If you're not doing it as a hobby, the one-off effort put into repairing an item (or in this case, engineering the correction) is also "waste".
If you want to dedicate that time to improving the planet, avoiding the waste of one TV is likely not a better use of your time than e.g. fixing some bug in some popular open source software that causes it to be less efficient.
Let's say you make a change to Firefox that makes it use 0.1 Watt less on average, and let's be conservative and assume the ~350 million Firefox users use it for one hour a day on average. That's 35 MWh per day saved. Assuming 0.1 kg CO2e/kWh, that's a saving of 3.5 tons of CO2e saved each day.
Fair point, but I bet that making Firefox take 0.1W less on average is vastly more work that fixing a TV image. And if you write blog post about it, maybe other people can fix their TV with less work.
I don't know if I am going to ever fix a TV this way.
But the knowledge of how to create a custom shader is going to come in handy one day. More and more I am finding, most knowledge comes in handy some time. You just have to remember at the right time what is possible and go refresh your memory on it.
Washed up waste is the tail end, the only "big" difference it makes is to the localized beach until the next tide/current comes from the source of the pollution.
Saving the monitor, releasing the diy reduces a (minor) head end of the problem that is not only leading to long waste in a landfill, but also metals and plastics in water.
What a ridiculous premise. The value of your time does not come in some sort of interchangeable unit where 1 hour of TV repair is comparable to 1 hour of Firefox bug-fixing. Realistically, if the author decided to get a new TV, he would not spend that new-saved time trying to make up for the environmental damage he caused by throwing his old TV out.
(And who is even to say your bugfix would save power? It's not like Firefox has a power-usage detector in their CI pipeline.)
If you want to dedicate that time to improving the planet, avoiding the waste of one TV is likely not a better use of your time than e.g. fixing some bug in some popular open source software that causes it to be less efficient.
Let's say you make a change to Firefox that makes it use 0.1 Watt less on average, and let's be conservative and assume the ~350 million Firefox users use it for one hour a day on average. That's 35 MWh per day saved. Assuming 0.1 kg CO2e/kWh, that's a saving of 3.5 tons of CO2e saved each day.