Torx Screwdriver Set

To do the Palm repairs I wrote about, I needed some smaller Torx screwdrivers. Ace Hardware had size T3, T4, and T6, and above that, but I needed size T5. I went to Home Depot hoping I could get a set of driver bits or an individual screwdriver for five bucks or so. For $4.87 they had a set of 36 driver bits, an extension arm, and a screwdriver handle. It is called the Husky 36-Piece Precision Screwdriver Set. torxset.jpg In addition to Torx sizes T5, T6, T7, T8, T9, T10, T15, and T20, it had 6 small slotted head bits, 4 philips heads, 3 pozi heads, and 8 hex heads. At that price, and with a lifetime guarantee, how could I go wrong? Besides, that was the only way I saw to get a Torx T5 screwdriver.

The set is in a nice plastic case with each bit held in place and a clear front cover. But as soon as I put one of the bits in the screwdriver, I saw what horrible product design this is. The driver bits don’t snap into place, they just slide in and are fairly loose. So if you hold the screwdriver with the point end down, the bit just falls right out. Put in the extension piece and they all fall apart. They’re not even magnetized or anything. It is such a poor design that I am tempted to take the set back and get my money back (scratch that, I figured it out in Comment 4 below). The good thing is that I needed the T6 size too, so if I had just bought a T5, I would have been out of luck.

Palm Repairs

A couple of weeks ago the switch on my Palm TX stopped working. I did some searching and found a good post on a Palm forum by Woz of Oz (if it is not Apple co-founder and Dances With the Stars contestant Steve Wozniak, it is someone who wants you to think it is him) that said you can use the center button to turn on the Palm and get the clock pop-up, which leaves you in whatever program you were in last (whereas the Calendar, Memo, and other buttons turn the Palm on but take you to those programs). So I have been doing that lately. To turn it off you just wait a minute and it goes off on its own. I’m hoping Apple releases a nice update to the iPod Touch next month and I can use that instead of the Palm.

Continue reading “Palm Repairs”

Clean Air Champion

Today at work I won an award for being a “Clean Air Champion” (I got a certificate and a coffee mug). As part of the Clean Air Campaign, I have been logging the days where I do a clean commute. And since I take MARTA every day, then pretty much any time I go to work is a clean commute day (twice actually, since I go to work and then go home). The advantage of logging my commute is they have a monthly drawing where you can win a $25 gift card if you participate. I have won at least 3 times, but nothing in the last year.

So I got an e-mail this week saying to meet in the lobby with the other 25,000 pound champions. By their calculations, I have saved 25,000 pounds of pollution with all of the clean commutes I have logged. I did a similar calculation when I wrote about 10 years of MARTA cards, coming up with 2,000 gallons of gasoline saved in 10 years. Now a gallon of gas only weighs 6.3 pounds, so if all of that turned into pollutants, it would only be 12,600 pounds in 10 years. But I found a government website that says one gallon of gasoline actually produces 20 pounds of carbon dioxide when it burns because every carbon atom in the gasoline is combining with two heavier oxygen atoms from the air. So that means in 10 years I saved 40,000 pounds of CO2. And with the time I rode MARTA before I started collecting cards, and the time since I wrote that blog entry, I am probably up to 16 years or more of clean commutes.

So I really am a Clean Air Champion.

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