PAUL BOUTIN
New York Times News Service, Thursday, Apr. 09, 2009 11:57PM EDT
B ehind the cash register at Smoke
Shop No. 2 in downtown San Francisco, Sam Azar swipes a customer's
credit card to ring up Turkish cigarettes. The store's card reader
fails to scan the card's magnetic strip. Azar swipes again, and again.
No luck.
As customers begin to queue, he reaches beneath the counter for a
black plastic bag. He wraps one layer of the plastic around the card
and swipes it again. Success. The sale is rung up.
"I don't know how it works, it just does," says Azar, who learned
the trick years ago from another clerk. Verifone, the company that
makes the store's card reader, would not confirm or deny that the
plastic bag trick works. But it's one of many low-tech fixes for
high-tech failures that people without engineering degrees have
discovered, often out of desperation, and shared.
Today's shaky economy is likely to produce many more such tricks.
"In postwar Japan, the economy wasn't doing so great, so you couldn't
get everyday-use items like household cleaners," says Lisa Katayama,
author of Urawaza, a book named after the Japanese term for
clever lifestyle tips and tricks. "So people looked for ways to do with
what they had."
Popular urawaza include picking up broken glass from the kitchen
floor with a slice of bread, or placing houseplants on a water-soaked
diaper to keep them watered during a vacation trip.
Today, North Americans are finding their own tips and tricks for
fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and
adhesive tape. Some, like Azar's plastic bag, are open to argument as
to how they work, or whether they really work at all. But many tech
home remedies can be explained by a little science.
CELLPHONE LOSING CHARGE
If your cellphone loses its battery charge too quickly while idle in
your pocket, part of the problem may be that your pocket is too warm.
"Cellphone batteries do indeed last a bit longer if kept cool," says
Isidor Buchanan, editor of the Battery University website. The
98.6-degree body heat of a human, transmitted through a cloth pocket to
a cellphone inside, is enough to speed up chemical processes inside the
phone's battery. That makes it run down faster. To keep the phone
cooler, carry it in your purse or on your belt.
This same method can be used to preserve your battery should you
find yourself away from home without your charger. Turn off the phone
and put it in the hotel refrigerator overnight to slow the battery's
natural tendency to lose its charge.
REMOTE CAR KEY
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach
your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key
fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns
your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio
engineer.
Pozar explains, "You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head.
With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not
a great one, but it works." Using your head can extend the key's
wireless range by a few car lengths.
DRY INK CARTRIDGE
If your printer's ink cartridge runs dry near the end of an
important print job, remove the cartridge and run a hair dryer on it
for two to three minutes. Then place the cartridge back into the
printer and try again while it is still warm.
"The heat from the hair dryer heats the thick ink, and helps it to
flow through the tiny nozzles in the cartridge," says Alex Cox, a
software engineer in Seattle. "When the cartridge is almost dead, those
nozzles are often nearly clogged with dried ink, so helping the ink to
flow will let more ink out of the nozzles." The hair dryer trick can
squeeze a few more pages out of a cartridge after the printer declares
it is empty.
CELLPHONE IN THE TOILET
It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet.
Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits
from frying your phone's fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently
with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice.
It works for the same reason you may keep few grains of rice in your
salt shaker to keep the salt dry. Rice has a high chemical affinity for
water - that means the molecules in the rice have a nearly magnetic
attraction for water molecules, which will be soaked up into the rice
rather than beading up inside the phone.
It is a low-tech version of the "Do Not Eat" dessicant packets that
may have been packed in the box the phone came in, to keep moisture
away from the circuitry during shipping and storage.
LONGER WI-FI REACH
If your home Wi-Fi router doesn't reach the other end of the house,
don't rush out to buy more wireless gear to stretch your network.
Instead, build a six-inch-high passive radio wave reflector from
kitchen items, like an aluminum cookie sheet.
Follow these instructions.
Place the completed reflector - a small, curved piece of metal that
reflects radio waves just like a satellite TV dish - behind your Wi-Fi
router. It focuses the router's energy in one direction - toward the
other end of the house - rather than letting it dissipate its strength
in a full circle. No cables, no batteries, no technical knowledge
required. Yet it can easily double the range of your network.
DIRTY DISCS
You need to clean a skipping DVD or CD, but don't have any cleaning fluids on hand? Soak a washcloth with vodka or mouthwash.
Alcohol is a powerful solvent, perfectly capable of dissolving
fingerprints and grime on the surface of a disc. A $5 bottle of
Listerine in your medicine cabinet may do the job as effectively as a
$75 bottle of DVD cleaning fluid.
TOO MUCH FLASH
If your cellphone's built-in camera flash is much too bright,
washing out photos, tape a small piece of paper over the flash.
Experiment with different colours and thicknesses of paper to tone down
the flash from super-bright white to a more pleasing glow for evening
photos.
CRASHED HARD DRIVE
If - no, make that when - your PC's hard drive crashes and can't be
read, don't be too quick to throw it out. Stick it in the freezer
overnight.
"The trick is a real and proven, albeit last resort, recovery
technique for some kinds of otherwise-fatal hard-drive problems,"
writes Fred Langa on his Windows Secrets website. Many hard drive
failures are caused by worn parts that no longer align properly, making
it impossible to read data from the drive. Lowering the drive's
temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so
slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room
temperature can cause those parts to expand again.
That may help free up binding parts, Langa explains, or at least let
a failing electrical component remain within specs long enough for you
to recover your essential data.
That's the spirit of folk remedies: They may or may not work, but what have you got to lose?
