[Eddie], who made the Mac Logo LCD Mod, had posted a step by step tutorial on how to do it yourself. He basically just fully disassembled his MacBook, popped out the logo, put one from an iBook or Powerbook, then mounted a small LCD back there and routed it into a USB port internally. He says the extra electronics cause a tiny bulge in the monitor casing. We wonder if this couldn’t lead to stress damage on the main LCD in the long run.
[thanks Koray]
MacMod member [EdsJunk] has modified the Apple logo on his MacBook to act as a second video display (cache). There’s a video embedded below showing it playing Quicktime videos and the iTunes visualizer. Unfortunately there aren’t any details of the hardware used. From the display settings, it looks to have a resolution of at least 640×480. We hope to see more details soon.
Yo dawg, we heard you liked macs. [Charles] got sick of his Mac mini looking nice and pretty and decided to cram it into an old beige box. This old beige box just happened to be an old Apple II disk drive, so we guess that gives it some more street cred. The original disk drive sold in 1978 for $500. Man times have changed.
[thanks BluRy]
Wired Gadget Lab has taken down a video made by [Brian X. Chen] in which he gives a brief overview and demonstration of how to install OSX on an MSI Wind netbook. This apparently didn’t sit well with Apple, who contacted Wired and complained; Wired agreed and removed the video. Frankly, we’re disappointed with Wired’s response. While they were technically posting content which is questionable at best—in the video, Brian mentions that this is illegal and that it would be a good idea to have a retail copy of OSX on hand, but then goes on to point out that you can also download the hacked operating system off The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, etc—the video in and of itself wasn’t illegal, and thus Wired comes off as susceptible to what amounts to bullying by Apple. We’re all about creativity and innovation, and stifling that innovative spirit has never worked well in the long run.
Fortunately, if you’re feeling like you’ve missed out on the video, don’t despair: Gizmodo has posted the video on their website for you to view and enjoy.
[photo: Brian X. Chen]
[Matthew] sent in this slick project where he made a Mac pro Ultra Mini. He received a MacBook that had been killed by water. He took it apart, re-soldered some connections and was able to get enough of it working to be a decent multimedia machine for his tv. To make it look nicer, he found an external drive case that looks like a tiny Mac Pro. After a little bit of grinding, cutting, and zip tying he managed to get all the pieces inside the case. We’re always happy to see hardware salvaged, and to see it transformed to a fantastic looking useful machine is a bonus. Good job [Matthew].
Techspansion, creators of the popular media conversion programs VisualHub and AudialHub, have called it quits. Company founder [Tyler Loch] explains that the decision to stop the development of these popular Mac based utilities was due to personal reasons.
Unlike the numerous media converters available for Windows based computers, there are only a handful of good media conversion applications on the Mac and Techspansion’s applications were some of the best.
VisualHub makes it easy to convert one video format to another, while AudialHub does the same for audio files. We found AudialHub very useful when converting WMA files for import into iTunes as the Mac version of iTunes does not have the ability to convert WMA files like its Windows counterpart.
Registered users who don’t have a copy of the latest build will find direct download links removed from the Techspansion website. All is not lost as one very enthusiastic individual has made the downloads available at The Pirate Bay.
In a somewhat ironic chain of events, uTorrent alpha for Mac has been leaked on Pirate Bay. Initial reviews are positive, with some saying that it runs better than its windows counterpart. The search function seems to be broken though.
[via BoinBoing Gadgets]
