Time-stamp: <2022-10-05 22:13>

The Tinkerer

»You're weird. You find a new thing, and then you obsess about it.« My partner said. And she's right. And now I think I found the common denominator for these obsessions. I'm a tinkerer.

When I did my apprenticeship as automobile technician, we were assigned different stations in the workshop, each lead by another master technician. Herr Drexl was the one I admired most. He was an expert in rebuilding automatic transmissions, and when they left his hands, they worked better than when they came from the factory brand-new. He built his own tools to measure tolerances perfectly -- tools they didn't even have at the factory.

Tools are my thing. And the obsession comes with optimizing the tools. Bend them and modify them until they do exactly what I want, perfectly.

When I started using computers professionally, I got fed up with Windows 95 very quickly. I switched to Linux. Endless tinkering ensued, which ended up as a career starter. I became a sysadmin.

Motorcycles. I can't just ride them. Better tires, better lights, better storage, adjust the suspension to perfection, learn how to do all the maintenance myself -- in the end I spend more time with a wrench in my hand than a helmet on my head.

Guitar. Why does this sound bad? If it's not me (which I know only practice will fix in the long run), I need to fix it. I have all the tools to set up a guitar now. I learned how to change pickups, how different potentiometers and capacitors affect the tone, fiddled with pedal order in my signal chain, learned about tubes vs. solid state amps, built my own pedal from a kit. I also practice a lot, but the building and modifying plays an important part in how satisfying guitar is as a hobby.

Needless to say, my tool of choice at the computer is Emacs: the ultimate tinker tool.

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✍ Wolfgang Mederle CC BY-SA 4.0

✉ <madearl+gemini@mailbox.org>

language: en

date: 2022-10-05 21:43

tags: diary