I watercool my PC because it’s a ThreadRipper with a couple of AMD Radeon 5700 XTs, and the latter is known to have overheating issues, so I opted for watercooling. Watercooling can be bourgeois decadence, but it can also be practical and necessary.
Nevertheless, I didn’t have great airflow in the case, so all of the heat that remained stagnant inside a room without air conditioning (which I had bought an air conditioner for but it took me 3 months to get the equipment and resources necessary to screw a piece of wood to the window so the air conditioner wasn’t slanted towards the apartment) during the heat waves last year killed one of my SSDs that was part of a contiguous LVM partition among 3 SSDs (I wish I learned about RAIDs earlier). I have been without a desktop for nearly a year now and have been in a slow process of building a couple of new machines.
I managed to successfully watercool my pc safely and follow recommended procedures to make sure my pc didn’t leak while running. I had to replace a water block that was leaking during my initial setup of the pc. I had towels and a couple of extra hands to help. You need to run the machine for a day with towels placed around the case before running the computer (this can be done by inserting a bridging plug to only run the watercooling system) to ensure no leaks are occurring. As long as you do diligent research and you are careful, it’s usually safe to watercool. The worse that happened to me is that I screwed in a fitting on a $700 distribution plate reservoir + pump system too tightly, and it created some cracks around the hole, but it hasn’t became much worse.
You can get a shirt of the post image, btw: https://spacedoglaika.com/collections/refinished-propaganda/products/knowledge-will-break-the-chains-of-slavery-refinished-soviet-literacy-propaganda-ussr-communist-t-shirt
I’m just mentioning it because I have been wanting this shirt, which is why this post caught my eye.
To be more relevant to the post, I do want to mention that I have been struggling with time management and burnout, but for the past month or so, I have been learning to play the guitar, and it’s really helped my mood and focus as it’s an easy thing to start doing with little energy. I practice guitar while I am waiting for my ADHD meds to kick in during the weekend, and it helps me feel more motivated when they do. I’ve learned 4 chords (sort of), and I tend to practice a riff with 3. I think forcing myself to play slower has a positive effect on slowing down my mind’s racing thoughts. I also play guitar sometimes at night after work, and the mental roadblock for me to start tuning and playing is much lower than it is to hype myself to play a video game or work on a computer project.
I aspire to be skilled enough at guitar to casually sing and play commie songs.