Lately I have been buying used stereo equipment. I always wanted a nice component stereo system but never really had the money or space earlier in my life. I recently got a harman / kardon HK3400 tuner / receiver and a harman / kardon FL8300 five disk changer at two different estates sales for $75 and a set of Realistic Minimus-7 speakers for $20. Honestly I haven't been happier with them. I now can utilize my CD collection in my work space while working from home. Quite nice to have hours worth of music on random. It is amazing how well these components work and they are both built in the mid 90s. The tuner has a powered volume knob too which is super nice and you never see that much anymore.
Another project I have been doing is refurbishing my sisters old 8th gen iPod. I had done this already with my 3rd gen iPod a year or so ago and it turned out great. I used RockBox on mine but hers is staying with the original iTunes software. That does limit the size she can use as that software only handles about 250gigs of space where RockBox you can utilize way more. The hardest part with her iPod was removing the back. Talk about painful on the hands. I finally got it off but took me a while to do it as it just made your hands hurt after a while. Was also going to replace the battery but Apple decided to glue it in really well and honestly the battery in the 8th gen is still fine. Overall a fun project and you can get cards built to replace the old platter drives with flash cards for about 40 bucks or so depending on what format you want to go with. If you have one lying around with a bum drive it may be worth it as the hardware in those iPods are great and worth it. A couple photos of doing my iPod with RockBox are below.
