Pimp my scooter

[Glen] built this shiny party machine out of a pretty sad-looking scooter. We’d bet you’re wondering why we think it’s a party machine when it looks so common? The only real giveaway in this photo is the custom exhaust, but hidden in the body of the beast is 720 Watts of party power plus a whole bunch of extras.

When … Read the rest

Tiny audio switcher eliminates repetitive plug swapping

usb-audio-switcher

[Phil] uses both his computer’s speakers and a set of headphones while working at his desk, but he was growing tired of constantly having to remove the headset from his sound card in order to insert the speaker plug. He’s been meaning to rig something up to make it easier to switch outputs, but never seemed to get around to … Read the rest

Power strip hack reduces standby electricity consumption

computer-standby-circuit

For years, [Rasmus] has left his computer connected directly to the mains power so that he can turn it on via Wake on Lan. While powered down, it would still continuously consume about 6W of electricity, but now that he didn’t need it to be on standby so often, he wanted to make it more energy efficient.

In Denmark, where … Read the rest

PC temperature monitoring system lights up when things get hot

gpu_overheating_warning_system

[Taylor] popped a new graphics card into his computer, but before he could settle in for a round of gaming, his card started to overheat. He eventually tracked the problem down to an undersized power supply, but the prospect of cooking his new GPU to death made him think twice about how he was monitoring his system’s health.

To continually … Read the rest

Broken vintage record player reborn as a portable MP3 cabinet

old_record_player_pc_jukebox

[Julian] picked up an old record player that was sitting in somebody’s trash pile, and brought it home to see if it could be restored to working order. When he got it home he discovered that it didn’t work at all, so he and his wife decided to modernize it a bit.

In an effort to simultaneously reunite himself with … Read the rest

Fixing POST errors with a single key

one_key_keyboard

Instructables user [Mike Craghead] was in the middle of building a very compact public computer kiosk when he ran into a problem with the processor fan. It was too big for the enclosure and had to be swapped out with a fan that did not allow the motherboard to monitor its rotational speed.

Motherboards don’t like this situation very much, … Read the rest

My desk IS my computer case

l3pdesk

If you think that your water cooled rig is pretty sweet, check out this creation by Dutch PC enthusiast [Peter Brands] (Google Translation).

With his computer tweaked as far as he could imagine, he decided to spruce up his office a bit. In the process, he ended up tweaking his computer just a little bit more. After seeing … Read the rest