You can repair it at the Repair Café.
Books tickets on Evenbrite: http://repaircafe-es2.eventbrite.co.uk/?rank=72&ebtv=C
A Community Project to Repair, Reuse, Recycle
[ ahem, we subscribe to ’Reuse Repair Remake Recycle’ that we thought of first? & independently! – Remake (it into something interesting) is more creative 🙂 ]
What do you do with a chair when the leg has come loose? With a light that no longer works? Toss it? No way!
Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). The types of items that can be repaired and reused include clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances and toys.
Why a Repair Café?
We throw away vast amounts of stuff. Even things with almost nothing wrong, and which could get a new lease on life after a simple repair. The trouble is, lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves or they no longer know how. Knowing how to make repairs is a skill quickly lost. Society doesn’t always show much appreciation for the people who still have this practical knowledge.
Repair Café is changing all that! People who might otherwise be sidelined are getting involved again. Valuable practical knowledge can be passed on. Our possessions are being used for longer and don’t have to be thrown away. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products. It cuts CO2 emissions, for example, because manufacturing new products and recycling old ones causes CO2 to be released.
Repair Café teaches people to see their possessions in a new light. And, once again, to appreciate their value. Repair Café helps change people’s mindset. This is essential to kindle people’s enthusiasm for a sustainable society.
But most of all, Repair Café just wants to show how much fun repairing things can be, and how easy it often is. Why don’t you give it a go?
The Goodlife Centre
The Goodlife Centre’s light and airy workspace in Waterloo is an ideal environment for a Repair Café, which is free to attend. Visitors are encouraged to bring their broken items from home for assessment, and if deemed repairable by the organisers, can start making their repairs in the Repair Café. DIY and electrical experts from The Goodlife Centre will be on stand-by to advise and a selection of tools and materials will be made available for use on the day. It’s an ongoing learning process in a friendly social environment with plenty of tea or coffee on hand.
The types of items that can be repaired and reused include clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances and toys. In fact, there is very little that cannot be given a new lease of life. We hope that the Repair Café will help Londoners view all of their possessions in a new light and appreciate their lifelong value. By reducing our dependency on throwing away and starting over and instead focusing on repairing and reusing items, we hope to inspire enthusiasm for a sustainable society.
The Goodlife Centre is about sharing practical knowledge and learning traditional skills for life and this is very much in line with the values of the Repair Café concept. By hosting a regular Repair Café, we hope not only to encourage sustainability in our borough, but to facilitate a community that learns from each other.
Director and founder of the Repair Café, Martine Postma says:
We are very happy to see that our concept is taken up with so much enthusiasm in other countries. We’re very excited about the first Repair Cafe in the UK, in London!
London’s first Repair Café will take place at The Goodlife Centre on Sunday 22nd July from 2pm – 5pm. The Goodlife Centre is just ten minutes from Waterloo, Borough and Southwark tube stations.
For full details of the Repair Café concept that originated in Holland go to http://repaircafe.org/
Also follow the independent London group ‘RestartProject’
http://restartproject.wordpress.com
Twitter @RestartProject
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RestartProject
Why British TV drama is crap – and why this matters to tech firms
[ full credit to the Register, et al ]
– What results is the opposite of ‘dumbing down’. We’ve seen talk ad nauseum for over a decade about ‘TV platforms’ but with only lip service paid to the idea that content is king
Platforms, platforms everywhere. And nothing to watch
By Andrew Orlowski
Posted in Music and Media, 20th July 2012 09:03 GMT
Analysis It has been years since a contemporary BBC drama caused an office discussion round here. The best American imports such as The Wire and Breaking Bad are all regular conversation pieces but I can’t remember a British one being interesting enough even to worth a mention. And you’ll know why. They’re glossy, expensive and dreadful.
But Line of Duty, a thriller about a bent detective, is pretty bold. It’s extremely tightly written, brave, and nasty with it – although the unseen gangster may may yet turn out to be Fat Bastard from Austin Powers films. He sounds like him.
Which is not to say Line of Duty is in the American league. The supporting characters are cyphers. They have little or no psychological complexity or lives of their own. A good test of a drama is how quickly you can imagine the characters having their own spin-off series. By the end of the second series of The Sopranos, each of Tony’s crew was so richly drawn you could imagine a spin-off for each one without too much difficulty. Not here. But it is a return to form.
The BBC has been showing another crime drama, though. Blackout is a vehicle for Christopher Ecclestone, and that’s where the good news ends. This is classic contemporary drama which thinks it’s edgy, but where the focus is entirely on the visual style, which mimics that of a slick advertisement. The BBC is a great training ground for advertising production talent – its own (nonstop) advertisements for itself (brands, strands, idents as well as actual programmes) are top quality. As a result, much British drama boasts eye-catching cinematography and editing, but the directors don’t know about story-telling. They’re passing through, en route from Audi advert to (they hope) Hollywood riches.
(Hollywood demands ‘emotional range’ on the applicant’s CV, which is why Blighty’s directors and writers wedge touch-feely moments into the oddest places. Like Dr Who – as Ian Harrison pointed out here [1]).
Blackout has another problem common to our contemporary home-grown drama: the plot is implausible on so many levels. The baddie in the show is an evil corporation that bumps off its enemies. Gina McKee is in it, because Britain only has about eight professional actors, who must appear in everything, all the time. This over-familiarity means we don’t really believe them as anything but themselves.
Eccleston lives, with his family, in a trendy loft space – something BBC producers would probably quite like to do. (“Sit down, have a seat”). It is also improbably politically correct. At the end, Mayor Ecclestone declares the city to be a Chavez-style socialist republic, which is what a lot of BBC producers would like to do to W12, if not everywhere else. (“Love it. Here, sign this contract, we’re commissioning you”). But even the most politically disengaged viewer will be thinking: “Hang on: rate capping, surcharges, EU contract directives… You what?”
There’s also something else unsettling about Blackout.
Everything that can be Americanised has been: so Town Hall becomes City Hall, press officers become media aides, and when we see the city, it’s an American city: a helicopter shot shows us the tops of skyscrapers that could be any generic American finance district.
Now you’re wondering – all very interesting, but what’s this digression doing at El Reg where I expect to see news of TV technology platforms and business.
Continued at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/20/drama_queens
Why is repairing so important?
https://restartproject.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/why-is-repairing-so-important/
Posted on July 16, 2012 by ugomatic
The Restart Project is all about changing consumer behaviour in the ICT industry, about facilitating the collective learning that will demand hardware and software manufacturers to adhere to open standards, to allow for openness at all levels, to design for durability and compatibility. To look forward with progressive new features, without leaving behind users with slightly older hardware.
Repair is an essential component of our vision. It is instrumental in transforming our obsessions about technology into sustainable technology ecosystems, where owners can claim back control over the very tools at the heart of our digital lives.
Repairing makes the invisible visible: by opening up a device, together we can learn the trade-offs of its design and the manufacturer’s intentions in terms of its durability.
Community-based repairing such as what we do in Restart Parties liberates us from the tyranny of the buy-dispose-buy again. We all know it can’t possibly make sense that it is cheaper to buy a new product, rather than to fix the existing one. And yet, this is what we hear all of the time, all of us: the flash in your digital camera no longer works? Buy a new one, or pay more than the cost of a new camera to change the processor. The screen of your e-reader no longer works? It’s glued to the rest of the device, we’ll just send you another one.
Manufacturer’ reluctance to fix software problems is just as disturbing. The operating system of your device doesn’t allow to open password-protected files? Buy the new device, as we fixed it for it – but we won’t port the software patch to the older device, period. In such cases, repairing becomes jailbreaking a device, liberating it from the cage of proprietary operating systems and extending its usability for its owner.
The Restart Project is about much more than just repair. But repair is key to our collective understanding of the need to change status quo in this industry. And to liberate ourselves from the mantra of “recycling”. Recycling is very trendy these days, it makes us feel good. And yet, it should always be the last resort: recommendable only when reuse, refurbishing, repair have all failed.
NW3 is a keen supporter of RestartProject, which exists globally in different forms, but has run several events in north London (and hoping to expand shortly)
Apple & EPEAT : really green?
So after just a couple of days, in a rather rare change in direct, the fruity firm Apple, returns to EPEAT ‘eco & green recycling certification’ following a substantial customer backlash. Not that this had anything to do with their change of mind of course
[ for the record, we aren’t against Apple or Microsoft, or anyone else, but do object to hypocrisy or sales gumph ultimately designed to do nothing more for the world than improve their profits ]
It is probably worth considering that it is Apple’s success at producing ‘iconic’ products that puts it in the limelight, and that many other companies probably do similar things ..
Long term, probably Linux and open source is the only way to go .. so many devices become obsolete simply because the software is no longer available that supports them.
Maybe its just that to make things thin, they have to be glued together – is that the secret of modern manufacturing?
Perhaps its time to stop this fixation with all things thin and start worrying about a healthy planet
The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/11/retina_display_macbook_epeat_rating/
.. pulled all 39 of its products from the EPEAT’s registry of “green gadgets” last week.
Teardown website iFixit speculated that the glued-on battery in the Pro is to blame. The EPEAT standards specify that machines must be easy to disassemble in order for parts to be recycled or upgraded [PDF].
iFixit writers described their experience of taking apart the new MacBook Pro:
That’s why it’s such a problem when manufacturers glue batteries into place with industrial-strength adhesive. When we originally tore down the Retina MacBook Pro, we could not separate the battery from the upper case. The next day, after a lot of elbow grease, we were finally able to get them apart—but in the process punctured the battery, leaking hazardous goo all over.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/13/apple_rejoins_epeat/
“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake,” writes Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior veep of hardware engineering
“Our relationship with EPEAT has become stronger as a result of this experience, and we look forward to working with EPEAT as their rating system and the underlying IEEE 1680.1 standard evolve,” Mansfield writes
– the word ‘evolve’ is worrying
“I am very happy to announce that all of Apple’s previously registered products, and a number of new products, are back on the EPEAT registry,” EPEAT head Robert Frisbee
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18837492
Mr Mansfield is unlikely to be involved in the effort as he announced last month that he was soon to leave Apple.
“We look forward to Apple’s strong and creative thoughts on ongoing standards development,” said Robert Frisbee.
EPEAT: http://ww2.epeat.net/ProductDisplay.aspx?return=search&action=view&productid=8661&ProductType=3&epeatcountryid=1 (for Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display MC975)
– the Macbook got itself ratified within 24 hours of returning to the register
– several of the EPEAT certifications (ending in a GOLD award) are questionable
– several criteria can be obtained by providing extended servicing by ‘the manufacturer’, for 3 years after guarantee, or by 3 ‘approved’ repairers. 4 years lifetime does not seem very eco to us
4.3 Design for end of life
YES Required 4.3.1.3 Easy disassembly of external enclosure
YES Optional 4.3.1.7 Molded/glued in metal eliminated or removable
4.4 Product longevity/life cycle extension
YES Required 4.4.2.1 Upgradeable with common tools
YES Optional 4.4.3.1 Availability of replacement parts
– this could be true though (replaced the fan recently in an older Macbook)
Comments (just some) ..
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1752
Over 5 years is “vintage”, Apple has “discontinued hardware service” on them (except in California who apparently told them to go stuff it). Over 7 years is “obsolete” – nothing at all and even service centres can’t get parts.
How is it possible that it has attained this certification when the bloody battery is still glued to the case, has someone tweaked the EPEAT requirements while no one was looking? If the laptop cannot easily be separated into its component parts for recycling whats the point. Looking at the “End of life” requirements on the website, anything glued or requiring manual separation is only an option?
Does that mean they are no longer going to glue the batteries to the laptop casing in a way that makes them completely non-removable and non-replaceable?
Also, does that mean they are going to stop bonding aluminium to glass and plastic in screen assemblies?
That’s the thing with Apple – forced obsolescence. 10.8 is now dropping support for other models so they probably only have a year before they become unsupported. My -2 year old first gen iPad won’t take IOS6