Most people have a living room. I have a basement full of blinking lights, beeping buzzers, and the smell of old plastic. Welcome to my workshop.
Ever since i was a kid, i’ve been
fascinated by tech gadgets: at the age of 4, i used to burn my own CDs,
help dad looking for music, mess with dad’s phone settings and whatever.
But
the true turning point came when i started elementary school. I was
sitting bored at my desk, when I noticed teacher, struggling at playing
the DVD that came with the English book. I saw the VLC icon on the
teacher’s desktop, so i stood up and told her: “You should use VLC to
play the DVD. You see that traffic cone on the desktop?”.
Not even the time to finish talking that she screamed at me this: “I AM OLDER THAN YOU I KNOW THINGS BETTER THAN YOU!!!”.
Well, in the end, she ended up using VLC, like i told her.
That was the moment i thought:
“Well I can do something better than the teacher so, why don’t keep doing things better than the teacher”.
I became then a sort of “IT technician” at any school I attended.
Around the same time, grandma (who lives
at 1st floor) let me use her basement like i wanted. Imagine what a 6
years old kid can do to a basement. I was so creative, I used to make
computers and appliances with cardboard. But, after a few years, these
cardboard computers turned into real, something i would have never
expected before.
The first computer to enter the basement was a
broken HP desktop that dentist gave me: my first approach disassembling a
computer on my own. And yes, i broke it further but who cares: I
learned how a computer Is made at the age of 7.
No one in family used to be familiar with computers and I felt like in need of a “teacher” to learn even more computer stuff.
That’s
where YouTube comes in. I learned everything from a particular creator
who disassembled computers and stuff like that. Believe it or not, at
the age of 10 I already knew how to make a RAID of disks.
Talking about being 10 years old, that year my dad brought home this:
It was love at first sight.
And
that’s how I started experimenting with old tech (which should, for me
its MUST actually, be called “retro”). This Pentium III running Windows
98 brought me into the retro tech world.
Then I discovered iPods
(I still daily drive one btw) and built a collection and then Nokia
Lumias (built a collection of these too). I was a cool kid. Wasn’t I?
Then I started to grow, experimenting with computers and stuff bought at local fleas and things like that.
I
developed a passion for the HI-FI world too and now I can push dad’s 40
years old Telefunken amp at full volume, enjoying 80’s beats like he
used to.
What about now? Well I basically do the
same things, except that I bought a domain and started blogging here,
just for fun. Now that I have a blog, I can finally have my digital
blank canvas like I do in my basement, which will be now renamed to “The
Workshop”.
