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J.P.'s (non-musical) Gear Reviews - New computery stuffs!

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  I finally decided to bite the bullet and assemble myself a brand new desktop computer. This was something I was way overdue on doing, and I'm honestly surprised how long I managed to use only a decent-ish laptop, even for average gaming. The current state of affairs (until October 9th, 2024) My daily driver is a "gaming" laptop that I bought three years ago, in October 2021. It's an MSI GF65 Thin 10UE with a 10th-gen Intel i5, 16GB of RAM, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX3060. The RAM was upgraded to 64GB and a 1TB NVMe drive was added at some point in 2023. Performance-wise, it's great for productivity applications, software development, and basic video editing. Even though it has a pretty good dedicated graphics chipset, it's still a watered-down version of NVIDIA's RTX3060 card in a laptop. One of the main issues this laptop has is poor thermal dissipation. Both the graphics chip and the CPU produce a lot of heat, and the heatsinks, heat pipes, and ...

J.P.'s Gear Review v2.0 - Ep. 14 - Let's talk about vintage synths

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  It's been a hot minute since I had some time to dedicate to write about music stuffs on here. Since it's been so long, might as well make it special. Today, we will not be discussing about pedals, but we'll be talkin' synth . A very specific vintage one. It's going to be a story of rejection, rescue, and subsequent recovery, blood will be spilled, tears will be cried, and cold sweats will be had. Without further ado, let's dig in. First, a bit of history about the Korg Polysix The PolySix was one of the very first affordable polyphonic synthesizer on the market. Released in 1981 and commercialized for an unknown number of years (my Google-Fu failed me on this; if you know when it was discontinued, please edit the Wikipedia page for it), it made direct competition to the Roland Juno-6 that was released only a few months later, and was targeting the common mortal who couldn't afford a Sequential Prophet 5 or an Oberheim OB-X. At a price tag of $1095US in 19...

J.P.'s (non-musical) Gear Reviews - The Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller Saga

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I know, it's been a while. Work has been crazy busy in the last few months, and blogging and gear reviews were moved to the backlog until things calm down. I hope to be able to make at least one gear review during my vacations that will happen Soon™. In the meantime, please enjoy what I dubbed The Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller Saga™. - I'll be the first to admit it: I didn't do all the research I should have done before buying one. In my defence the one I gifted my father last year works perfectly, so my experience with them has been positive. Until May of this year... Ordering from Xbox Design Lab Towards the end of April, I decided to splurge and get myself a custom Xbox Elite Series 2 controller. I owned an Elite Series 1 in the past and I really liked the weight and design of the controller, and modularity of the components. Except this time, I wanted it purple . I hopped on the Xbox Design Lab  website (shortened to XDL in the rest of the post), picked the colours of ...