I’ve had an X-Tronic 5040 XTS soldering station since 2018, possibly longer. It’s been a great unit! I’ve periodically had to replace the iron handle, and recently had to replace the heat gun, as well as the heat gun stand. Each of those parts are $15~$30, so considering the whole station cost $300 new and…
Author: Jo
PCchips M748LMRT Motherboard Adventure!
What started out as a very misfortuned PC based off an AIR 486SH motherboard, a 66MHz Intel i486DX2 processor, and 8 MB of RAM, traveled a very bumpy road, fell off a cliff once or twice and managed to clamor its way back up somehow, and eventually became something much stronger! For my latest PC…
Repairing the $40 Ender 3 V2
Initial Fixup I’ve got a new, interesting project here! A friend of mine found this Creality Ender 3 V2 at a thrift store for $40, and I couldn’t pass it up! As an owner of a well-modified Ender 3 Neo, I’m very familiar with the crazy process of gradually working out all the kinks of…
Be Easy on Yourself: My Biggest Life Lesson
I’d like to share something with my readers. I usually post about technological things, but today there’s something much bigger on my mind that I’d really like to put out. If there’s one life lesson I’ve learned that I wish I could instantaneously share with the entire world with the push of a button, it…
Keyboard Membrane Repair (Updated 2026!)
Chapter I – ThinkPad Buttons Note: I titled this referencing a keyboard, even though I am working on a touchpad. This is because most touchpads don’t use this type of build anymore, so I wanted to make the title more relevant. Here in February of 2025, I have a good old IBM ThinkPad R52 laptop!…
My trip to Las Vegas & the Grand Canyon!
Hello! I usually do technological writings, as any of my readers well know. But today, I would like to present to you all my thoughts and photos of my trip experiences from March 14th to 18th, of touring Las Vegas and its fancy, fun and extensive hotels, as well as checking out the Grand Canyon!…
Why eBay Totally SUCKS!
We all know eBay. They’ve been around since 1995, and they’re one of the biggest commerce sites on the whole Internet – if not the biggest. Well, the fact that they’ve been around for so long really shows, as their infrastructure is incredibly dated, janky, and really lackluster in comparison to their competition. Not only…
Dell Dimension 4300 Complete Setup
I got a complete Dell Dimension 4300 computer setup! It’s been so long since I’ve done one of these project log articles, I thought now that I got this, it’d be the perfect time to get back into it! It looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t working perfectly. It can’t boot up, and…
The HP Laptops
Way back in 2006, I bought a brand new HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop. It was a gorgeous computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition, with a large 17″ screen, an AMD Turion processor, integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics, probably 1GB of RAM and 80 GB for a hard drive if I had to guess….
My Sonic Story
I’ve told this story a number of times to my friends over the years, but I never had actually written it down. I felt it was time to do that! This is all about my history with my Sega game consoles and the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. It holds a lot of meaning for me…