Hackjob

 It's been about five years since I've done any major upgrades to my good ol' Alienware Area 51 R2. Of course, when you're maintaining a PC of this age, the components are inevitably going to start showing it. Recently I noticed my CPU temps were abnormally high, even at idle. Regardless of how hard I ran my fans, they never dropped. I've wanted to deal with this tower's cooling setup for a while now - mostly in relation to replacing the noisy-ass stock fans, but now I no longer had an excuse to keep putting it off.

 If you were a kid growing up in the early 2000's, there is a very good chance you've heard of the Motorola Razr. Or hell, your parents; like mine, actually owned one! The Razr V3 was arguably the  phone to get up until the introduction of the first iPhone. It's radical sleek, thin profile and slew of celebrity endorsements led to it being the best-selling feature phone to date, saving Motorola's cell phone division in the process. But alas; times have changed and the Razr V3 and feature phones in general have long since become nothing more than a memory in a world now dominated by smartphones. That still hasn't stopped Motorola from trying to recapitalize on the name of it's most successful product, none of which have really managed to recapture that same magic. The Razr 5G is arguably the most faithful of those attempts, but depending on who you are - it still may not be enough.

For the first real post on this blog, I thought it would be fitting to write about something that was killing me not writing about it at the time: building my first guitar. My desire to do this write up was also fueled by an unfortunate event from that year; one of my all-time idols, Eddie Van Halen passed away on October 6th, 2020, just months after I had completed the build in the summer. The guitar in question is a replica of Eddie's famously haphazard Frankenstrat, a guitar that after watching several YouTube videos and learning of the guitar's construction, I figured "Well, I can do that too!". So I did, and this guitar holds a very special place in my heart, not just because I defied my own lack of experience, but because I feel like it's a fitting tribute to one of the greatest guitarists that ever lived.

  Here we go again. Coming up with new blog names is hard. You'll be lucky to come up with something original, short and memorable, and not already had it's domain name taken by some ancient slice of Blogger that hasn't been updated in over a decade. So I when I finally came up with "Hackjob": a name that I think more or less perfectly sets the tone for this blog and it's content, turns out the most obvious choice for a domain name redirects you to some random Indonesian news site. So, if somebody from Aktual.com, the so-called owners of " hackjob.blogspot.com " ever stumbles upon this blog; go eat a bag of dicks. Anyways, an introduction. I'm YALE70; I'm a tinkerer, gearhead, techie and a worse gamer than I'm willing to admit. Some of you might know me from an old blog called StudioYale , which I originally started my freshman year of high school as a blog for reviewing Nerf blasters, though I later started to get into tech and gaming re...