Category: Geek

I guess some people’s hatred of the Mac runs to the extreme, or maybe it’s a love, where you always want a Mac by your side. This fella was given an empty old school Mac case and thought up this silly little Mac hack. As he points out on the Instructables page for it, the “screen” is translucent, so you can tell when your “iWipe” needs a refill.

Move over Ben Heck, this dude wants a shot at making crazy portable game boxes, too. This one’s an Xbox married to a PSOne screen and stuffed into a vaccum-formed box the builder fabbed up himself. Can’t say much for that horrid green pain job. Yick.

[Via hackAday]

I don’t know how this escaped our attention before. It’s a lighted throne chair built from 4000 AOL CD spamdiscs. I love how they got a sort of mosaic tile effect by using the same version of AOL discs for the seat and back. The finished chair weighs 150 lbs and barely fits through doors.

[Via hackAday]

Oh, lordie, we’ve finally succumbed to the whole geek needlepoint craze! This poor 8-bit widow grabbed the ol’ “granny grating” (what wargamers call needlepoint mesh) and stitched up this “micro-messenger bag,” which holds one DS cart, for her hubby. When you think about it, there’s a real similarity between old chunky-pixel games and mesh-based embroidery.

[Via Kotaku]

I’ve always had lots of respect for Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, and Patrick Norton. They always struck me as some of the bright lights around a lot of dim bulbs at ZDTV/TechTV. They’ve certainly proven their commitment to technology, tech journalism, and technoculture. Almost immediately upon jumping the TechTV/G4 ship, as it was about to beach itself on the shores of MTV-land (or was it Frat House Island?), they began doing podcasts, both audio and video. Recently, they, and other TechTV alum, such as Chris Pirillo, have been talking about creating a sort of cut and paste network of their respective projects under one Web banner, i.e. the TechTV talent minus the network. (Talk about your post-broadcast television.) The results are UndoTV, or it will be, when the site actually launches. According to a short piece on Wired News:

“Pirillo and LaPorte hope to attract a sponsor and begin producing original content, but for now will let the site evolve from the ground up. Contributors will keep 100 percent control of the content they provide to the site, Pirillo wrote.”

Okay, I’m sorry, but that’s just creepy.

[Via Engadget]

It won’t win any awards for hacking elegance, but somebody has already figured out a way to copy Blu-Ray and HD DVDs: hit the PrintScreen key. According to a piece on Ars Technica, quoting from an article in the German tech mag c’t, someone has developed a brute force copying method that involves a script which does a PrintScreen for every frame of a high-def DVD. It gobbles up over 300GBs of space, and you have to capture the sound separately and re-sync it, but it just shows to go ya, that if there’s a hacker’s will, there’s always a hacker’s way.

Who doesn’t remember the bad ol’ days of two-color sprocket-feed dot matrix printer paper? Those perf tabs that would sometimes not separate properly and would rip your print-outs, and piles of them would gather around your office like so much space age confetti. Ah, good times. Good times. You can now relive those heady days with one of these tri-fold Dot Matrix Wallets (US$25) from Ever-Together Designs. They’re made of Tyvek and even have a secret compartment in them.

[Via Boing Boing]

You know we’re all about the jet packs and silver lame’ flightsuits here at Street Tech Labs, so imagine our delight when we read this on MobileWhack (edited for brevity):

“Richard Herron has invented the Skywalker Jet Pack which weighs around 40.91 kg and can fly for about five minutes with the current prototype. The production model jet pack would be capable of flying up to ten minutes and have a range of 4 miles (6.436 kilometers). It will also have an integrated GPS. Last week, Herron put a prototype pack on eBay and the winning bid was USD10,399. The prototype jet pack has 8 AT-450 turbine engines and can carry a pilot weighing over 95.45 kg for about 5 minutes. For the production model, the frame will be carbon fiber, and be much stronger and better looking than the prototype. The belt’s helmet will include a heads-up display with a timer which will show flight time and engine information.”

These Alienware bags are kinda cool, I guess. I’m not so sure though that, if I were in high school, or college, or on my way to a LAN party, I’d want to be carrying an expensive bag that screamed: “Look, I have a tricked-out fragtop in here!”

In case you’re interested in taking the risk, the backpack costs US$99, the Messenger Bag is $79.