"Retro Repair" key electronics skills?

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 10 May 2016, tony duell wrote:
> It's a very real problem, it's the main reason for decoupling capacitors 
> which provide a local source of power with a low impedance connection 
> (as they are so close to the IC).

It seems like there is a lot of "fiddling" with those types issues and 
getting good at doing so is part of the process of getting profecient with 
component level troubleshooting. That's why working with electronics 
"kits" (ie.. kit based projects) is about my speed right now. In most of 
those cases, folks have worked out the kinks involving connection issues, 
but I'm still just doing analog stuff. I have no idea how much it'll 
matter when I go to learn a bit about digital. However, that quote about 
digital circuits being made from analog physical bits seems like good 
foreshadowing. So, we'll see.

I'm still playing along with projects from a kids' Elenco kit. I'm having 
fun with timers and making "bleeps and bloops". I'm also using it to try 
and figure out how about 5% of my borrowed ocilliscope works. I've got the 
manual, it's just figuring out what everything means is a bit challenging 
right now. So, it helps teach me how to calibrate the darn thing to just 
sit on something that looks like a sine wave etc...

-Swift