Building A New Rig Next Year Is Going To Be Fun

Remember when you didn't need a PhD in dongle management to listen to music on your phone? Wolverine's gazing longingly at a photo of the now-endangered 3.5mm headphone jack like it's a long-lost love. Today's tech companies: "We removed this ancient technology to make room for... courage. And $29.99 adapters." The real superpower isn't adamantium claws—it's being able to charge your phone and listen to music simultaneously without carrying three different cables and a portable USB hub.

Microsoft just invented the server rack again, but with a fancy cloud name. Remember when we moved everything to the cloud because on-premises hardware was "obsolete"? Now they're selling us the same hardware back as "Azure Local" with a premium price tag. Next revolutionary product: a keyboard you can actually feel when typing.

The eternal hardware naming convention hell strikes again! On the left, the desperate plea of every tech enthusiast who just wants to buy a damn monitor without needing a cryptography degree. On the right, hardware manufacturers (MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS) proudly showcasing their latest creation: a jumble of random letters and numbers that probably took longer to name than design. Nothing says "we understand consumer psychology" like naming your product "XD-MBYG04K-URS3LF" — because who wouldn't remember that during their next Best Buy trip? Meanwhile, Computex just reinforced that hardware companies would rather eat glass than create memorable product names. At this point, I'm convinced they're just letting cats walk across keyboards for the naming process.

Nothing beats the pure ecstasy of using that little red TrackPoint nub on ThinkPads. Touchscreens? Meh. Mouse? Whatever. But that tiny red dot that barely moves and gives you carpal tunnel after 5 minutes? ABSOLUTE NIRVANA. It's like the keyboard equivalent of preferring dial-up internet because you "enjoy the anticipation." Only true keyboard warriors know the special relationship between a developer and their pointing stick—a relationship that's equal parts Stockholm syndrome and masochism.

Whoever made this deserves a promotion and a psych evaluation. It's a brilliant visual pun using electrical circuit diagrams to illustrate computing concepts. Serial processing executes tasks one after another (like killers waiting their turn), while parallel processing handles multiple tasks simultaneously (killing your CPU efficiency but getting the job done faster). After 15 years of optimizing code, I still chuckle when junior devs discover threading and suddenly want to parallelize everything. Sure kid, enjoy your race conditions and deadlocks—I'll be over here with my popcorn.

The paranoid tech veteran's approach to data security: physically removing the hard drive platters. Sure, you could use DBAN or a hammer, but where's the satisfaction in that? This is like bringing a tactical nuke to a knife fight—complete overkill that would make any security auditor simultaneously applaud and facepalm. For the uninitiated, those metal discs (platters) are where your embarrassing browser history and collection of half-finished side projects actually live. No platters = no evidence of that framework you started building in 2018 and abandoned after three commits. Bonus points for the "I was bored" justification—the universal explanation for both brilliant engineering solutions and catastrophic tech disasters since the dawn of computing.