OHAI Everyone! Happy New Year.

On one hand. We're happy that we have our health. We're happy that we're not (back) on the streets again. That there's still food on the plate and a roof all albeit temporarily, over our heads. A lot of our friends and family did suffer through this year. In different ways. Read on if you care. This isn't going to be a tech article or anything like that.

P.S. I know some bloggers talk about their "Top post of 2025," but that would require me to keep track of people, which is just too much damned work.

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What's up, cheap 3rd party controllers!

Out of all of the controllers that we've seen hit our bench, PDP Rock Candy's were surprisingly one of the few we rarely saw.  Despite their price, if they broke, people didn't bother to repair them. Just toss and get another.

There were generally three types of people who got these controllers:

1. The people who modded their Xbox cases translucent just like the controller, and really wanted to complete that Y2K iMac feeling. There was also translucent cases to convert your OEM wireless or wired Xbox 360 controller over as well. But Rock Candy's were in almost every game store for immediate purchase.
2. The second group is parents who would get a controller like this for their kid because they were pushing around $20-30(USD), versus getting an original Xbox 360 controller at almost double the price.  Depending on where your game console was placed, wired was just simply better because guess what? No batteries! Saving you even more money. You'll notice the rumble motors are missing. In some cases, that's acceptable.
3. Some gamers would also use cheap controllers like this for casual play on their Xbox 360 and save the wear-and-tear on the wireless for when friends come by. Third-party controllers, unless they were incredibly old or vastly superior, like the WACO JemStick for Atari. Third parties rarely gain in value. Thus, destroying these is the best way to go.

The best part is, they're still cheap, and they still work in Windows 11 without the need for special drivers.

Read on if you want to see some repair and me rant about controllers once again.

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Getting back to the Nvidia Shield with some controller action.

It's Christmas, and apparently, what I got was a bunch of controllers that were broken. Perfect gift for a guy like me!

As you could see in the picture. We got two Nvidia Shield 2015 controllers, Model #P2570, and one 2017 Model #P2920. All on with stickers, saying two words, "no power." The P2920, we aren't going to focus on too much. Because in part, we've already talked about that controller a lot. But also after replacing the battery, we DID get it to power up, only to find out that the Bluetooth side refuses to engage when holding the Nvidia button (anyone who has brought the Bluetooth back from the dead from an electrical standpoint, feel free to comment below. There's absolutely no flashing white light. The charging circuit and USB plug seem to work fine.)

Okay! Read onwards if you want to see some pictures of controller guts and a half-assed review on the original controller Nvidia came with, known as the P2570.

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Incoming "Glorious" repair.

Just when you thought the keyboard blogs were done. In comes a different keyboard to my bench known as the "Glorious GMMK3" keyboard which is supposed to be one of those DIY level keyboards for people to get into the joy purchasing your own switches, your own keycaps, cramming housing insulation into the shell of your keyboard just so that you too can have that special "YouTuber grade THOCK" as you type. Or, perhaps you would rather go with linear switches with o-rings because you actually like to keep your job.

Looking up the cost of these complete kits, they generally go for $130+ (USD), which is double what we paid for our Red Dragon K556 when it was brand new on the market. A little boutique to appease the gamers with money. However, it is still basic enough to be picked up in most chain outlets. This particular keyboard landed on my bench for $10, whole dollars on Craigslist, with the supposed mother explaining how her "Gamer Kid" was working on this and broke it.

Fair ball. When we picked up the box, we could already hear the little rattle of screws rolling about inside. So! Let's crack this bad boy open and see what hell awaits us!

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A word of caution before we begin:

This article will contain some dirt-horror as we're going to tear apart our very first Redragon K556 that we purchased back in 2019, then later used heavily for work. This article is almost an addendum to the previous one, where we fixed two K556 keyboards with very minimal effort. But we also wanted to follow up on what happened to the very first keyboard. We got the nice keycaps that are not being made anymore.

Put away your lunch and read onward.

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The World Wide Web.

This was going to be a sidenote in one of our websites, which slowly exploded into an article on its own by complete accident.

Read on if you want to know more.

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Here comes the endless e-mails.

We've been getting our fair share of e-mails from our carrier trying really fucking hard to get up to upgrade our phone. This may come as a shock to some of you out there in FOSS land. Because we actually have two phones. One on an Iphone 12. The other phone is the Google Pixel 8 Pro. Now we never really focused much on the phone review tech blogger scene, as we feel the majority of the bloggers out there are either AI-generated or shilling really fucking hard so they can get free swag and product. Not only that. But we're not sure if we can nerd out hard on mobile technology, as it feels the entire ecosystem is kinda shitty with paying thousands for a device that is used against you to blast even more ads.

Read onward for our diatribes.

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Small review of the MeshPocket QI2.

We travel a lot. Hang out in a lot of airports. Thus, we couldn't take our Heltec V3 with us to the airport because well!! That bodge solder job is going to make a TSA agent worry a little bit. But also near the end of my travel cases blog, we went on a bit of a rant about how to survive being in the airport. Saving one on the trip from going to one of those hipster bloggers about travel. Part of that blog talked about battery packs. On how it's important to have one, as you are never supposed to trust a single outlet that an airport provides to you. It's not the maintenance team's fault that outlets get worn out and destroyed. Some of those spaces within the terminal were not meant to be over capacity all of the time; space is money, and these airways cram as much as they can with as little sitting space as possible.

So when my original 8000Mah battery started to feel like a 500Mah battery (testing it on my lithium charger, one of the four cells was functional. Last cell held a charge at 550Mah, original rating at 2,300Mah.) Which is fine. had it for 5 years. beat the hell out of it. Forgot it in my travel bag for over a few months and it committed lithium seppiku. It's time for a new one. And placing this review on Amazon is pointless when we have our very own website to post to. So why not get a battery pack that has LoRa built in?

Read on if you want to know more.

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