Goodbye Old Studio…

If you follow me on social media, or perhaps you’re a member of my Discord server, or indeed one of my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi or the YouTube channel memberships, you will no doubt be aware of the fact that I recently relocated my entire studio 30 miles down the road to a much bigger and much more interesting space.

However, I am of course well aware that there are thousands of you out there who don’t keep up to speed with all of the stuff that I have going on behind the scenes, and I will say that’s perfectly acceptable because, let’s face it, there’s stuff going on in the world that’s a lot more interesting than me.

However, for the benefit of you people, and indeed everyone who has been keeping up from the very start, I thought it was about time I did a bit of an update video on this new building, what it’s all about and all the exciting future possibilities that it may bring.

Because although this backdrop may look pretty much the same as it has for the past 2+ years, I can reassure you that this is indeed a completely different space: I have a dedicated studio office here, I have another office next door which is the same size which I’m using for storage, but it is also shaping up to be a rather nice computer museum in its own right - and I can’t wait to show you that. There’s a third office that I’m using for admin type stuff, kitchen area, triaging stuff as it comes in. There’s another one that I could potentially expand into as well. There’s a reception area, there’s proper toilet facilities.

This is a rather exciting building, and this little part of it is all mine, as you will find out in this video!

But first, I’d just like to say a very quick thank you to this channel’s sponsor, PCBWay.com. Now you may be familiar with PCBWay thanks to their 11 years in the PCB fabrication business - and indeed they have also started offering some additional services including CNC machining, 3D printing, injection moulding and sheet metal fabrication. But what I want to tell you about today is their Christmas sale which is running until the end of December. There’s a link down in the description and you can get some rather impressive discounts off their usual prices, but this offer must expire on the 31st of December - so get in there quick for all of your PCB and indeed other fabrication needs.

And with that out of the way, lets just take a very brief look at the history of ctrl-alt-rees - and this all started way back in November 2019 in my little box room at home. I used a very grainy little compact camera, knew nothing about audio or lighting or editing or anything like that. I just wanted to sit down in front of the camera and share my passion for retro computing and fixing this stuff and collecting this stuff with all of you - and that is indeed how it started all those years ago - and it is quite amusing to go back and check out some of those old videos. Still very proud of them. Of course, they’re very rough around the edges. They’re not like my current output, but it’s always good to kind of back and see where all of this started. Now of course, I started to upgrade - I bought a decent camera, I changed all of the set, put dedicated shelving and stuff in there - and of course that was a big reveal in and of itself. But the really big move came two years ago - and that was in November of 2023 when I took out the lease on an office, which was actually two miles down the road from the house - and I actually started to transform that into a dedicated YouTube studio space: I had the wooden cladding across the divider - of course, it wasn’t an office in its own right, it was a meeting room attached to an office - I had the wooden cladding, I had all of the shelving, of course, I had the infamous window display - and I did a joke on multiple occasions about turning that into some kind of computer museum. Of course, the big calling in life for all of us retro computing YouTubers - and then a company started to rent out the office that was attached to that so I then had to move the studio down to the other end of the room, which was a whole palava in and of itself - and now I’ve found myself moving 30 miles down the road to Leamington Spa of all places.

So, what exactly is the story behind this new building?

Well, my friend’s mail order business purchased this all the way back in 2020 because he needed the warehouse space - around 90% of this building is warehouse space and he’s certainly crammed those racks in there and filled them with all of the pallets of his lovely stock. But about 10% of this building was offices - offices that he didn’t need and that weren’t cost effective to demolish - so they’ve basically sat empty for the past five years.

So as you can imagine, the first time I came here this was a bit like one of those urban exploration videos: it was very dark, it was very cold, it was a bit damp, everything smelled a bit, very worn down and dirty as the previous company had left it.

But I could see a lot of potential and he said that I was more than welcome to move all of my stuff in here if I wanted - and so that’s when a plan formed. Now as you can see, this is the reception area here. This was full of all of his fixtures and fittings and stuff that he uses for exhibitions. I have since moved those into another office. These are the old partitions that I had in my window display in the last studio. I’ve just stored some stuff behind here temporarily while I finished sorting stuff out - so that’s all they’re for but this space does have some potential: of course, being a retro YouTuber, I do feel the call of building my own computer museum and I have started along that avenue, as you will see in a second - so you know, nice little reception area. It does have toilets, it does have a kitchen, so you never know what might happen in the future but the really interesting stuff that I’ve built already is just through this door here…

Now this, as you can probably see, is a corridor - and as you can hopefully hear, has by far the worst acoustics out of all of the areas that I’m going to show to you in this video - so I will move on very quickly, but yeah, just on the right hand side here, on my left, this office isn’t one that I’m currently renting, although there is some potential here for future expansion maybe. This is where all of the junk ended up that was being stored in the other three offices that I now call home - so I guess we’ll take a closer look at those, shall we?

So this is a little bit smaller and a little bit messier than the other two offices and it has my microwave, my tea and coffee making facilities, my fridge and my freezer. But of course for the retro fans out there it also has these filing cabinets which I have started filling with various knickknacks and bits and bobs: stuff from my collection, future projects, that kind of stuff. These came with these offices which is really cool, they’d kind of been abandoned in here so I’ve claimed them and I haven’t redecorated in here at all so it’s still got the horrible manky old carpet tiles, it’s still got holes in the walls and all sorts but I think longer term with this room - I don’t know, I might quite like to turn this into perhaps a dedicated podcast studio, a bit of a different set, have a table in the middle with microphones and stuff and perhaps do some interviews and stuff in here as well because I am right in the heart of the British gaming industry, we’ve got Codemasters just down the road, we’ve got Rare not a million miles away, we’ve got all of the kind of Midlands-based game studios in the immediate vicinity and hey, you never know, as things grow and kind of expand it might be nice to have a dedicated space like this and if nothing else you know I can use it as a studio for live streaming and that kind of thing as well.

This, however, is perhaps a little bit more interesting: this was going to be my storage room - so it’s a 4 metre by 4 metre office and it has some very nice features like this rather cool integrated lockable storage, which should be very handy in the future. But of course, the bit that’s probably of most interest to those of you watching is my collection - my museum area that I’ve started to set up in here, and indeed all of these machines will be powered up - some of them are already - and the small handful of people who have popped in to see me have been very impressed with this indeed - so I’ve decided to keep this room as a bit of a feature, a bit of a museum, bit of something special for people who do pop down and see me in person. I don’t have any immediate plans to open this space up to the public, but you never know. I might do a few kind of members only events or something like that here.

I’ve got all of my Xbox games here, my Xbox 360 games, Atari ST, PC big box games. Of course, I’ve got some of my machines on display around the room, all of that Atari stuff and, you know, the early 70s stuff, pong machines, stuff like that. The original 1977 VCS on display there, the XE Game System, Jaguar Corner, which has quite a large selection of games as well as the console, which will be hooked up very shortly, and then my Atari 2600 collection, my 7800 collection, and a few other bits and pieces that you might recognise from previous videos on the channel - so the point of sale system, the Atari Sparrow motherboard, the NEC PC-98 and all of that wonderful stuff - so still some work to do in this room, but I’m very pleased with it so far. I’ll get some proper seating and stuff so people can come and play on these systems - and you know, I can come out and chill in here and have my lunch in here as well.

But of course this is the main attraction and indeed was the priority when I was moving stuff over - so one of the very first things I did when I got the keys was basically to gut this entire office here - it’s another 4x4 metre office. Get some new carpet tiles down and get the walls painted, get my famous cladding up which of course I had to remove from the old studio and bring over.

Bringing all of the stuff over was a whole ordeal in and of itself: multiple car loads and van loads over the course of a couple of weeks. Dumping stuff absolutely everywhere and trying to work around it. It was absolutely chaotic, I didn’t give myself a very long timeline at all, I think it was just 2 weeks that I had to move out and get stuff up and running in here. But I did hit my deadline: I recorded my very first Ramble from this studio: Rees Rambles, my weekly podcast which you might not be familiar with so that will be linked down in the description below - and I did actually manage to get something recorded and I have been recording here every single week since I’ve been moved in which I was very impressed with. It was a lot of hard work - so yeah a lot of stuff here that you’ll probably recognise from my previous studio: we’ve got of course the infamous Desk PC pretty much back where it was in pride of place.

I ran DOOM on that and I use it for stuff around the studio as well - I’ve done a couple of videos on that, very strange machine indeed. There’s the Tiny Pentium that I have behind me here - of course that was the topic of a couple of videos on the channel in the old studio: stuff like the history of the internet in the UK in the late 90s, I did some benchmarking and stuff on there with COAST modules, things like that. Really really handy machine that is, I did those Linux videos as well with Red Hat Linux which went down very well on the channel - so of course that also had to have pride of place here in the studio - and across the other side we have my sofa which is partly just there to fill space and because this was the first room that was done by far so it gave me somewhere to sit while I was working on all the other stuff - and we have the old workbench desk I guess with the the infamous Power Mac machine on there or Mac Pro and the RM 486 DX4/100 - one of my favourite machines in my collection - and as we can see down here on the floor in the corner the brand new Nvidia case that I featured in that video just a couple of weeks ago which I’m now building up into a project.

Of course as far as recording is concerned I’ve got all of my lighting and stuff set up in here - so I’ve got my C Stand which goes over the top: that just illuminates my beautiful face when I’m recording these videos. We’ve got these two soft boxes here with these colour temperature adjustable LED panels. My trusty old Sony ZV-E10 camera which was the first kind of major upgrade - first very expensive upgrade - that I bought for the channel all those years ago and has served me exceptionally well over those years. I’ve got a lovely SmallRig tripod, I’ve got my parabolic overhead light thing which I use for teardowns and that kind of thing - and also a monitor which I have permanently set up in the corner so I can actually see how my shots are framed and see if stuff’s in focus so that’s very useful indeed.

I am very pleased of course I had some help from some friends as well so thank you ever so much to the people who popped down and helped out with all of the work to get stuff moved over and get all of this decorated and up and running.

Of course I am very excited indeed to start using this new space - I’ve got a list of video ideas as long as my arm and it’s just going to be so much easier to work with having everything permanently set up. I’m not tripping over my stuff all the time, it’s all very logically laid out, I can find all of my tools and all of those projects and parts and things which is going to make my life a lot easier and of course that’s going to improve the output of the channel as well.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed something ever so slightly different from the channel this time around, a bit of a look behind the scenes and of course, normal service will resume very shortly: I have lots of restorations, upgrades, repairs, builds, documentary type videos, all sorts of stuff planned for 2026 and beyond so make sure that you are subscribed to the channel so you don’t miss out on those - and on that note, I was talking to the people that I am renting these offices from and they pointed out that they have rather a lot of e-waste, rather a lot of old machines that have been decommissioned over the years, particularly with the move to Windows 11 quite recently and they are very reluctant to see all of that going to landfill - some of it’s only a couple of years old and they don’t really want to pay a dedicated e-waste company to dispose of it - so they have told me that I am welcome to anything that I like from these various piles if I want to make videos about repurposing this old stuff for light home use or you know, Linux-based machines, gaming stuff, dedicated appliances, all of that stuff - so I do have a bit of a series planned on that as well: on saving e-waste from landfill, which I do think is very important, and of course, a great source of cheaper and quite decent computers as well, if you know where to find them.

But that is that. Now there is just one more thing - and I don’t usually push this in a really big way, but this is the perfect opportunity to say a very big and a very heartfelt thank you to my supporters. So I have Patreon, I have Ko-Fi, I have YouTube channel memberships and if it wasn’t for those people I wouldn’t have taken on that studio 2 years ago. I wouldn’t have been able to cover the cost of the rent, the ad revenue from YouTube is all over the place, it’s not something that can be relied on, particularly with my quite inconsistent view count - and so it was them that enabled me to take that jump and to start taking this channel a lot more seriously, which of course I did - so a very big thank you to you, of course, you still cover the costs of this new and improved space and every single penny that you pay every month does get reinvested back into either covering the cost of this or parts and things for projects for the channel so hopefully that is all reflected in the output.

Like I say, not something that I push in a big way, not something that I’m going to start pushing in a big way, but if you are interested in joining those wonderful people, you can get videos a little bit early and also ad-free and the links to those options are down in the description below. But that’s all I have for you for this video. Like I said, normal service will resume very shortly indeed, hopefully as soon as next week.

But that’s that - so hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.