The real life Mudkip Wooper Pokemon seen above is an axolotl, a salamander-like animal that lives in only one lake near Mexico City. These adorable animals can be bred in captivity, but keeping them is a challenge. [LRVICK] decided he didn’t want to throw down hundreds of dollars for an aquarium cooler so he built his own out of parts usually used for keeping computers nice and cold.

Commercial aquarium coolers that would meet the requirements start around $300 and go up from there. Not wanting to spend that much, [LRVICK] found a 77 Watt Peltier cooler for $5 and figured he could make it work. Off-the-shelf parts for water cooling CPUs were used to construct the aquarium cooler – a water block on the cold side, a huge heat sink and fan for the hot side, and a bunch of tubing goes up to the tank.

Now [LRVICK] has an axolotl housed in a very professional-looking aquarium that is a steady 65 degrees. He’s got a very nice build, and the axolotl looks very happy.

Are you still using heat sinks and fans to cool your computer? Lame. Tearing up your property to bury geothermal coils is definitely the way to go. [Romir] has been working on this for about a month and is just getting back data from the first multi-day tests. Take some time to dig through his original post. It includes something of a table-of-contents for the 35 updates he’s posted so far. Closed loop cooling seems to be trendy right now, we just didn’t expect to see a system this large as part of a personal project. The last one we looked at used just six meters of pipe.

Remember Mauritius from High School geography? We didn’t either, but apparently it’s a small island nation east of the southern tip of Africa. It seems they are trying to develop an industry in eco-friendly data centers. The plan is to use a pipeline to gather cold water from the ocean, run it two miles to the island, and use it as inexpensive cooling. Because rooms packed with servers generate copious amounts of heat it’s easy to see how this can reduce the cost of maintaining a data center.

The thing that struck us here is, how eco-friendly is this? The article mentions that this technology is fairly mature and is already used in several places. With that in mind, isn’t this just another way to raise the temperature of the oceans, or does the environmental savings of not using electricity or gas to produce the cooling offset this?

[Thanks Vesanies]

Overclockers are always trying to come up with new, colder, and quieter ways to keep their PCs cool. [gigs] was so dedicated to this, he decided to lay 6 meters of copper pipe to use as a radiator in his new house’s foundation. As of now, the foundation is laid (copper pipes and all), and the forum posts come complete with finished slab pics, though there is no house to speak of yet.

[via Slashdot]

It can sometimes be difficult to decide what items we want to fill space in our homes. Our health is valued highly, as is our ability to consume cold beer. Someone out there must have been thinking of us when they designed this exersize bike that chills your beer. Admittedly, it won’t chill it as fast as some other methods we’ve tried. We also may end up forcing our friends and loved ones to do the actual chilling, but beer tastes better when cooled by slave labor anyway.

This came in on the tipline: [Ville 'Willek' Kyrö] wanted to build a fully passively cooled computer. That means no fans at all. He started with scrap aluminum heatsinks, ripped apart a cpu heatsink to get the copper heat pipes, and began surrounding the boards with heatsinks to form a case. Cooling down the powersupply was the hardest part, as it did not lend itself to the flat surfaces of heatsinks. Any passive case with powerful components will inevitably be huge and heavy; this one weighs over 20 kg. He says, “It might not have been worth it, but it sure was weird watching the computer boot up with no sound at all”.

Maybe you saw the previous post and thought, “Well, that’s all well and good, but why is such a stylish case being used to ventilate cat feces?” Antec has heard your cries and has created a computer case with all the lovely curves of a litter box and just as much airflow. The Skeleton case has an open frame design with a 250mm fan on top. You mount the motherboard to a sliding tray. The power supply and hard drives are mounted underneath. It’s an interesting idea and easily replicated, but if cooling had been the goal, it would be a lot more enclosed. You can see the case with components installed on TweakTown.

[via acquire, thanks, xtine]

The case does not add any new functions to the console, but it improves its efficiency on several levels. To deal with the noise produced by the DVD drive, they installed sheets of sound insulation foam around the drive, greatly reducing the sound it makes when it spins up. They did even more for temperature control, replacing the standard dual 70mm fans with a single 120mm fan that cools more efficiently and quietly. The case is also larger and features a frontside grate, allowing for vastly improved airflow. Lian-Li designers even left opening in the back for option water tubes in case you want to add a liquid cooling system.

[via Xbox-Scene]

[Turbokeu] provides detailed schematics of different configurations for the frequency meter as well as schematics of the layouts of the two PCBs that are used. Even if you don’t have an immediate use for a frequency meter, his clean and readable schematics are worth a look in their own right. The display is installed on front of a tower case along side a CPU speed display.

[via YourITronics]

Contestants must pour 72 ounces of beer into their device where it must emerge in a continuous flow no more than one minute after having been poured. No internal reservoir is allowed; the idea is that the beer must be cooled as it flows through the device. The target temperature of the beer is 38º F, but they often start out at temperatures topping 90º F.

Raw numbers are one part of the competition, but another is efficiency and elegance of design. One design that has been entered and refined every year is a styrofoam cooler filled with a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and dry ice. The latest design dipped ziplock bags full of beer into the mixture, cooling it at a rate of nearly one degree per second. With the current rules, however, this method would not be allowed. The rules are tougher than ever, but if you want to compete, you can sign up at the Defcon forums. Defcon 16 will be on August 8-10 at Satan’s rectum the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, and the fourth BCCC will be at noon on the 8th, next to the pool.

[Thanks Renderman]