Category: Mods

The Banana Jr. 6000

Flickr - Banana Jr. 6000 

 

 

 

This is so darn cool. The computer made famous by the 80’s comic strip ‘Bloom County‘ has been re-born as a file server! I’ve wanted to build one of these for years, it’s nice to see that someone has finished one up. This one looks as if it started out life as a Mac SE/30, the original was based on a Mac 128 if memory serves me right. The floppy is in the right place on that model. Still, it looks real cool. Anyone have any cartoon inspired case mods out there that they would like to share? I need to pick up some yellow paint on the way home tomorrow don’t I…

whoa02 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

A great collection of Bloom County strips featuring the amazing Banana Jr. 6000 

MacMINI in an SE/30

Mac Mini SE/30

 

 

 

 

How can you case mod an Apple Mac mini? Car mount, Millennium Falcon, kitchen-ized, G5-ized,even turned into a toilet paper dispenser (!). This mini mod brings back on of the classics of Apple history. The SE/30 was quite the computer for it’s time. With it’s 16 MHz 68030, 9 inch screen, and a max of 128MB or RAM it was able to be a server as well as a desktop machine. Remember when those were specs you would drool about? Yeah, those were the bad old days… Well, this SE/30  is back on the A list with the transplant of a shiny new Mac Mini. The mini was wired into the case along with a new grey scale monitor to make a truly cool computer.

MacMINI in SE30

VGA to NTSC Without a Scan Converter

Linux on old displays

Have some old NTSC monitors gathering dust in your basement? Why not make a triple head display out of them. Sounds kooky but you can drive three monitors from one card by sending data on each color. So you get one monitor each for the red, green, and blue signals. Cool, eh? You have to hack your video cards BIOS a bit to get the refresh to match the TVs, but that’s well worth it.

[via hack-a-day] 

Linux on Obsolete Display’s Project Page

Model Rocket Altitude Predictor

Rocket day

 

 

 

 

 

 

This looks to be a handy tool. You enter the body diameter, the rocket weight, drag coefficient, and the motor type and you get an estimation of how high it will go and even how long it will take to land if you add the parachute size. You can use it for other things too, like seeing if you could launch a full roll of paper towels into the air. You can, it takes about 3 D-12 motors. 🙂

Model Rocket Altitude Predictor

Scrolling LED Display For Less Than $20

Cheap Scroling LED Display 

People need computers with blinking lights. I slave away at a Macintosh all day and all I have to look at is a calm glowing white light. It glows the same way when the thing is doing nothing as is does when the CPUs are maxed out and locked up. I can’t even tell if there is any hard drive activity! Now, I can’t put this project on the Mac. For starters it’s not mine, work owns it. Second, there is that lack of a parallel port that causes some problems. However, this would work just fine on my PC. The front LED that shows hard drive activity is blown out (what is this problem I have with lack of hard drive feedback?!?) so this would be a cool indicator of when my drives are off in a world of their own. Unlike the author of the how to I don’t have a fancy table saw to make a mount for it, I’ll have to make do with hot glue. ;P

[via MAKE] 

Put a scrolling LED display in your computer for less than $20

Underwater CVS Camcorder hack

Underwater CVS Camera Mod

What a fantastic mod! I love the magnet and the reed switch. 

Connect this one to the contacts of the record button and mount it on the back of the case, right under the screen. Now, waving a magnet by the bottom of the screen will start and stop recording underwater, without breaking the seal of the case.

I’ve often thought of building an underwater case for a camera but doing the interfaces for the buttons has always been a daunting task. For a while I was thinking I would use a water proof IR remote but never worked quite right. Plus it was a pain to mess with underwater. The magnetic switches are perfect. I wish I would have had this while I was on the beach…

Underwater CVS Camcorder