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PSA: a bent paperclip and a 9-volt battery saved me on a job in a 1920s house in Tacoma
Was tracing a dead circuit in a kitchen rewire, and my tone generator died. The homeowner had an old transistor radio, so I clipped a paperclip to the hot wire, touched the other end to the battery's positive terminal, and ran the negative to ground. The radio picked up the static pulse through the wall, letting me follow the path. Anyone else ever use a weird radio trick like that?
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barbara_schmidt686mo ago
That's so clever... it's wild how much old tech still works on a basic level. Makes you realize how much we overcomplicate things now.
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murphy.richard6mo ago
Yeah, I've done that with a cheap AM radio, and Barbara's right about old tech being useful.
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margaret_taylor426mo ago
Barbara's totally onto something. My garage is full of old tech that still works perfectly fine, and it makes me look at new gadgets differently. Sometimes I'll buy some fancy new thing and the old version was actually simpler to use. We keep adding layers until the basic job gets lost. It's like we're afraid of things that just do one job well.
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