Heck, I’m not even an electronics geek and I don’t generally trust the knowledge of your average Radio Shack store staffer.
I usually attempt to fix things at home-only, I’m finding that a lot of it sin’t fixable. take toaster ovens-to replace the heating elements, you must rebend the little metal tabs that hold the case together-and guess what?-they break off! I spend 3 hours doing this, and found that the thing was useless-the sides of the overn were loose, and the electrical isolation was compromised (shock hazaed). So, you throw it away and buy a new one!
There’s something else which doesn’t fit but I’m going to shoehorn it in here anyway because it’s been bugging me and now it can bug all of you:
Sometimes, it isn’t about DIY versus ready-made, it’s about spending four hours now to save yourself five seconds spread out over the foreseeable future. Repetitive tasks are my nemesis and my inspiration. I seek to automate them as much as possible and use my solutions in as many new ways as I can find. If that means I spend hours hacking and reading and debugging and testing instead of taking a few seconds doing it by hand every single time it comes up, I’ve won. If I can apply my solution to something else, I’ve won even more. That is why I view most user interfaces the way modern pilots must view early biplanes: I admire the tenacity it must require to get anything done using them but I am happy I don’t have much contact with them myself. Very few widespread user interfaces can be scripted, and without scripting it’s impossible to automate anything. There are clever ways around some things but often when I use such interfaces I’m reduced to mindless clicking and dragging and typing while the code that would solve the problem in my own world dances, unusable, in my forebrain.