A Geek Goes Flying

Another Facebook Marketplace bargain, though this one was in rougher shape than I realized initially. A 2001–2002(ish) ESP Ltd EC-300, in See Thru Black Cherry. Made in Korea. This one had been modified with Seymour Duncan pickups, and was missing the pickup switch top . The EC-300 was the top-of-the-line non-Deluxe Ltd when new, and had an MSRP of $699 (about $1,300 in Spring 2026 dollars). Original specs: EC-300 Set neck, 24.75" scale Mahogany body Maple neck, rosewood fretboard Flag inlays Black hardware Tune-o-Matic bridge with stop tailpiece White binding on the neck 24 XJ frets EMG-HZ H-1 pickup set (passive) 2 volume, 1 tone knob, toggle on upper horn “STBC” color way (See Thru Black Cherry) It came to me mostly stock. The seller represented on Facebook Marketplace that it had been “modded with real verified Seymour Duncan 59 and JB-1” pickups, but when I had everything apart I saw the pickups are the  Seymour Duncan Hot Rodded Humbucker set  with a JB (SH4)¹ at th...

My old, dead, Mac Pro had a 6-core X5680 Xeon at 3.33 GHz. The “new” one came with dual 6-core X5650 2.66 GHz processors. Things have gotten so cheap, I picked up a pair of X5675s (3.06 GHz 6-core, the fastest processors Apple shipped in a dual processor Mac Pro 5,1 configuration) on eBay for $19 with free shipping. So now I had to install them. (I haven’t installed a processor since the days of the Socket 370 . (Edit: I’d only installed one processor, an i5-3570K in a Hackintosh I built in 2011. Forgot about that...)) (Also edit: I looked up the TDP for these processors; the X5675s are 95W, while the X5860s and higher are 130W, so 70W additional in a dual processor setup. Stuck with the 3.06s because I was worried about the additional heat. Stick with what Apple did stock...)   My exhaustive 5 minutes of Google searching found several videos that came close to being a full guide, but nothing comprehensive, so I figured I’d write out my experience here. The results were awesome, m...

After 7 years, one of the two 6TB Western Digital Red drives that forms half of my RAID1 mirror failed to come up after a server reboot: [   19.762832] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x100 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [   19.762838] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [   19.762841] ata2.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [   19.762847] ata2.00: cmd 60/08:40:08:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 8 ncq dma 4096 in                         res 41/40:00:09:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [   19.762850] ata2.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [   19.762852] ata2.00: error: { UNC } [   19.764196] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133 [   19.764212] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] tag#8 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [   19.764215] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] tag#8 Sense Key : Medium Error [curre...