I do practically all of my work on Sony VAIO notebook I bought 3 years ago. I picked it because it was very light (less than 1.5kg), small, had great screen, keyboard and battery that seemed to last forever (around 11 hours without WiFi and about 8 with it). I still love this machine, but it has a remarkable design failure. Let’s see if you can spot it on this picture?

That glassy looking button is an on/off switch. It responds to light pressure and it protrudes from notebook even when lid is closed. What could possibly go wrong?

After a while I got tired of my notebook getting turned off while I carried it and made what I believed would be a temporary fix until I figure out something better ^[1] . A cap for button made out of layers of paper for sturdiness (I should at least use paperboard) glued together and reinforced with copious amounts of Scotch tape. It looked ugly, but mostly worked.

The problem with temporary fixes is that they tend to become permanent. I think this happens when they are too successful and remove too much pain, but it’s hard to find that sweet spot of enough uneasiness without actual aggravation. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.

So I’ve been using it ever since with a firm intention to figure out a better way to fix it. I finally decided to draw what I need and print it at Shapeways ^[2] . Here are results:

I made two (left is old paper one), because it takes them a while to print and deliver them to Europe, I had no experience with materials and they are relatively cheap. They also looked better before I sandpapered them somewhat for a better fit. In fact both of them were completely black.

A couple of tips if you intend to use SketchUp for drawing models. SketchUp was really made for drawing sketches of buildings so when you start it, you’ll see an image of a person (to help you scale your sketch). That image is an object and you have to delete it if you don’t want it to screw up your measurements in exported file. The other consequence of SketchUp purpose is that anything you draw has no depth. This didn’t matter to me since required thickness of protector cylinder was about the same as minimum thickness that 3D printer can print. If this is not true for you, then you’ll probably need to do some post-processing (search Shapeways for tutorials).

My notebook has been “on the road” and has performed admirably apart from a failed battery latch which forced me to now use a lower capacity battery (which still gets me through a typical conference day). But 3 years is forever for wandering notebook so it was no big surprise that frame of its screen eventually cracked. Superglue didn’t fix it and I was thinking about gluing a piece of wood or metal to screen for reinforcement, but I hate the idea of additional weight. It would also look awful.

At about same time I was snooping around Mozilla store to see if there was something I like which I could buy to support my favorite web project and discovered laptop skins. I was never a fan of covering my laptop with stickers from various startups (why would anyone want that?), but this was perfect. I’m not sure from what kind of material the skins are made of, but they are thin and don’t tear easily. With another layer of Scotch tape I got something that I think looks great and provides enough protection for a now more careful user:

Looks great, right?

1. I still find it amazing that this problem wasn’t caught before release.  Eventually they noticed it and later models got buttons that need more pressure to trigger and are better shielded from environment. ↩
2. I knew about 3D printing and company for years. Who knows why I didn’t think of using it sooner. ↩