I visited CMU for Spring Carnival! I had a blast doing the classic Carnival activities like Booth & Buggy, but really I had the most fun when hanging out with friends. These first set of photos are from when I went with some friends to the nearby Phipps Conservatory:
Flowers
iPhone 16 Pro Max, 2.22mm & 6.765mm lenses. A bit maximalist, not a great collage but still pretty fun I think.
The rest of these images are from a party where I helped Holly tear apart her Surface Book 2, a very challenging task as you soon shall see. They were taken with a very bad digital camera (Canon PowerShot SX230 HS) that was lying around, mostly because I thought it would be fun and indeed it was quite the fun challenge to work with it to get usable pictures. I had a blast that night; catching up with old friends, tearing apart a laptop, and photography, what more could I ask for?? I hope the joy I had comes across in these photos:
Laptop "sous vide"
The Surface Book 2 has no external screws. The only way to take it apart is to soften up the edges of the screen & pry it apart with an x-acto knife. Our first idea to soften the edges was to submerge it in near-boiling water, hence "sous vide". Unfortunately, we did not have a large enough pot, so we had to do one edge at a time.
Laptop "card cushion"
Honestly, it's probably a good thing the sous vide idea didn't end up working out; we would have been stuck with the fact that, once out of the water, the laptop cools quite quickly, and there's only a limited time window to slide the knife thru the adhesive before it "hardens" into an impossibly sticky mess again. And once open, it's much harder to sous vide, so yeah we found a better solution: microwavable heat packs that we could lay on just the next area to slice, with increasing numbers of cards pulled from our wallets prying the already-sliced parts open.
Screen Removed!
Finally, after a lot of work, we were able to get the screen fully off! We thought it would be smooth sailing from here, so we took our "success pose" shot a bit early.
Money Shot
This is my favorite shot that I was able to get with this camera. It's actually incredible how close the focal plane can get!
Documentation Shot
Turns out, the screen was just half of it. I forgot to bring my iFixIt repair kit, and no one else had the tiny Torx bits needed for the security screws inside laptop (that you could strip extremely easily if you weren't careful), so a 9PM Home Depot run it was. This photo was taken a bit of the way through that process, after removing some of the screws, and yet more adhesive that was hiding yet more screws (required btw). I can understand why iFixIt gave this laptop a 0/10 fixability rating now!
Motherboard Removed!
Still, after much perserverance, we acheived our goal: motherboard removal! Or more importantly, SSD removal from the motherboard, for which motherboard removal was basically required because wow that thing was stuck in there. As you can see, we were ecstatic to have finally accomplished our goal after 2:30hr of concerted effort. All in all, though, effort well spent: it makes for a helluva story!
