Hackjob

  About two months ago, I scored two direct drive turntables for $60: a Pioneer PL-518 and a Technics SL-1600 MK1. Either one of these decks alone would've been a steal at the price, and a huge upgrade from the old Garrard 770M I was spinning LPs on prior. Unlike the Pioneer (which has been such a nightmare that it deserves it's own post), the Technics managed to survive it's two decades of horrible storage in relatively great shape. It just needed a little love.

  Well I've gone and done it. It hasn't been that long since I finished installing new fans in my Area 51 R2, and while they did resolve the cooling issues I was experiencing prior, it didn't help me reach my goal of a 4.0+ GHz overclock on my i7-5960X: a problem whose fault I've attributed to the factory motherboard. Rather than continue trying and failing to make it work, I decided it was time to get drastic, and completely rebuild the beast from the ground up. Time for a long one.

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.