Reader [Brien Schultz] didn’t like his laptop suspending every time he closed the lid to move around the house or to a different work area, so he turned that feature off. Of course that just led to him forgetting to put the thing to sleep when he really needed to, like when he was walking around all day with it in his backpack. To solve his self inflicted problem (common cause of many hacks) he wrote a .NET program to monitor the laptop’s accelerometer. The accelerometer is usually used to park the hard drive heads in case the laptop is falling (it’s also used for hilarity). If BedTime detects that the laptop is in motion, but is not being used it starts a countdown and eventually puts the laptop to sleep. Brien isn’t using the “sleep after X minutes” option because it would put the machine to sleep while it was open and he was just distracted for a few moments. Demo video after the break.
laptop164 Articles
Old School Libretto Mods
Somehow, [acidx] knew that I coveted a libretto for years. He sent in his writeup on modding his Libretto 50ct to be a bit more useful. The mods are pretty basic, he overclocked it to 133Mhz and added a ps/2 port. The tweaks keep the well aged libretto a usable platform.
Pssst. wanna see your hack on Hack-A-Day? Use the tips line!
Wii Laptop How-To (Part 3)
The final part of Ben Heckendorn’s Wii Laptop How-To is up. Somehow, Ben managed to get access to a laser cutter and a CNC machine (in friggin Iowa) and used em to create the new case for the Wii Laptop. Add dash of soldering, a few simple circuits and some clever case construction. Voila.
