People who restart

Posted on May 7, 2013 by janetgunter

This post appeared first as a guest post on the RSA’s The Great Recovery blog.

Ten months into our activity, we have stopped more than once to pinch ourselves. Last year, when we started throwing Restart Parties, we only had the smallest group of volunteers. We just threw ourselves head long into our cause – to empower people to reduce waste – and what has always impressed us is the organic growth of our committed group of repairers. New repairers turn up at events, find us online, get referred by friends.

We owe all of our momentum to our Restarters, a fun yet serious group. We would like to take a moment to introduce two of our committed repairers, and share their approach to repair.

Continue reading →

Training, and saving laptops

Posted on March 15, 2013 by janetgunter

We had our first, more formal training this week, at the invite of Brent Libraries. Our Restarters worked with 10 people who had signed up for our “Speed Up Your Laptop” training.

Many of the people – mostly women! – in attendance were owners of “hand-me-up” laptops from their children. None wanted to give up on their laptops, but really did feel they needed some basic maintenance skills. Continue reading →

Repairing with young product designers

Posted on March 8, 2013 by janetgunter

We had an excellent day yesterday at Central Saint Martins, one of the University of the Arts London campuses, most associated with product design. We started the day with a lecture to second year students about what we have learned working with hundreds of frustrated electronics owners over the past nine months.

Our top 4 messages to future product designers… Continue reading →

Our Top Fixes of 2012: #1 – Epson, We Have a Problem!

Posted on January 23, 2013 by ugomatic

Original photo by Flickr user Newtown graffiti

And the winner is…

It might appear as cheating that we decided to pick the case of the infamous Epson Stylus D68, which we already wrote about back in December as our symbolic top fix so far. In short, it’s the story of a printer which stopped functioning all of a sudden, leaving the owner with nothing more than 2 blinking lights. According to Epson, the problem was that the ink pads of the printer had “reached the end of their usable life and that your printer will no longer work until it is serviced”. Basically Epson has a counter of the number of print-outs produced by a printer, and once a predefined number is reached, the company recommends (actually more than recommends!) that the printer is substituted, or that, in case of expensive high-end printers, the ink pads are substituted. As our volunteer repairer John pointed out, Epson produced its own software utility to reset the counter. However it doesn’t recommend users should use it or even try substituting the ink pads: “Epson does not recommend ink pad replacement by users without technical training or resetting the Ink Pad Counter without replacing the ink pads.” This is a typical case of a company trying to expand its control over the way consumers use a product they have bought, so we had to do something about it. Continue reading →

Our Top Fixes of 2012: #2 – Repair and Reuse Before Recycling

Posted on January 20, 2013 by ugomatic

Laurence, Ben and the dvd player

Laurence came to our first Restart Party in Brixton, the one we defined as our “Midas moment”, as everything we touched…miraculously got fixed. Laurence’s Matsui 225 dvd player was no exception to the rule: when she brought it to the event, it was a typical case of a sad piece of electronics on its way out, as it would “eat dvds” and not play them. A team of volunteers opened it and took the whole thing apart, making sure that the tray mechanism would get cleaned throughout. Jack, Ben and Alan, took about half an hour to perform the operation, and everyone enjoyed the learning experience: many of us had never seen how a dvd player works from the inside! When they put it back together, the dvd player started working again, as new.

But what is the point of fixing a dvd player, especially when the exact same model can be bought used on Ebay for close to nothing? Continue reading →

Our Top Fixes of 2012: #3 – Beware of the “Genius”

Posted on January 18, 2013 by ugomatic

Barti, Adrian and Janet in the middle of troubleshooting

Barti brought her MacBook Pro with a “dead screen” to a Restart Party. We troubleshooted her computer and figured that the problem was actually with the video card: the laptop would switch on normally, with the familiar Mac OS X start-up sound, while screen was completely black, not even marginally dim (which is what usually happens when the lightbulb behind the screen needs replacing). We suggested to Barti that she tested the laptop with an external monitor: if that didn’t work, she could know for sure whether it was the video card. After the event, Barti’s tests confirmed our diagnosis, so she took her laptop to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store. She was quoted £370 to have the video card replaced, but the technician advised Barti that, given the steep cost, it might have made more sense to just resell the laptop for spare parts, and look for another one. When she asked us for further advice, we knew there had to be a better solution. Continue reading →

Our Top Fixes of 2012: #4 – Clean Your Fan, Mate!

Posted on January 15, 2013 by ugomatic

: A whole lot of dust inside a 6-year-old Macbook!

Janet’s laptop has been a source of inspiration for The Restart Project. Months before planning the first event, we were already “restarting” her old white MacBook, by adding additional RAM, updating some applications and clearing space from the hard drive, in order to speed it up. All of this worked, but was not enough. She kept complaining that the laptop was really hot, and the fan out of control. Having installed smcFanControl, she knew that the temperature insider her laptop was often reaching 80 degrees Celsius, and the fan going beyond 6000 rpm – not good. During our second event, we took her laptop apart following a very detailed iFixit guide. Continue reading →

Our Top Fixes of 2012: #5 Not All Manufacturers Are Equally Greedy

Posted on January 14, 2013 by ugomatic

We held our first Restart Party back in June 2012, and in exactly 6 months we went on to run 12 events and countless presentations all over London. Our growing community of self-repair enthusiasts has fixed, or contributed to fix, all kinds of malfunctioning electronics: from laptops to electric shavers, from printers to bed-side lamps, from wi-fi cards to dvd players and watches. We didn’t always succeed, to be fair, either for lack of spare parts, tools or simply because we did not know how to – but in every occasion we learned a lot about repair, flawed design, planned obsolescence and alternatives to the mantra of recycle & buy a new one.

As we gear up for a lot of exciting upcoming events in January and February, this week we are presenting you our personal selection of 5 top favourite fixes we performed at Restart Parties in 2012:

#5 – Not all manufacturers are equally greedy

Bob and Ugo troubleshooting the tablet

Bob came to our very first event, after learning about it during BBC Outriders in the middle of the night. He brought a “dead” tablet: a Elonex Etouch 1000ET, which had failed following a failed software upgrade. The screen was black, with no sign of life. The device was outside of its warranty period, and Bob did not know what to do. We took quite a lot of time with his tablet, and managed to install the new available firmware. However, the tablet’s screen would only blink for a second at start-up, then die. Continue reading →

The gift of repair

Posted on December 13, 2012 by janetgunter

Why not give the gift of a simple promise to help a friend or loved one repair something in 2013? You could either include this in a Christmas card, or present it with a gift as a “personal warranty” for the gift, or you could fold up and drop in a stocking.

We’ll be handing these out at our Christmas parties this weekend, Saturday in Belsize and Sunday in Brixton.

Please share, print and use, or get inspired to make your own version. (We’re licensing this Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)

Download the high-resolution colour version here
Download a high-res version optimised for black & white printing here
Download a high-res version optimised for printing in grey scale here

If you need help finding a repair clinic or café near you, consult our growing global map – “Community (of) Repair”.

Triumphing together against planned obsolescence

Posted on December 11, 2012 by janetgunter

Moment of triumph over the Epson in question

I am not a technical person.

It may seem strange, being one of the founders of this project, but perhaps that is always what makes me good for this. The technical stuff not only frustrates me – it also really intimidates me, just like most people.

When I first saw The Lightbulb Conspiracy, a documentary about planned obsolescence, I would have never imagined myself battling against one of the featured tricks of printer manufacturers – Epson’s dreaded internal counter/chip. It is an emblem of planned obsolescence, much like the first iPod, where Apple made it impossible to change the battery.

This Saturday, in Willesden Green, a frustrated participant to one of our Restart Parties brought her Epson Stylus D68. She said it died suddenly with no warning and two lights just blinked red and she could no longer print. She had just replaced both ink cartridges.

I did some Googling about her problem and quickly came across a number of people complaining about the dreaded “kill chip”.