title: “portable computers: screw solutions” started: 2020-01-17 published: 2020-01-18

this is the first time over a month has gone by since submitting an earlier blog entry. i have written and accumulated several new but very incomplete posts since the last i submitted. but this all has nothing to with this mischievously misleadingly titled blog entry i am writing and you are reading.

part zero / portable computers

by portable computer i basically am referring to notebook computers, laptops, netbooks, those kinds of portable computers. not as portable as other computers like mobile phones, tablets, or the timeless tamagotchi of the 1990s, but designed to be used as one would their desktop computer but on-the-go and without needing to lug around a screen or a mouse or a keyboard or anything because it's built into the device and as with a desktop computer, you can plug in external hardware as needed.

you could have just said, say, laptops and there'd have been no need to explain anything

shut up, other me. sit in a corner somewhere and drink a beer

i don't have any beer

so go shopping

no u

no u

[omitted]

sorry about that. the smeghead's an absolute nutter. let's move on.

part one / parts of speech

in the beginning～

～i gave this blog entry a title with two main parts. and the second part of the title was made deliberately ambiguous in a vain attempt to be intriguing, hopefully make the reader curious.

hah. you just admitted you were vain

no i didn't. i said i did something that was vain. these two things do not equate each other. stop being thick.

stop being so mean so mean to yourself, dude. i have feelings, too, you know

[sigh] i know. i'm sorry. forgive me?

[silence]

*じ～～～～～～～～～～*

ok! fine! you are forgiven just stop staring at me like that. it's creeping me out.

a subtitle of “screw solutions” can mean several things, and the word that changes everything is that first one. setting aside interpretations that don't fit the context here, whether or not screw is being used as a noun or as a common sfw expletive-alternative.

i'm talking about the noun. the tool, as in the bolt or the nail modified with an inclined plane wrapped helically around aforementioned tool's axis and with groovy heads (that is to say, there's generally grooves on the head designed to fit a certain type of screwdriver).

OK YOU KNOW WHAT. I'M STEPPING IN.

wait, what? why? this is my blog post.

no. no; it's really not. it's a horrifying lovecraftian supernatural monster that's going to consume the psyches of everyone who reads this if i don't stop you soon. so zip.

this has gone on to far too long. and what have we said? not much of anything. here's something: my thinkpad, pure illusion, had room for another hard drive and so i decided to make use of that. this was shortly after it arrived. i didn't need to look at a manual or make any online searches for how to do this. i used my best judgement for where i thought the space for it would be, unscrewed one screw, allowing me to expose a part of inside pure illusion, gently pushed the drive in nice and snug, and screwed the cover back on. the whole process took less time than finding the screwdriver, probably.

here comes the kicker

the hard drive was taken out of an old dell laptop whose life was already over. i actually removed the hard drive before i got pure illusion because i was going hard drive hunting and i was curious how hard taking apart and putting back together the necessary parts of the notebook to get to the drive would be. that process took a very, very long time in comparison, and i never bothered trying to put any of the pieces back. i think i ended up just removing whatever i parts i could in the end that seemed like they might be useful at some point in time. i don't put a lot of trust in my memory though regarding what happened when because [spoiler alert] the majority of what you remember probably didn't happen the way you remember it happening. eye-witness testimony is both the number one most relied on type of evidence that gets convictions in court, and one of the least reliable type of evidence that can even count as evidence in court.

the laptop i dismembered had a lot of screws i had to remove. i cannot recall at which point i could remove the hard drive. but here's a lovely photograph of the pieces. note the plastic baggie. in it are at least 30 screws i had to unscrew and there's a couple of pieces with screws attached to them after unscrewing them from when i was planning on putting it back together still. and i easily may have lost several screws while in the process.

do you know how many screws it would take to replace pure illusion's keyboard? two. i've also replaced a key on the keyboard. on most (especially modern) laptops this is a daunting task, and in most cases not worth the effort. on pure illusion it was nothing short of simple.

before you go

(chosen pseudo-randomly and in no deliberate order):

cowboy bebop (likely will focused on in a later post)
kono subarashii sekai ni shukufuku wo
flying witch (likely will focused on in a later post)

ではじゃあまたね～

stay tasty in 2020 o/

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