And hey, I only nearly electrocuted a coworker with a badly soldered power cable once.
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In those decades I’ve learned that while I love PC gaming and will always believe the PC is the best place to play, games aren’t actually why I care about PCs these days. Sure, it’s sweet to benchmark a new gaming rig or marvel over the capabilities of Nvidia’s latest GPUs.
But really, what I love about building PCs and what keeps me coming back to this community is the constant learning experience that’s available to you if you’re open to it. When I began trying to fish busted desktops and laptops out of trash bins in the ’90s so I could try to rebuild them, my attempts never worked—I just didn’t know enough, as a teenager, to figure out a faulty display connector in a laptop or sort out how to fix a bunch of bent pins on the motherboard.
Eventually, with the help of some friends and the internet, I (barely) figured out how a PC works and how you can build one. That felt good, but even after I built a PC I wanted more. I wanted to figure out how these magical machines worked, and while I still don’t really understand the full truth of it, I’m at least past the point where I’m worried about the magic smoke in my computer slipping out.
Over the years I’ve come to appreciate that taking joy in the pursuit of knowledge and mastery is something lots of us do, including myself. It makes not just PC building but gaming, journalism, and life in general more rewarding, and lately I’ve been getting a lot of satisfaction from learning my way around the Flipper Zero.
PCWorld
If you’re not familiar, the Flipper Zero is a handheld gadget that costs roughly $219 and sports a bunch of sensors, including an NFC reader, a sub-1GHz radio, an infrared scanner, and an RFID reader. By interacting with the little cartoon dolphin mascot displayed on the Flipper Zero’s ‘lil LCD screen you can load programs to the Zero and execute them, allowing you to run all sorts of little utilities right from your palm.