OLPC Dual Booting

June 23, 2008 by 11 Comments


Gizmodo has the first ever footage of an OLPC dual-booting both its default OS, Sugar Linux, and Windows XP. The BIOS was not originally intended to boot XP, so it had to be modified for this to work. The XO’s screen flipper and directional buttons work in XP as well.

It’s not all good news, though: XOs are designed to be ultra-lean, packing a meager 256MB of RAM, which is hardly ideal to run XP. Booting it alone took an eternity, so we can’t imagine anyone doing anything practical with this. The machines will never ship with only XP installed.

Xbox 360 Modding Case Details

June 23, 2008 by 15 Comments


If you’ve been wondering about what changes Lian-Li implemented in their commercial XBox 360 casemod called the PC-XB01, they’ve recently updated their product page.

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]

High Tech Coffee Tables

June 23, 2008 by 4 Comments


Time was, coffee tables were good for three things only: setting down your coffee, setting down your coffee table books, and maybe putting your feet up. To combat this perception, Born Rich has posted their top ten list of high tech coffee tables that are capable of these things and more.

Continue reading “High Tech Coffee Tables” →

Add A Second Internal Hard Drive To Your Laptop

June 23, 2008 by 17 Comments


[Andrew] sent in something we’ve been considering for our 17 inch Dell. He squeezed a 100GB PATA notebook drive into the spare space in his Compaq laptop. He used a USB interface to provide the connection and added a toggle switch to conserve power when he doesn’t need the drive spun up. The mod would be even nicer if you added a keyboard activation switch like [sprite_tm]’s keyboard light.

Non-destructive Breakdown Voltage Tester

June 23, 2008 by 4 Comments


This applies more to older vacuum technology than your average solid state hardware, but [Richard] put together an interesting project. It’s designed to test a component for its breakdown voltage without destroying it. The general idea of the ‘BVT’ is to increase the voltage applied to a device until some current leakage is detected. Of course, any device that includes notes on probable arc length in relation to kilovolts is awesome by definition.

More Wiimote Hacking From Johnny Lee

June 23, 2008 by 2 Comments

Our friend [Johnny Lee] has been quite busy traveling and moving to a new city. He hasn’t had time to put together any new videos because of this. He’s been doing more Wiimote research though and has put together an extensive post about what he’s working on and thinking about.

Right before the move, he put together a demo for throwable displays. The square pieces of foamcore have retro-reflective tape added to each of the corners. The Wiimote sees the orientation of the square and adjusts the projected image to fit perfectly; even when you pick it up and throw it. He used it to add a trail to an airhockey puck. Embedded above is an earlier project where he used the Wiimote to track a foldable display and project accordingly.

[Johnny] has also been working on 3D tracking with two or more Wiimotes. Since the Wiimote is camera based, stereo triangulation is simple. Check out the video below from the University of Cambridge that uses two Wiimotes for motion capture.

Have a look at [Johnny Lee]’s full post for even more Wiimote ideas.

Eee PC 1000H Dissected

June 22, 2008 by 9 Comments


The people at TweakTown completely disassembled a new Eee PC 1000H and documented the entire process. Aside from showing you the side effects of too much tech fetish and not enough regular fetish, the article reveals all the parts of the new Eee, with a few surprises inside. Although it’s an Eee PC, it’s very different from all of its predecessors.

One of the things the teardown shows is that several parts are far more modular than previous Eee PC models. The hard drive, for example, is a standard Seagate Momentus which is made for desktop systems; it can easily be swapped out. Another easily swapped component is the 1GB SIMM from ASint.

Although their (ahem) stripping process was a bit unconventional, a lot of interesting information was yielded from this teardown. Keep ’em coming, TweakTown, just be sure to clean off your tool when you’re done.

[via Gizmodo]