Mac SE Restomod Has A Floppy Surprise

June 19, 2025 by Tyler August 20 Comments

If he’s anything like us [Duncan Hall] was probably equal parts excited and disgusted when he found a 1987 Macintosh SE case at a garage sale. Excited, because not every day do vintage computers show up at these things. Disgusted, because it had been gutted and coated in house paint; the previous owner apparently wanted to make an aquarium. [Duncan] wanted to make a computer, and after 15 years, he finally did, calling it the PhoeNIX SE.

Note the small hole in the top floppy bay for the laptop webcam.

The NIX part of the name might make you suspect he’s running Linux on it, which yes, he absolutely is. The guts of this restomod were donated from a Dell XPS laptop, whose Core i7 CPU and motherboard power the project. A 9.7″ LCD serves in place of the original monochrome CRT, held in place by 3D printed hardware. While a purist might complain, it’s not like anyone makes replacement CRTs anymore, and once that’s gone? You might as well go full modern. (The analog board, on the other hand, is available. So is the logic board, if you were wondering. Lacking a CRT, some might have chosen e-ink instead, but the LCD looks good here.)

All ports are on the rear, as Steve would have wanted. That original sticker survived under latex paint is a spot of luck.

Having gone full modern, well, there’s no need for the M5011’s dual floppies, so one of them holds a webcam and monitor for a modern experience. A zoom call from that case would be a bit surreal, but we really appreciate the use of the empty floppy bay to keep the clean lines of the Macintosh SE unaltered. The other floppy bay (this is a dual-floppy unit) appears empty; we might have put an SD-card reader or something in there, but we absolutely agree with [Duncan]’s choice to 3D Print a new back panel and keep all I/O on the rear of the case, as God and Steve Jobs intended.

However you feel about restomodding retrocomputers (and we’re aware it’s a controversial practice), I think we can all agree this is a much better fate for the old Mac than becoming an aquarium. Thanks to [Loddington] for the tip.

If you’re on the side of the aisle that prefers to see restorations than restomods, the tips line is waiting for some quality restorations.

Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies For One-Handed Users

June 15, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control the shoulder, arm, and hand. This resulted in numbness and paralysis in his right shoulder and arm, with the prognosis being a partial recovery at best. As a writer, this meant facing the most visceral fear possible of writing long-form content no longer being possible. While searching for solutions, [Kurt] looked at various options, including speech-to-text (STT), before focusing on single-handed keyboard options. Continue reading “Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies For One-Handed Users” →

Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do

June 11, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

The original DOOM is famously portable — any computer made within at least the last two decades, including those in printers, heart monitors, passenger vehicles, and routers is almost guaranteed to have a port of the iconic 1993 shooter. The more modern iterations in the series are a little trickier to port, though. Multi-core processors, discrete graphics cards, and gigabytes of memory are generally needed, and it’ll be a long time before something like an off-the-shelf router has all of these components.

But with a specialized distribution of Debian Linux called Proxmox and a healthy amount of configuration it’s possible to flip this idea on its head: getting a desktop computer capable of playing modern video games to take over the network infrastructure for a LAN instead, all with minimal impact to the overall desktop experience. In effect, it’s possible to have a router that can not only play DOOM but play 2020’s DOOM Eternal, likely with hardware most of us already have on hand.

The key that makes a setup like this work is virtualization. Although modern software makes it seem otherwise, not every piece of software needs an eight-core processor and 32 GB of memory. With that in mind, virtualization software splits modern multi-core processors into groups which can act as if they are independent computers. These virtual computers or virtual machines (VMs) can directly utilize not only groups or single processor cores independently, but reserved portions of memory as well as other hardware like peripherals and disk drives.

Proxmox itself is a version of Debian with a number of tools available that streamline this process, and it installs on PCs in essentially the same way as any other Linux distribution would. Once installed, tools like LXC for containerization, KVM for full-fledged virtual machines, and an intuitive web interface are easily accessed by the user to allow containers and VMs to be quickly set up, deployed, backed up, removed, and even sent to other Proxmox installations. Continue reading “Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do” →

This Relay Computer Has Magnetic Tape Storage

June 11, 2025 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Magnetic tape storage is something many of us will associate with 8-bit microcomputers or 1960s mainframe computers, but it still has a place in the modern data center for long-term backups. It’s likely not to be the first storage tech that would spring to mind when considering a relay computer, but that’s just what [DiPDoT] has done by giving his machine tape storage.

We like this hack, in particular because it’s synchronous. Where the cassette storage of old just had the data stream, this one uses both channels of a stereo cassette deck, one for clock and the other data. It’s encoded as a sequence of tones, which are amplified at playback (by a tube amp, of course) to drive a rectifier which fires the relay.

On the record side the tones are made by an Arduino, something which we fully understand but at the same time can’t help wondering whether something electromechanical could be used instead. Either way, it works well enough to fill a relay shift register with each byte, which can then be transferred to the memory. It’s detailed in a series of videos, the first of which we’ve paced below the break.

If you want more cassette tape goodness, while this may be the slowest, someone else is making a much faster cassette interface. Continue reading “This Relay Computer Has Magnetic Tape Storage” →

Back To The Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck

June 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 4 Comments

Our hacker [Valve Child] wrote in to let us know about his Back to the Future lunchbox cyberdeck.

Great Scott! This is so awesome. We’re not sure what we should say, or where we should begin. A lot of you wouldn’t have been there, on July 3rd, 1985, nearly forty years ago. But we were there. Oh yes, we were there. On that day the movie Back to the Future was released, along with the hit song from its soundtrack: Huey Lewis & The News – The Power Of Love.

Continue reading “Back To The Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck” →

Using A Videocard As A Computer Enclosure

June 10, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The CherryTree-modded card next to the original RTX 2070 GPU. (Credit: Gamers Nexus)

In the olden days of the 1990s and early 2000s, PCs were big and videocards were small-ish add-in boards that blended in with other ISA, PCI and AGP cards. These days, however, videocards are big and computers are increasingly smaller. That’s why US-based CherryTree Computers did what everyone has been joking about, and installed a PC inside a GPU, with [Gamers Nexus] having the honors of poking at the creatively titled GeeFarce 5027POS Micro Computer.

As CherryTree describes it on their website, this one-off build was the result of a joke about how GPUs nowadays are more expensive than the rest of the PC combined. Thus they did what any reasonable person would do and put an Asus NUC 13 with a 13th gen Core i7, 64 GB of and 2 TB of NVMe storage inside an (already dead) Asus Aorus RTX 2070 GPU.

In the [Gamers Nexus] video we can see that it’s definitely a quick-and-dirty build, with plenty of heatshrink and wires running everywhere in addition to the chopped off original heatsink. That said, from a few meter away it still looks like a GPU, can be installed like a GPU (but the PCIe connector does nothing) and is in the end a NUC PC inside a GPU shell that you can put a couple of inside a PC case.

Presumably the next project we’ll see in this vein will see a full-blown x86 system grafted inside a still functioning GPU, which would truly make the ‘install the PC inside the GPU’ meme a reality.

Continue reading “Using A Videocard As A Computer Enclosure” →

Wireless Power Makes For Cable-Free Desk

June 8, 2025 by Tyler August 33 Comments

Some people hate cables with a passion; others are agnostic and prefer cabled peripherals to having to stop and charge their mouse. [Matt] from DIYPerks has the best of both worlds with this wireless-powered, no-cable desk setup.

The secret is embedded within the plywood desk: an evaluation kit from Etherdyne Technologies, Inc consisting of a 100 W RF power supply and its associated power antenna looping around the desktop edge. The mechanism is similar to the inductive charging often seen on phones nowadays, but at higher frequency and larger scale, enabling power to be transmitted several feet (at least a meter) above the desktop.

The range is impressive (this isn’t the maximum), but the efficiency is not advertised.

The kit from ETI contained several PCB-coil receivers, which [Matt] built into a number of devices, including a lamp, heated cup, microphone, speakers, his mouse, keyboard, and even a custom base to run his monitor, which really shows the power these things can pull.

The microphone is a non-Bluetooth RF unit lovingly modified to studio quality, at least as far as we can tell on laptop speakers through YouTube’s compression. The speakers use a pair of Bluetooth modules to negotiate stereo sound while staying in sync. And before you ask “what about signal for the monitor?”– we have to inform you that was taken care of too, via a wireless HDMI dongle. Check it out in the video below.

Of course the elephant in the room here is power usage — there’s a 10 W base draw, and probably a big hit to efficiency vs cabled-everything– but we figure he gets partway to a pass on that by using a Frameworks mainboard instead desktop hardware. Indeed, a full analysis might show that the transmission efficiency of this system is no worse than the power to charge/discharge inefficiencies in a more conventional battery powered wireless setup.

While no wires is pretty clean, we’re not sure this beats the totally-hidden-in-the-desk PC [Matt] built last year in terms of minimalist aesthetic. That Frameworks mainboard also likely lacks the power of his triple-screen luggable, but this was still an entertaining build.

Continue reading “Wireless Power Makes For Cable-Free Desk” →