After about the 85th time I searched the Internet in vain for a solution to a problem I could not have been the only one experiencing, something occurred to me: Maybe nobody's writing about it?
Certainly, as a user and advocate of free software I end up dealing with a list of problems that is, if not longer then at least more eclectic and unusual than most people's. The choices I've made in the tech side of my life have not favored a stable or bug-free experience by any stretch of the imagination: My desktop computer is custom-built from individually purchased parts. I'm currently running the testing branch of Gentoo GNU/Linux on it.
But I still shouldn't be alone out there. Indeed, it's taken a long time for me to get comfortable with the communities and resources that actually exist for this very purpose. A lot of times, one site or another just isn't the right place to document an entire solution to a single problem. And they need documenting. If I want to advocate free software, I have to acknowledge that reliability and problem resolution represent tangible barriers to adoption that need to be addressed.
It hasn't been easy, finding and fixing problems, figuring out how to troubleshoot in the first place. But I have been getting better. And with each new experience, I learn something new. What if I put my experiences somewhere on the web? Somewhere visible to search engines? Even if I only wrote about a fraction of 1% of the problems people actually run into, this could still help a lot of people -- especially computer or Free Software newbies. Just by writing about what went wrong for me, and how I went about trying to fix it, I might open a doorway for discussion. And even if I didn't know the solution to a problem, at least the fact that there was a problem would be there, and people could discuss it. Someone might even find a solution, and share it.
And so, the idea of The Fix Lever was born in my mind. And here it is. My home on the web for tackling software problems, hardware problems, and heck, even a lot of practical everyday-life kinds of problems too. Join the discussion! Solve a problem! Pull the lever!
