Here’s something to make when it’s cold outside. Snow! This site has a couple of snow machine designs that can be built from stuff you might already have (an air compressor, a high pressure sprayer, various plumbing fittings). There also has a page describing the physics involved in snow making. Thanks J. Wolf! Link.
Run a Mac, on a stick. “Running Linux, Windows or applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and AbiWord from a USB flash memory device is old hat. How about a Mac 128K or Plus on a USB key? Using a ‘portable’ Mac system you can: play with old system software and applications without dusting off your old Mac, impress your friends, or show others what the older Mac system looked like, use Mac on Windows and Linux.” Thanks Jim! Link.
Remember when we asked about cool Home Depot projects? Here’s one that Patrick sent in, he writes – “Want a interesting looking, reasonably priced hanging pot rack? Here is one that I built in about thirty minutes. Everything screws together, so it is fun and easy to assemble, after you have the parts. The hooks are purposely fixed in one direction so that you are not up all night listening to your pans swivel and clang around. You can also slide the hooks into different places on the bar to accomodate the different sizes. It might take longer than thirty minutes to build if you do a better job than I did peeling the stickers off all the parts.” Link.
Chris writes in about his his progress on hacking away with 20 hard drives, he writes “In part 3 of “Things to do with 20 hard drives” we take a look on how to build The real hard drive clock, using the arms with heads as hands. Even though this clock might not fit into every home, it definitely has something about it that makes it nice to look at.” Link.
More repairing goodness, Radiorental writes in describing tips for scoring super cheap iPods – “There’s usually half a dozen 10GB or 15GB broken ipods on ebay at any point in time. Usually either the battery or HD is stuffed. Most go for under $35, new battery is ~$10, HDs are around $100 for a 40G. $140 total for a 40G 3rd gen Ipod thank you very muchness.” Link.
If laser cutting your Powerbook isn’t your thing, here’s a HOW-TO on replacing the glowing white Apple logo with the old school rainbow colored Apple. The tricky part is taking off the back case, but they have some pretty good tips on getting it off without damage. The logo was replaced by multicolored “Roscolux” gels. [via] Link.
Wow, Intel smacks what they call “gadgets” a bit – they think the $100 laptop effort is more of a gadget than a “grown up PC…not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power.” It will be a fascinating to see what happens in the next couple years. I think it’s not just one solution, but many…The $100 laptop seems to be using, or will use an AMD processor, not Intel, I wonder if that’s why they’re down on it? Link. See our less than $100 version made from an Apple eMate here.
