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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.

A Better Pomodoro

Blog #0001 - Pondering how Pomodoro Technique works.

Pomodoro Technique, work 25 minutes, rest 5 minutes; Simple, and work well enough. But I still often not achieving much with it, or unable to focus through it.

Its fundamental logic:

  1. Get started doing things, knowing it won't take long, and award with a break.
  2. Giving a natural time block, prevent overspending time on single task without realizing it.

Knowing the root reasonings, we can optimize it:

  1. Start a timer (stopwatch), work on highest priority task until distracted, rest for 1/5 of the work time. This makes the tasks easy and keep us going.
  2. Keep progressing and increase the work time, until getting into Flow State. This prevents the break every 25 minutes stopping our flow. A stopwatch should still be running to remind ourselves how much time spent.