this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
121 points (97.6% liked)

Dull Men's Club

4778 readers
517 users here now

An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.

https://dullmensclub.com/

1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.

2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.

3. Avoid repetitive topics.

4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.

There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.

Some other communities to consider before posting:

5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.

6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.

7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.

.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I stumbled upon an old Thinkpad with an empty CMOS battery. Sadly it was shrinkwrapped, so I took the one naked CR2025 I still had and wrapped it in paper-ish packaging tape to prevent shortcircuits.

It’s working.

top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

Whenever I have to do this I use one of the couple of ludicrously enormous pieces of heat shrink tube that inevitably seem to come with every assortment kit for some reason. It's either this or try to find a regular reason to have to solder quintuple-aught AWG cable or whatever the hell they expect those things to actually fit.

Maybe wrapping batteries is the intended use case, come to think of it.

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

FWIW I believe they were shrink wrapped to prevent what’s inside the battery (ie battery corrodes) getting out and to help keep it in place OVER preventing short circuits.

[–] 5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You‘re probably right, but the way I reattached the old contacts to the new battery made the tape absolutely necessary for shortcircuit-prevention.

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 2 points 5 days ago

Also it looks neat

[–] faizalr@fedia.io 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

How do you connect the wire to the battery? Soldering it must be dangerous.

[–] SuiXi3D@fedia.io 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Very hot, very quickly. The trick is to have the solder hot enough to weld, but not have the battery or wire hot enough long enough to damage the internals of the battery. It really isn’t hard to do, but you do have to be fairly precise, and you’ve got more wiggle room than you’d think.

[–] natebluehooves@pawb.social 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

spot welding seems more appropriate when batteries are involved.

[–] SuiXi3D@fedia.io 1 points 5 days ago

Basically, yeah.

The original one was soldered to a small „paddle“ which was „tacked“ to the battery. I just taped it together and since the tape is kinda stiff it‘ll probably stay where it should be.

[–] evil_andy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago

I've had to do this enough times that I went and bought one of those battery tab welders for like 40 bucks. It works well enough when I have to use it.

[–] FireWire400@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

Nice! I recently swapped the CMOS bat in a Compaq Armada M700, however I just went the lazy route and bought one with the plug already attached.

Funnily enough, I did the exact same thing you did on a ThinkPad X60s before selling that

[–] KingGordon@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Hell yeah, brother!

[–] newton@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago

Great job, best KISS principle I've seen in a month.