what did *you* do?

The Great LiveJournal Outage of 2005 During the outage I separated 20 kilos of rice into small, medium, and large grains. What did you do? Ganked in whole from deebee.korp

dual shock 2: electric boogaloo

I was going to write an entry about what a miraculous little piece of hardware Sony's Dual Shock2 controllers are, because it's so easy to take them apart and fix them. But I can't.

There was some leftover mochi or something stuck to one side of the X-Button. I couldn't get it depress smoothly, so I disassembled the controller to clean it. 6 tiny screws in the bottom, no mean-spirited (heh) glue along the seam to slow down warranty-voiding consumers, and pulled it apart to show it's vibrator-laden guts. I cleaned the button thoroughly, then put it back together, only putting two screws in, in case I had to re-investigate, but it seemed unnecessary. The controller went back together smoothly, even simply, and the X-Button regained its previous smooth action.

Sitting down to enjoy a little mayhem in San Andreas, I took to the streets, and realized with dismay that the emergency brake wasn't engaging. The shoulder button hadn't re-seated properly when I put it back together.

Two screws out. Re-seat the button. Two screws in. Test. Right shoulder button fine.

I will spare you the tedium of the two additional adjustments.

These are not simple devices. Tug on one thing, something else moves. Fail to line up one 0.5mm peg with the circuit-board hole, and it won't re-seat. The two top shoulder buttons are split evenly by the main seam, so balancing the buttons while reconnecting the two halves is critical.

My controller is back in one piece, all screws locked in, but I gotta say I'm feeling a lot more respect for factory workers' fine motor control as of last night.