Fix your own damn gadget

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So my Fuji Finepix Z1 has been dead for a month. Won’t turn on, dead.

I was thinking I’d have to send it somewhere (like Fuji Canada, genre) and give someone my money. In the meantime, it’s been sitting on its little dock cradle, and I have been acquainting myself with my cell phone’s photo (not so bad) and video (so bad you want to cry) cababilities.
It’s a Sony Ericsson K51oa, not a high-end thing (there’s a new high-end phone coming out soon in Canada, maybe you’ve heard of it) but it takes remarkably decent pictures. Remarkably decent means extremely average, as in hey, this thing actually takes pictures and you can even recognize the people in them! Well, at 1.3 Megapixels (no focus or anything) it works best outside, which is good for me cos I used it mainly for last week’s vacation in the country. Still it sucked not to have the good good finepix grain, the zoom, the screen you can actually see. Because when you combine lots of sunshine with a very weak LCD that has something like zero angle of vision and sunglasses, you just take your picture staring at a gray screen and hope for the best. As for the video, 176×44 pixels should NEVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCE be called “High-Quality”. It’s an insult. 176×44 should be called “crap”, and the lower setting, 128×96 should, uh, not. “High-Quality” is not even good enough to put on youtube.

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So anyways, LifeHacker had a link today to a really nice site that provides user-generated help for all those gadgets you got lying around that mysteriously stopped working or have some weird misbehaving feature, but that you really don’t want to spend $200 to have a lab technician press the secret “reset” button behind the bezel. Its called FixYa and it is an answer to all my gadget-owner prayers.

It took me all of five minutes to type “fuji finepix Z1 power”, click on a result, and voilà! I picked up my camera and it was magically fixed. Actually the answer was to remove the battery for a couple of minutes. Since the camera had been unused for weeks, with the battery removed, well it now worked! I don’t know how this happened, but it’s all thanks to this site. FixYa. If you have an electronic gadget – chances are – bookmark this one. It will be useful.

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