I recently got an e-mail saying I had violated Twitter’s rules for hateful conduct. I immediately thought my account password had been compromised, or that this was a phishing attempt. I rarely post to Twitter anymore, except to promote this website or other personal projects. The e-mail was real though, and Twitter locked my account for a Tweet I made nearly a decade ago!

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Back before I first left the United States in 2012, I’d often use price comparison websites when trying to find parts for computers and system builds. These sites tracked prices from hundreds of small vendors, some of which had brick and mortar stores, others were storage warehouses, and others were simply drop shippers. Upon returning to the country, I found that most of the old comparisons sites I used were void of those smaller individual stores, replaced by less than a dozen of the big retailers. While I was away, the era of the mom-and-pop e-commerce website had ended, with most retailers now using marketplaces provided by the large players like Amazon, eBay, Newegg and others.

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I’m not one of those people that can buy a phone and start using it. I usually root my device and flash a custom ROM not long after I first turn it on. Where normal people can start using a new device immediately, it usually takes me a day or two before I can do the same, dealing with some weird edge case of missing documentation, just to get basic administration rights on my mobile device. Although Razer has official instructions for unlocking their devices, and there are many third party guides, I attempted to avoid a critical step mentioned in their documentation. Even when I followed it, I still ran into problems, and found it fascinating that Razer devices can only be flashed via a USB 2.0 link. I’ve documented some of my error messages here, in case anyone is confounded by similar issues.

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I had been working off of my laptop for several months, but some performance issues and thermal throttling led me to revert back to building a desktop. I had sold my previous build before traveling across the US, so for this particular build I wanted something in an ultra small, easily transportable form factor. I decided to jump in on a crowdfunding effort for the Louqe Ghost S1 ITX case. This review covers installing my system into this very compact ITX case, my first experience with water cooling and what to expect for others when considering the Ghost case.

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