On Wed, August 5, 2009 14:50, lookaround360@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > I'll bet you even change your own motor oil. One of my great luxuries has been that I *never* work on my car. Well with the computers ect, it is getting harder to work on one's one car. I never considered that a luxury. Now I don't do much but what I do helps me understand the car, its mechanics and how to better care for a fairly large investment. I used to carry my RX 7 to a wide variety of shops with only one hope. That hope was not that they would fix the problem, but that they wouldn't damage anything else in the attempt. Half the time I had to drive in and say "Change x" and hope they didn't foul up y. Y might be no big deal, or it could be expensive. Yes it was one of the Wankel rotories and yes it was very different, but yes once I figured out the process I don't know many others that got 230,000 miles on the original engine and turbo. It paid to learn. In the process of learning you usually figured out what not to mess with. > It seems to me that the less annoying services will be the most > successful. There needs to be a digital version of "No user serviceable > parts" sticker. Mess with it and you die. That'd be useful. Those stickers are a decent guide to finding where you can actually do some good! (I got trained in on this by an IBM field service engineer, who was showing us how to find which fuse was blown on the line printer driver board in an IBM 1401, and where he kept the spares, so we could un-solder the old one and solder in a new one without waiting for him to come up from Rochester.) > If you have to tinker aren't there plenty of open-source and hobby > resources? I haven't found photographic or software tools where the built-in functionality is sufficient; I need them to be part of an open system. I personally believe the open source project is really beginning to hurt some of the bigger software companies. I have had very good experiences with open source software, and not so good with software for which I paid a kings ransom. --
