fandomhigh | Practical Mechanics, Tuesday, June 10, 2014

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practical mechanics

Practical Mechanics, Tuesday, June 10, 2014

"Sorry I missed last week, guys," Ben said from the front of the room, smiling apologetically. "There was a suddden attack of...cat. Fandom, right? Anyway, today we're going to do some really basic practical mechanics today: stuff you probably either do already or need to know in the dorms. We're going program a DVR, work a Blu-Ray player, and troubleshoot a wonky laptop. Just as a reminder, if any of your real stuff gets to be broken beyond your ability to fix it, you can either stop by my office during the week or wander down to Stark's in town. I worked there when I was a student here."

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Not a cat!

Nathan Byrn

Celia Bowen

Barry Ween

Marasiah Fel

Joker Moreau

Andros

Get it to record an entire season of your favorite show.

Or, if you're evil, get it to override someone else's programs.

The other things seemed too easy, so Sia went with the one that seemed most complicated, because she'd never done it before.

She was not going to admit that she was confused, shut up.

A few taps of the remote, and the DVR was set up to record all episodes of Octo ER, first runs and repeats, all channels, all times, saving all episodes until manually deleted. It was also first in the priority queue. Sorry, everyone else!

Make the movie play without breaking the damn disk. Be surprised that the movie is the third of those damn car movies: Ben has terrible, terrible taste.

The technology in the room was creating an intense buzzing sound in his head that Nathan was having some difficulty ignoring. He attempted the one activity that sounded the easiest and the quickest while holding one hand over his ear to temper the sounds.

Turn it off and turn it back on! Or hit it with a hammer. Whichever.

Celia didn't even know what the other two things did -- she knew it had something to do with the films shown in the common rooms, at least, but anything else was utterly beyond her.

Computers, though, she vaguely understood, inasmuch as she had used one. The first step with this...broken laptop (she couldn't really tell it was broken, except that the screen didn't seem to be able to show the Google or the Wikipedia, which was all she ever used computers for, anyway) was obviously to turn it off -- which actually worked the way she thought it would, by pressing the large, obvious button.

She frowned, then pressed it again and waited as it made those buzzy, clicky noises that computers seemed to always produce. When the screen lit up and it sang a little song, Celia actually threw her hands in the air in glee. "I did it!"

That's right, everyone who's ever complained about a computer before just rebooting it: a girl from 1884 just figured it out.

Oh sure. Barry could just turn it off and on...

But that would be the wimpy way of doing it.

Which is why his laptop was already in pieces as he redesigned the mother board. The hard drive was connected to his tablet where he was wiping the drive and installing his own operating system.

Joker wasn't Barry, by any means. He wasn't a fraction of Barry. But (after he'd turned the laptop off and back on again, of course), he'd managed to hook it up to his omnitool and fire up an all-in-one repair tool he'd downloaded from the extranet.

After that, he sat and waited impatiently. "Come on, there's less than a terabyte on this thing! How long can it possibly take to scan?!?"

Who are not animals today! Whee!

Still sporadic as I finishing showing my friend All the Africa Things today!

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Practical Mechanics, Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Sign in [6/10]

Re: Sign in [6/10]

Re: Sign in [6/10]

Re: Sign in [6/10]

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Program a DVR

Re: Program a DVR

Re: Program a DVR

Work a Blu-Ray

Re: Work a Blu-Ray

Fix a Laptop!

Re: Fix a Laptop!

Re: Fix a Laptop!

Re: Fix a Laptop!

Talk to Ben & Cassidy!

OOC