I Fixed My Laptop with Floss, Lemming Toads, and Huge Packages

I Fixed My Laptop with Floss:

That's right, I said floss. One of the weird things about a tablet PC is the unorthodox hinge system they use. Rather than a pair of hinges on the edge, they need one central hinge contraption that also rotates so that you can put the thing into slate mode. This hinge gets a lot of wear, and seems to collect dirt and debris. Dirt and debris makes hinges not only stick, but make noise. A horrid, primordial screeching crackling sound similar to a combination of nails on a chalkboard and bones being crushed by a rabid hyena. You think I'm kidding? The creaking on my tablet got so loud that I was able to wake a person who was in the depths of a dreamless ambien coma, and coworkers have been giving me odd looks. It was LOUD.

Sadly, there's just about jack shit online as far as suggestions go for fixing this issue. Most suggest just cleaning it out, but other people, like myself, noticed that the solid dry lubricating pad had degraded form use and crumbled away. Not good.

The one thing I did find suggested using, of all things, waxed floss. The floss is actually good for cleaning out the metal residue and dust to stop the creaking, and the wax seems to make a pretty good dry lubricant. So what the hell, I tried it out, and holy shit, it worked. It cleaned out the black metal dust and dirt, and mostly stopped the creaking. The joints were still pretty stiff, even after trying to work the wax into the bastards for a while, so just for good measure I zotted each joint with a blast of dry waxy teflon spray that I just happened to have hanging around from another never-finished project of mine. Yeah, that's right, I have dry wax teflon spray just sitting there waiting for a good use. I'm weird like that.

So anyway, after all was said and done, it works again. I had briefly tried some silicon grease that was used for paintball guns, but it doesn't come even close to the amount of viscosity needed, and the hinge seized up after a day. So don't do that: Floss and Teflon spray. It works, bitches!

In other news, I drew a Lemming Toad, seen above, who is now up on Mojizu waiting to make the grade (or not). Fun little guy; I tried out some different line colors, but in the end I wound up darkening them anyway. I can't seem to quite hack the light line styles of some other artists yet. Guess I'll try again another time.

And in YET OTHER news, I'd like to give my personal superfluous and completely ridiculous packaging award to Razer for their Mamba gaming mouse. The mouse itself is superb, and I love that I've gone from a chunky 800 DPI to a nearly unnecessary 5600 DPI of sniping accuracy for gaming, so I'll give them a little link/plug here for a fantastic product (I got mine on Amazon; cheaper!), but holy shit guys, did you need to ship the mouse in a giant plastic display case with an honest to god pedestal for the mouse to be displayed on? I get that you want the packaging to be nice and all, but this is sort of a 'fuck the environment and the green movement and all that hippie shit, let's go the other way and just cram as much unnecessary bullshit into the package as we possibly can! SUCK IT ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!'

I mean, the case comes with a little three tire bureau underneath it with drawers for storing the various parts of the mouse. Why you need these, I dunno, because once the mouse is up and running there's no reason to store anything in them. Well, perhaps it could make a poor woman's jewelry case, as I think about it, it's that friggin huge. And the plastic case could probably make a decent planter for, oh, say, some sort of vegetable or herb that needs good root space.

I do get that I'm sort of hypocritical for bitching about excessive packaging when I'm dropping a chunk of cash on a gamers mouse, but still, I think they could have scaled back a little and been a little more environmentally conscious while also saving themselves and the end consumer a few bucks on the over the top packaging.