SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade.

Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college.

Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty.

In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock.

Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years.

Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage.

Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing.

Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.”

Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

RepairPal.com, which simplifies the process of car maintenance, has received $13 million in funding fuel to expand its network.

“RepairPal is doing for auto repair what Cars.com did for car purchasing,” said Greg McGivney, Cars.com’s vice president of strategy and business development, in a statement. “When transparency, expert advice and high standards reign, the customer wins. RepairPal has its priorities in the right place and we believe they will transform the auto repair industry.”

Cars.com and Castrol innoVentures led this round and will support RepairPal with expertise and strategic resources as well as financing.

Servicing a car is generally an expensive and stressful process. The average person does not have intimate knowledge of a vehicle’s inner-workings, nor a strong sense of how various repairs should be priced, especially as cars have become more complicated with on-board computers and other electronics. As a result, many consumers are easy targets for being overcharged, as they’re unaware of subpar work and are likely to sign up for unnecessary services.

To protect against these sorts of swindles, sites like Car Talk and Angie’s List collect user-generated tips and reviews. However, like any crowdsourced forum, the content comes from the opinions of strangers and is not necessarily trustworthy.

RepairPal uses data analytics to give consumers objective and legitimate information. Its system collects data from surveys, repair invoices, manufacturers, and so on to estimate the cost and time requirements of common repairs and services.

“We arm consumers with all the information needed to ensure they get the right services at the right price,” said the company on its site.

Once they have obtained all the relevant information, users can also search for trusted, certified, qualified mechanics in their area. The technicians who service the cars then write reports with “essential insights” about associated repairs, details about parts and procedures, and other tidbits to keep in mind. RepairPal also provides a centralized online location to maintain all car records and advice.

So far, there are 200 shops in the RepairPal network across 35 states, with multiple locations in California, New York, Chicago, Denver, Texas, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Miami. The funding will add shops and markets as well as accelerate product development. Features in the pipelines include reminders about upcoming oil changes or other services.

RepairPal was founded in 2007 and is located in San Francisco. This brings its total amount raised to $20.35 million.

A new gadget, a new naughty teardown from the repair gurus at iFixit.

The iFixit team didn’t waste any time tearing apart Microsoft’s new Surface tablet, which hit stores this past Friday. In my early look at the Surface, I found that it had plenty of personality (but some noticeable issues).

Given the inevitable move towards thinner and more tightly sealed computers — something that’s particularly noticeable in tablets — I didn’t have much hope for the Surface to be easily repairable. IFixit gave it a score of 4 (out of 10) on its repairability scale, which is a bit better than the third-gen iPad’s score of 2, but far below the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7′s scores of 7 out of 10.

Among the notable repair issues, iFixit found that it took half an hour just to pry off the plastic bezel around the Surface’s camera. Opening up the Surface also breaks a tamper-resistant label inside the unit, which will obviously void your warranty.

IFixit also noted several repair issues with the Surface’s display: They couldn’t remove the keyboard connector without entirely separating it front the display, and the LCD and glass are fused together (and strongly glued to the case).

“You’ll have to use a heat gun and lots of patience to gain access to the glass and LCD,” IFixit wrote.

But at least the Surface’s battery, even though it was glued in, was “way easier” to remove than the iPad’s.

These repair users won’t affect most users, since they won’t be repairing the Surface on their own, and they likely won’t be taking it to some tiny computer repair outfit. With tablets and tightly sealed computers like the MacBook Air, it’s generally easier to just send in a device to the manufacturer for repair.

If you knew you could use an iPad-based manual to fix a Dewalt cordless drill, you might be more likely to buy that model than the Black & Decker model sitting next to it on the shelf.

That’s the bet behind Dozuki, a new service aimed at helping companies create their own easy-to-update digital service manuals.

“We basically reinvented the repair manual,” Dozuki cofounder Kyle Wiens told VentureBeat.

Dozuki, which launches its preview site today, comes from the team behind open-source DIY repair site iFixit, which has built a successful business by publishing how-to guides for everything from replacing a cracked iPhone screen to replacing the turn signal lamps on your Hummer. iFixit’s repair manuals are modified wikis, which anyone can contribute to, and they’re available free online. The company makes money from a parts business, selling components needed for the repair jobs described on its site.

Unlike a typical wiki, which is basically unstructured text, the publishing system behind Dozuki and iFixit is built for publishing how-to articles. For instance, articles can be made dependent on other articles (you have to remove your car’s headlights before you can remove the front bumper), and how-to articles can include lists of required parts and tools, which can in turn link to an e-commerce site so readers can purchase what they need.

The same site infrastructure is also behind O’Reilly’s Makeprojects.com, a how-to site that includes wiki-fied versions of every DIY project published in Make magazine.

“We finally said, all right, there’s enough demand for this we need to spin this off as a separate venture, to enable anybody to set up manuals online,” Wiens said.

Dozuki will let product manufacturers create branded versions of iFixit-like repair manuals online. Those manuals might not be publicly-modifiable wikis, since for liability reasons a company might need to vet every change to a manual it publishes.

These online manuals might not even be readable by the public and could instead be aimed at a company’s service technicians. Currently, those techs typically rely on PDFs, which might be as much as a year out of date and don’t include such niceties as 3-D renderings, videos or animations, all of which a Dozuki-powered manual would. Dozuki manuals would also be much easier and faster to update: A technician could submit a change from the field, and it could be verified by headquarters and published to the manual within a few days instead of months.

“There are billions of dollars invested in writing service manuals, and even more in using them, and the software is just completely shoddy,” Wiens said.

While the topic might seem dry, Wiens sees manuals as a competitive advantage for the companies that use them. As consumers become more value-conscious, they’ll see the worth of an easily-repairable appliance or gadget that could last for decades instead of just a year or two, he argues.

The name “Dozuki” comes from a type of Japanese woodcutting saw. It cuts very precisely, but only when you’re pulling it back. if you try to force it to cut while pushing it forward you’ll break the saw’s teeth. Knowing that one bit of information is the key to using that kind of saw.

“That’s what we’re doing with manuals. Tech documentation seems boring, but it’s really important to give people that one piece of info they need to be successful,” said Wiens.

Dozuki will begin beta-testing soon and should be available to customers in the fall. It will be sold as a service, with a monthly cost starting at $100 per month.