Tech tricks to get out of a fix
Before you call the experts, Paul Boutin offers on-site assistance at home.
Behind the cash register at the Smoke Shop No. 2 in downtown San Francisco, Sam Azar drag a customer’s credit card to ring Turkish cigarettes. Store card reader not scanning the magnetic stripe card. Mraz slide again and again, but without success.
As customers begin to tail, which reaches under the counter in a black plastic bag. One layer surrounds the plastic card and drag it again. Success! The sale is rung.
“I do not know how it works, everything,” Mraz said, the thing I learned there is another employee of the store.
VeriFone, the company that makes the card reader of the store, not to confirm or deny that the plastic bag trick works. But it is one of many schools of low-tech high-tech failures for people without engineering degrees were found – often in desperation – and shared.
Today, economic instability is likely to produce much more of this stuff.
“In Japan’s postwar economy was not so great, so can not get the articles of daily use such as household cleaning,” says Lisa Katayama Urawaza author of a book named Japanese word of advice for lifestyle intelligent. “So people are looking for ways to do with what they had.”
Urawaza popular include the collection of broken glass on the kitchen floor with a slice of bread, or placing in a house plant soaked in water to prevent the layers of water during a voyage.
Today, many people find their own bad behavior tips for fixing gadgets with simple supplies such as paper and tape. Some, like the plastic bag Mraz, are open to discussion on how they work, or if all. But many remedies of the technology can be explained by science.
The loss of mobile phone
If you lose your cell phone battery while idling too fast in your pocket, your pocket, may be too hot.
“Batteries of mobile phones in fact do a little more if it remains cool,” said Isidor Buchanan, editor of the website of the University of the battery. The body heat of a human being, channeled through a handheld tissue inside a mobile phone, is enough to accelerate the chemical processes within the battery of the phone. What makes it run faster. Keep in your purse or belt.
This same method can be used to preserve the battery away from home without your charger. Turn off the phone and put it in the refrigerator overnight hotel end of the battery tends to lose its charge.
Remote car keys
Assume that the remote door of the car does not have the range of your car in the parking lot. Keep the metal key on your keychain to your chin, then press the button. This trick to turn your head into an antenna that can extend the wireless range of the key with a length of about cars.
Dry ink
If your printer ink to dry at the end of an important work, remove the cartridge and run a hair dryer on it for two or three minutes. Next, place the cartridge in the printer and try again while still warm.
“The heat from the hairdryer heat the ink in bulk, and aid to flow through small nozzles of the cartridge,” said Alex Cox, a software engineer in Seattle. “When the cartridge is almost death, the nozzles are clogged with nearly the ink dried, thus allowing ink to flow more ink nozzles.
