Earlier this year, I bought my mother-in-law in Malaysia a brand-new, top-of-the-line Cuckoo IH pressure rice cooker. She was thrilled. The irony? The rice cooker my wife and I use every day is an old workhorse I’ve kept running for years with my own two hands. This isn’t a story about being cheap. It’s a…
Tired of the crowded tourist spots in Korea? If you’re looking for a peaceful getaway loved by locals, let me introduce you to Seonyudo Island—a stunningly beautiful island on Korea’s west coast, whose name fittingly means “Island Where the Immortals Play.” Just a short drive from the city of Gunsan, Seonyudo offers a perfect blend…
If you’re a tinkerer like me, you understand the obsession. It’s that tiny, irrational detail that nobody else notices, but it keeps you up at night. For me, it was the missing 1/4″ screw mount on my GoPro Hero 8. Sure, the stock GoPro finger mount is functional. But as someone who grew up with…
For any technician in the field, sometimes the simplest tool is the most effective. When you need to quickly test a servo motor or make a simple manual move without hooking up a host controller, the built-in JOG mode on the drive itself is your best friend. While dedicated software provides more data, this panel-operated…
Replacing an electrical plug is one of those simple tasks everyone thinks they know how to do. The parts are cheap, the only tools you need are a screwdriver and a wire stripper, and the instructions are always the same: open the housing, strip the wires, screw them into the terminals, and close it back…
I was looking for something in our kitchen cabinet the other day when I stumbled upon a shocking sight: my wife’s secret collection of insulated bottles. I knew she liked them, but I had no idea it was this extensive. Her justification? “They’re all for different purposes!” As they say in Korea, “When you see…
A few years ago, a small crisis occurred in our kitchen. My wife, a hobbyist baker, declared that her old, stylish scale was no longer reliable. “You can’t get a consistent taste without precise measurements,” she said, and I knew she was right. As a technician who preaches the importance of precision in my own…
We all have one—that old, beat-up piece of gear we just can’t let go of. For me, it’s my HP DV6-6022TX laptop, a machine that’s been with me for nearly 15 years. It was a major purchase back when I decided to become a self-proclaimed “clumsy technician,” and we’ve been through countless jobs together. We’ve…
If you’ve ever worked with motors, you know the pain. That tiny, deceptively simple piece of metal—the parallel key—is a marvel of power transmission. But when it’s perfectly fitted into its keyway, trying to remove it can be one of the most frustrating jobs in the workshop. I’ve been there. In my younger days, I…
We’ve all been there. You buy a cheap, articulated phone stand, hoping it’ll be the versatile tool you need for online classes, video calls, or filming your projects. It looks decent online, but when it arrives, you’re stuck with a fatal flaw: a clunky, ugly, and impractical phone holder. That’s the story of how my…