grover sat alone on the shelf, placid red smile stiched across his goofy blue face. his fabric eyed gaze never shifted.
he couldn’t see it coming.
when the knife pulled free from the back of his head, his polyester brains spilled to the floor. only a sad smile remained. had grover only been able to see his attacker, things may have been different.
grover the muppet — barely alive.
we can rebuild him. we have the technology.
i’ve got an old dell laptop that’s having _lots_ of problems, so i’ve been waiting for some real inspiration (inspironation?) to tear the thing apart.
as luck would have it, the other day i got a message from asbesto, who told me about a wooden laptop that he made:
Here is my laptop: the “legnatile”; I replaced the plastic shell with a wooden one; it took about 4 months of work, and now it’s lighter than the original plastic shell. A unique piece, ultimate frontier of case modding, joint of natural wood and leather, with high technology. Inspired by “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson
you may have seen a ‘76000 in 1’ (pirated-nintendo-in-a-joystick) for sale at a kiosk in your local strip mall. though it probably has 50-100 nes roms at best, it’s great retro fun in a small, cheap package
if you’ve got a gameboy advance, a gba flash cartridge, and a gps receiver that outputs nmea, then you can turn your gameboy advance into a cool gps mapping receiver.
mikhail sharonov created a nice litle application that assists you in importing and calibrating up to 20 raster maps. the software will then output a gba rom file that you can run on your device. with a few minor software updates, he was also able to get the microsoft branded gps to work (the one which comes with microsoft streets and trips 2005). hot!
roy leamon just wasn’t satisfied with 5.1 discrete audio channels, so he went to work hacking together a 24 channel sound system that he calls the lsd (laemon sound device). the 24 seperate speakers are controlled over firewire by a mac g5.
it’s a bit difficult to imagine what is possible with this system. you could realistically have a seperate sound source for each instrument in your recording. you could move a single source around the room in a way that a 5.1 system can only attempt to imitate. there are a lot of possibilities.
this one is not for the faint of heart or light of wallet. though it’s constructed from off the shelf components, roy estimates that it would take $12-15k to reproduce his system. that figure just shattered any hopes that i had of being a true audiophile. this is probably ok — i don’t have the skillz to juggle 12 turntables anyway.
a couple of days ago, an engadget reader posed an important question:
Does a non-fugly cd-alarm clock exist? It is the Holy Grail of gadgets. How Sony can make a gorgeous T1 or T3 digital camera and still make clocks that look like ass confounds me.
now there is hope for fugly alarm clock haters. anders lundberg has solved your problem and built an alarm clock into a mac g5 case.
the howto is written in swedish, but it’s also well documented in the universal language of jpeg. it looks like he was able to create a custom led array that fits the hole pattern of the case, while using the guts from an every day alarm clock to drive it all. thanks for the link, gary!
update: a reader over at tuaw has translated the howto to english
kno one forwarded me a link to a diy lazer tag system that is off the hook.
MilesTag uses a digitally encoded signal allowing differentiation between up to 32 players and 7 teams, and supports a wide range of weapon types, including mines, area-denial and even non-conventional weapons. Damage inflicted by each weapon is scalable, and the performance of each weapon is fully configurable (rate of fire, ammo capacity, reload time, etc.).
the trogdornator (pictured above) really caught my eye. source and schematics are included so you and your friends can get together and build you own game. but make sure to pick your friends carefully — they must have courage, cunning and the ability to hack.
