Yahoo News for Stupid People: Tech Solutions in the 21st Century

Hi, I'm hardcopy, and my town got SWAMPED with so much snow, I was stuck in my house for about a few days surviving on cheese.  But I made a bacon cheese grilled sandwich, and that makes me feel alive again.


I read a recent article on Yahoo News entitled "Simple Solutions to High Tech Problems".  I know that if you actually read these articles you really are a sucker who thinks there might be something useful there instead of using common sense, but I was curious to see how bad this article was.  Here are the main highlights from the article:


"1. Touchscreen phones that won't work when you have gloves on"
Yahoo's Solution: Get a stylus or rip a hole in your gloves.  


hardcopy's solution: Take your freaking hand out of your glove or wait until you get into your car to use your damn cell phone.  Unless you are stuck in a cave for 48 hours and your fingers are frozen, then you actually have a problem and you need to use it if it didn't run out of battery in the first place.  

"2. Dirty cell phone case"
Yahoo's Solution: Put it in the washer.  Warning: some cases can be destroyed this way because they have glue.


hardcopy's solution: Just clean it out with eye glasses cleaner or Windex; something in a spray bottle.  If you're too lazy for that, then you can put it in a dishwasher.  And if your cell phone case can't be washed in a dishwasher, get your pants on and just clean it with a sanitary wipe from the recycling center!  I don't understand why you have to be so lazy and wasteful to put it in a dishwasher if about 70% of the world's cell phone cases aren't even made out of tough enough material without glue to endure it.


"3. Wet Gadgets"
Yahoo's Solution: "Before you give up hope, try dropping your soaked gear into a Tupperware container full of rice to draw out the moisture. Or, as a general preventative measure to keep moisture away, save some silica gel packs (you know, the ones you'll find in boxes of new shoes or beef-jerky packages) and stuff them in your cell phone or camera case."


hardcopy's solution: There is no possible way rice could absorb all of the water your cell phone is drowned in when you put it in the washer or leave it out in the rain.  First of all if any if you are Asian enough to wash rice, you totally understand how rice isn't extremely absorbent of water.  The only reason rice is washed before cooking is to wash out starch not to absorb water.  So not only are you putting your cell phone is a bowl of rice that won't suck water out of your phone, you're going to mix water with starch, and I would be more worried about starch possibly ruining my phone than "wow this is a stupid idea". 

"4. Scratched Discs and DVDs"
Solution: Use car polish and buff.


hardcopy's solution: That could possibly work for some minor scratches, but if your disc is too beat up, you can't rely on simple cleaning like that.  The picture here shows what a scratch cleaner looks like.  It's a pretty big machine, and it gets the job done.  When you get a badly scratched disc, chances are that you need about twenty minutes to run it through one of these.  Trust me I work in a library and I use this machine a lot, but it's worth the wait and it makes the disc look like new.  The one that I use has different felts that are either coarse or soft.  Then you have to put solution onto another set of felts (usually two for a pretty bad disc) and buff the disc through the machine for about ten minutes each.  Then you have to clean it off after that with a solution given in the package or Windex just to get all of the grime off from the machine.  Then you're fine.  And minor scratches can also be placed through a machine, too.

The rest of the article has legitimate advice for two other computer problems, which aren't so common.  I'm still just stunned about this "drying cell phone in rice" trick works for many one out of ten problems.  It seems weird to me, and unless someone does this in front of my face, then I'll just let it pass slightly.  


This all takes me back when someone sent fake advice to Official Playstation Magazine years ago saying to get rid of game disc scratches, you have put the game in a bowl of soup and microwave for a minute (at least I think someone sent that in or the staff was just screwing around with someone's mind).  People actually tried this, and one dude even did it with Metal Gear Solid 3, a very worth the price game.  He took a picture of the disc (surprise it looked like a wet chicken mess) and said "you owe me a new game".  I mean do people actually just do this?  Find any advice from anywhere and just go with it without doing any research first?  So fine one cell phone dried in rice.  I just can't accept the fact that a cell phone, which has been dropped in the toilet and possibly almost flushed can dry in raw rice in a day.