Second Hard Drive In A Macbook Pro

August 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

Picture 4 (Custom)

[Reid] wrote in to show us how to add a second hard drive to his Macbook Pro. He found that he hardly ever used his DVD drive, so sacrificed it in favor of added storage. What he found was that it had a proprietary adapter that he was unable to find for sale anywhere. Making an adapter may seem like a pretty simple hack, but this could save some people considerable time. Its also worth noting that upgrading the firmware got him an 18% speed increase, so don’t ignore those updates. We don’t see too many mac hacks around here, you may recall the mac tablet hacks and the logo monitor.

Touchpad + Arduino

July 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt_VmJljmKU]

[Jani] directed us to his tutorial on making a laptop touchpad work with an Arduino. After seeing the recent post on touch pad and VFD hacking, he couldn’t resist finding one of these to play with. He shows us how to connect it all up and offers two methods of using the data from it. The first method is to determine the direction of finger travel and the second, shown above, is to use it more like the volume control on an iPod. Source code for both is available on his site.

Touchpad And VFD Hacking

July 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

p2 (Custom)

[Agent420] brought up this touchpad and VFD hack in the comments on our capicitive sensor guide post. He had broken dell laptop from which he harvested the touchpad and an HP laserjet that contributed the VFD. Though the touchpad communicates using standard PS2 protocol, he wanted to use it with his Atmel 8535 AVR which required him to write some custom code. In the picture above, you can see the VFD displaying the coordinates of his finger. You can download his code as well as the spec sheets for the different pieces on the project thread.

Dell Vostro A90 Hackintosh

June 16, 2009 by Eliot 44 Comments

dell_vostro_a90

A friend recently commissioned us to install OSX on a netbook. We advised him to purchase the Dell Vostro A90. It’s essentially a rebadged Dell Mini 9, a model that has been discontinued, but is well suited for OSX. It’s only available with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM, and 16GB SSD. Depending on what deals are available, it’s $250-$300. We also had him purchase a 2GB stick of RAM which is the upper limit supported by the BIOS. Continue reading “Dell Vostro A90 Hackintosh” →

Commodore 64 Laptop

April 6, 2009 by Eliot 41 Comments

c64

[Ben Heck] has just completed one of his more unique laptop game consoles. This time around it’s a Commodore 64, which he’s been attempting since 2006. Recently he scrapped everything and started fresh on what turned out to be the fastest build yet. While it certainly looks similar to his other laptops, he put in a lot of effort to give it the appearance of an 80’s computer from the beige color to the texture. He used an original C64C motherboard since it was the final and smallest revision and coupled that with an original keyboard. A 1541-III-DTV allows use of an SD card as a floppy device. Just drag any disk image onto the card and it’s ready to go. Check out a video of it in use below.

Continue reading “Commodore 64 Laptop” →

Hacking The MagSafe

March 18, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

magsafe
This is a simple hack that could come in handy one day. [Mooner] wanted to use a Kensington universal power supply with his Macbook Pro, but found the adapters and peripherals involved “hideous”. His solution was to wire directly to the Kensington power supply. It’s pretty simple really, only a couple resistors are needed. It’s nice to have someone else do the research for you sometimes. While his final picture does look neat and tidy, we just don’t know how much of an improvement he’s made to the aesthetics. What do you think?

WiFi And Bluetooth Tethering On Android

February 10, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

tmobileg1

Many G1/ADP1 owners have been using the app Tetherbot to get internet access on their laptop via USB to the phone’s data connection. The app relied on the Android Debug Bridge to forward ports. It worked, but people wanted a solution better than a SOCKS proxy. The community figured out a way to create a properly NAT’d connection using iptables and then [moussam] rolled them up into easy to use applications. There’s one for setting up a PAN device on Bluetooth and another for adhoc WiFi networking. It requires you to have root on your phone, but hopefully you’ve achieved that and are already running the latest community firmware.

[photo: tnkgrl]