Oaken Gearbox

If you've ever bought anything from a smoker, you know exactly how hard that smell is to lose. I recently bought an older ThinkPad on Craigslist with this problem. Every time the fan kicked on, my living room was filled with the smell of stale cigarettes. The fix took some effort, but it did work. I first disassembled the whole case and removed the fan. I found some very good instructions for my particular model that helped me accomplish this without doing permanent damage. If you've worked on computer hardware at all, you're probably familiar with the grey scum that accumulates on fans and vents. Well this one was full of a black scum (ash? nicotine?). I wiped it as clean as I could with wet Q-Tips. After all the scum was gone I sprayed the whole thing, including the nearby foam inserts with pine scented air freshener. After reassembly, it now smells like air freshener, a big improvement over cigarettes. It did seem to make the fan noisier, though, so I would reco...

When I moved into my "new" house last year, I quickly realized that something about the switches for the light above the stairs wasn't right. Once the upstairs switch was "off", the downstairs switch no longer turned it on. Although it isn't hard to wire up two switches to control one light, cleaning up after someone else who did it wrong can turn into quite a puzzle. The first step is understanding exactly how these simple, convenient circuits work. The diagram below shows this. This is not the only way to wire it, just the simplest. If you want to see a few of the stranger variations, check out this link . Note that each one does the same thing, it just splices the wires in different places. To begin unraveling the puzzle you will need a multimeter , screwdriver , and maybe a pair of pliers . First, flip the breaker for the circuit you're working on. Pull the covers off both switches and pull unscrew the switches from the box.  Before to...