Kyle Wiens

In the sweltering heat of July, one universal human desire transcends borders and cultures: the unassailable craving for a cone of creamy, cool ice cream. But too often, the promise of that sweet reprieve turns to disappointment when we hear, “Sorry, our ice cream machine is broken.”
At least, that’s the case with McDonald’s. At any given moment, one in 10 McDonald’s restaurants across the U.S. has a broken ice cream machine, according to McBroken.com, a website run by a Github infrastructure...

My trusty Xbox is out of warranty. Although it has been a real workhorse for many years, all that swapping of discs is eventually going to kill its optical drive. I’m a fixer, and if the disc drive failed in a different kind of product, I could easily repair it by installing a new part. But this particular fix is beyond hard—it is illegal. Or at least it was until late last year.
Fighting for the right to fix such problems has taken me down a decade-long rabbit hole of work on federal policy,...

Interview with the authors of three new books on repair.

This bill was actually neutered by the Governor and the language was changed last minute and:
"eliminates the bill's original requirement calling for original equipment manufacturers to provide to the public any passwords, security codes or materials to override security features, and allows for original equipment manufacturers may provide assemblies of parts rather than individual components when the risk of improper installation heightens the risk of injury" (src: https://pbs.twimg.com/medi...

Join the world’s most influential maintenance man for a discussion of tech waste, consumption, economic opportunity and a new kind of DIY revolution with tech commentator and radio broadcaster Vanessa Toholka.
‘When you fix something – just for a moment – entropy loses its iron grip on the universe,’ Kyle Wiens has written. ‘When you fix something – just for a moment – you’re the victor.’
Wiens is a consumer activist and the CEO of iFixit, an online repair community.

I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience lately.
Coronavirus is sweeping the globe, carrying with it supply chain disruptions and fear. My iFixit purchasing team has been trapped in Taiwan since January, waiting for the all clear to go back to work in our Chinese supply chain. The S&P 500 just suffered its quickest correction since the Great Depression.
Kyle Wiens is the cofounder and CEO of iFixit, an online repair community and parts retailer internationally renowned for its open source re...

The fight for our right to repair the stuff we own has suffered a huge setback.
As anyone who repairs electronics knows, keeping a device in working order often means fixing both its hardware and software. But a big California farmers’ lobbying group just blithely signed away farmers’ right to access or modify the source code of any farm equipment software. As an organization representing 2.5 million California agriculture jobs, the California Farm Bureau gave up the right to purchase repair ...

Proposed rules by the Federal Communications Commission have digital watchdogs and open source advocates worried that manufacturers will lock down routers.

The EPA just opposed rules that would make it easier for researchers to investigate the millions of lines of code in cars — independent probing that could have detected VW’s programmatic shenanigans sooner.

An introspection on entropy.

Most problems can’t be solved with duct tape and baling wire anymore. What used to be done by hand is now managed at scale by giant machine. And that equipment is expensive—equivalent to the price of a small house.