Damn was the last month Pediatric Anesthesia posting tiring. Blogging and studying were pushed to the wayside, and free time was focused more on lifting along with the typical "work brought home" stuff.
After learning and bought the needed equipment to open up the difficult to repair Apple products (specifically my Airport Extreme), I decided to do something that I've not done in a while: clean up the insides of my MacBook Pro. There was good reason to do so: the laptop's fan never seemed to slow down and even ran when trying to put the computer to sleep, some keyboard combo's weren't working well, and there were sometimes random shutdowns/screwed up screen displays (I guess the VRAM got corrupted by heat). And my laptops tended to have only a 5 year lifespan on average, mostly by ruining the logic board (motherboard in the Apple realm), which is not great for the wallet.
The 2012 Unibody Retina MacBook Pro has 2 rear fans, and this picture focuses on the left-sided one. This was after 5 minutes of dusting with dry tissue paper. I followed up by using a pick to pullout the gunk stuck at the gills of the rear vent (where air flows out from the fans). Then I used a dry air duster to just blow out the whole area that wasn't grossly dusted off by dusting with tissue.
Now the fans turn on really fast only when it needs to (I use iStat Menus to manually change the settings to go full blast with the fans whenever any component goes beyond 60 degrees Celcius). Some video work that could take 6 hours now only takes 4 (as the CPU/GPU is less throttled), sleep/wake works as intended, and my Spotlight keyboard shortcut now works normally.
Just as you service your car, I guess you also need to service your "fanned" electronic machines once in a while.