If you are looking for a way to cycle safely at night and get amazing geek street cred, check out this project for LED wheel lights that make an animated image. You can even buy a kit to make your own easily. Now if only I actually had somewhere to keep a bike.

Perfect for any Bond Villain’s Lair – how to make giant metal globes! Ok, it’s a bit advanced but then nobody said it was easy to be a super-villain.

You’ve only got a couple of days left to bid on the amazing iTablet. It’s an old Apple iBook that has had major modding to make it into a tablet device – the screen has been swapped and a touch sensitive one added. It’s a very nicely done job, described on MacMod here.  The auction itself is here.

P.S. I’ve finally restarted work on my own mac mod, and am about 30% of the way through squeezing all the guts back into the little mac case. Am just awaiting some more supplies and hopefully it will be finished this week / weekend.  Phew!

Very nice japanese mod of a Mac Mini into a Classic Mac SE/30 case… good work fella!

Impressively he even re-used the old screen, I think. Scary stuff.

I really must get my mod finished. At least I’m nearly done website building now…

A very impressive, but crazy lego case

Not the approach I’m taking with my case, but nice all the same. (FYI
I’ve bought supplies of wood, aluminium and some nice brackets now, so
things are about to be glued/screwed together but a conference this
week will slow that down somewhat).

On switch, reset switch, power light, hard disk light. Dull stuff…
but vital if you want to actually be able to turn your PC on and see if
it’s doing anything! The problem is that I didn’t want to us the cables
that came with the original case, and when I ordered new motherboard
pin connectors, the wrong ones came – spot the difference:

The
problem is that these don’t fit the motherboard pins – arg. However, I
remembered a cunning trick that I heard about. The case connectors are
all separated because they need to fit lots of different motherboards,
which tend to put their connector pins in different orders. However,
I’m only trying to work with one motherboard, so I could wire
everything up to a single big block and put it on the motherboard. To
do this, I took a spare IDC connector and ribbon cable from an unused
floppy drive:

Using a coping saw with a nice fine blade, I chopped the ends off so I had a socket exactly the right size for the motherboard:

Then,
using the manual for the motherboard, I worked out what pin was
connected to what wire, labeled the cable and soldered it to new push
switches / LEDs I’d bought earlier:

Finally I used some modeling epoxy glue to glue the now-smaller connector back together:

Happily
the resulting cable works perfectly and I can now make my mini-itx
board work! I just need to find places in the new Mac ‘case’ to put the
switches and lights. I think the lights will hide in old eject holes
for the floppy drive, and the switches will be around the back, where
they won’t ruin the lovely front of the mac.