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). Those techniques are even in conflict, where RSVP focus on single words, while peripheral vision method utilize word chunks.

The research in review shows there is no proven magic bullet that allows speed reading without compromising comprehension. Speed reading is basically skimming through text, which is very useful when we're trying to get a bird-eye view of a paper, or to quickly move through book paragraphs that doesn't bring us much value.

When encounter important information where we have less prior knowledge, slowing down to grasp the gist of it is crucial. Speed reading comes in handy where we don't waste time reading every single line, just for the sake of reading it. You're not a failure if you didn't read every single line of a book!

Mark Manson:

"Reading is to serve you, not for you to serve the book."

Always focus on getting information out of what you read, fulfilling the "why" you read it. The research shows the only proven way to be better reader is just read more and increase knowledge in different domain, which also strengthen your language skill, so we waste less time pondering on vocabulary and can quickly grasp the meaning out of a writing.