Recently I purchased a pro tech toolkit from iFixit. The pro-tech toolkit is designed for tech enthusiasts to have every essential tool they need on hand. It comes with plastic picks for opening devices, tweezers, and a lot more super valuable tools.
image from ifixit.com
It also has a 64-bit screwdriver set for many different kinds of devices. When I recently took apart my Xbox 360 (which you can read about here), it used a special star tip, which the kit had. The kit also has an anti-shock wrist band which I haven’t had a chance to use yet. The only complaint I have so far is that the pressure tweezers broke quite quickly.
My favorite thing about the kit is the screwdriver set which has a lid shaped like a grid for placing screws which has been extremely useful as I don’t have any mat to put the screws on. Overall I really like this kit, and I will definitely be using it in the future, as it is super handy to have on hand! You can check it out by visiting their website here: ifixit.com
Recently, our old Xbox 360 had issues with the disc drive constantly opening after closing and sometimes not even opening without unnecessary force on the drive. I was able to find a guide on how to take apart my Xbox on iFixit. Unfortunately, when I was taking apart the Xbox, a piece snapped off as the entire outside shell was just snapped together with clips. After taking off the exterior body, I unscrewed about fifteen screws holding the final aluminum shell together.
Once I got it completely taken apart, I unplugged the cables connected to the disk drive, then I was able to just quickly pull out the drive. There was a LOT of dust. I then got an air compressor and wholly cleared all of the dust out of the inside components. Since this particular Xbox is now about 15 years old. I then took the outer plastic shell pieces and washed them with soapy water in a bucket. Since there was a couple of Gamestop stickers and it was partially yellow.
I also looked up the motherboard type since the “red ring of death” was very common to these Xbox 360s. The red ring of death was a widespread error code that would involve the motherboard or another hardware piece inside the Xbox to fail, and they’re mainly was not an easy fix (more about it here). And any of the motherboards made from 2005-2008 were most likely going to have that issue. But I found out that the model motherboard we had was called “Jasper” (thanks to this helpful website: weekendmodder). This meant the board was from when Microsoft mostly fixed all of the problems and had a rare chance of getting the red ring of death. Since it was manufactured in the years 2009 to 2010.
I cleaned out the disk tray entirely and found that the most common issue would be fixed by cleaning a rubber pulley. Because the motor wasn’t powerful and the pulley would get dirty and not turn the gears far enough, which would result in the disk tray getting confused about why it wasn’t closing. Once I had cleaned the gears and washed the rubber band, I put it all back together and powered the Xbox back on. And it started opening and closing again! I tested it thoroughly before screwing the drive back into place into the Xbox.
I also upgraded another part of the Xbox, which I am working on. There will probably be another blog post on it when I have finished.
Tablet computer with broken glass screen on white background
Recently my iPad (5th gen) was dropped, and it had many cracks on its screen. After about a week of the glass being broken, I looked it up to see if I could order a replacement part to fix it and if it would be worth the price of a claim and the time to replace it. After a bit of googling around, I found out that I could just replace the glass part (the digitizer), and it would be much cheaper than replacing the whole LCD display.
A digitizer is where the screen recognizes touch, and is the outer glass part you interact with the actual LCD was not damaged. I was able to find a replacement part on a site called iFixit. I heard about iFixit from a YouTuber I watch called Hugh Jeffreys. Hugh Jeffreys is an Australian tech enthusiast who repairs devices such as Phones, Tablets, iMacs, etc., and makes short videos on the process. He and several other youtube creators also use iFixit tools for taking apart phones.
iFixit sells parts to many different kinds of devices mainly I was able to find a screen digitizer for my exact iPad model pretty quickly on their site. They also have a pretty active community on almost any device for help on taking apart and fixing. The part I ordered cost me about $50, including the tools necessary for taking apart the iPad.
After the part arrived, I looked at the guide in the item description. Unfourtintly I broke the home button ribbon cable when taking the front display off of the iPad. It was a painful process of heating the iPad adhesive with the heating tool, then attempting to pry it open, and then heating it again. Fourtintly I was able to find a home button replacement on iFixit as well, but that meant that the Touch ID would no longer work due to apple’s “safety concerns.”
After I applied for a screen protector after the completed repair, I bought it off amazon for about $8 for three. The entire repair cost about $70. It would have been cheaper if I hadn’t bought the home button replacement.
For a while now, my mother has owned an online business, and she uses a service called ship station. Shipstation allows an easy way to ship orders. The way we have it set up is a Dymo scale and a Rollo label printer hooked up to a computer that has Shipstation’s software called shipstation connect. Unfortunately, shipstation connect is currently only supported on Windows and Mac. That is a problem because I want to use my old laptop running Linux Mint.
After googling a lot to see if anyone could get it running on Linux and not finding anything, I. looked into using a virtual machine. A virtual machine is basically a computer OS (operating system) that runs inside your native OS or a “virtual computer” that runs inside another computer. I was able to download a software called virtual box by Oracle. The setup was surprisingly easy; all I had to do was download Windows off of Microsoft and create a new VM. After installing windows onto my VM, I downloaded shipstation connect from their website and drivers for the Rollo printer that I was using. After that, I saved a snapshot (a snapshot is basically a save that I can go back to later.) After I exited the program and had to look up how to get my USB devices connected as I didn’t see them show up when in windows, and after some googling, I found out I had to manually add them in the virtual machine settings on the virtual box.
Unfortunately, none of my devices would show. Even after installing the extension pack provided by oracle for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, it would still show the message <no devices connected> I double-checked that my laptop was detecting the Rollo printer and the Dymo scale by using the lsusb command in the terminal, both devices showed up as connected and functional. So I went back to google, and I found out by this helpful forum answer that I needed to let virtual box see connected devices. After doing a simple command in the terminal, I restarted the laptop, and the virtual box program showed all of the connected devices. Once I got that working, I added the devices I wanted, the Rollo printer and the Dymo scale. And I started the windows machine once again from the saved snapshot. Once windows fully initiated in the VM. I ran the ship station connect program and hooked up the scale and printer. Then I went to my main screen on Linux and opened a browser tab, and tested the scale and printer. They both worked flawlessly and without delay!
Summary:
I was able to run a Virtual machine on a program called a virtual box. And used windows on it. Once I got windows working, I installed ship station connect and basically used the virtual machine of windows as a “local server” to use the scale and print on other devices or use my regular browser on the same device as my virtual machine.
