Hackjob

One of my favorite pastimes is scrounging around on online secondhand marketplaces and thrift stores for interesting gadgets worth bringing back into peak working condition. There's a certain satisfaction about finding some battered old throwaway and turning back the years of neglect to find something genuinely useful, or at least super cool. In some cases, it's a chance to visit a bygone era and bring a piece of it back to life. This Garrard Model 770M turntable was certainly all of the above.

After contemplating the purchase for ages, I decided to pull the trigger on my first 3D printer. It was beginning of a lifetime of enjoyment... or it should've been. Instead of buying a brand-new Ender-3 like everyone else did, I decided to buy my printer used, from eBay. What ended up arriving at my door was nothing short of a complete disaster.

The 1990s were a truly miserable time for regular computers. Everything on the market was just beige. Even Apple: usually known for having an easily recognizable lineup, marketed an army of computers that were all damn near imperceptible from one another. This all went on until Steve Jobs went on a fat trimming spree, reducing the company's confusing array of home desktops to just one stylish option: the iMac. It made waves with it's futuristic and colorful design, making the beige-boxes look like yesterday's leftovers. The machine was such a hit that Apple decided, why don't we make one for the road? Enter the iBook, the world's most refreshingly ridiculous laptop.

 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...