Month: October 2006

I’ve seen a couple of these projects online before on how to roll your own benchtop power supply. They usually involve eviscerating an existing PC power supply to wire in binding posts, fuses, switches, etc. These always look like the kinds of projects that make me want to reach for my wallet to buy one instead and use the free time to… oh, I don’t know, date girls or something. This simple one leaves the PC power supply intact and instead focuses on creating a benchtop interface that plugs into the supply, which is a lot easier. This way, you just plug the ATX motherboard connector (that you’ve either scavenged or bought) into the supply and you’re good to go. I love the way he’s spaced the banana jacks so you can use a standard two-prong banana plug to select ground and your desired voltage.

This weekend, I was at MicroCenter, with Street Tech cyber-saint Alberto Gaitán, and we were snatchin’ up the bin/bargain gimmes. They had, among other things, 1GB JumpDrives (ThumbDrives, Keychain Drives, Geek Sticks, whatever we’re calling ’em these days) and 1GB SD Cards for US$16! They even had freakin’ 802.11g wireless routers for $7.99. Crazy. I could have redirected some serious creds to that place. Thanks to Alberto for talking me down or I might have walked out of there with that 42″ plasma display. Now *that* would be a computer monitor.

On the way home, we got to talking about portable apps and how, at 1GB, you could put portable versions of most of your crucial apps (wordpro, mail, web, chat, ftp, calendar, etc.) on a Flash drive and carry it around with you, rather than a laptop. Of course, you’re then dependent on there being a computer available wherever you go, but that’s becoming less problematic all the time.

So, today, I see this item on Lifehacker, a link to the OS X Portable Applications page. They have ports of nearly everything you’d want in your pocket, all the way up to Web authoring, RSS, and media editing tools. Each app averages about 30MB; with suites like OpenOffice, running as high as 430MB, you’d have to pick and choose what you think you might need on the road.

Of course, for most people, it’d make more sense to download and set-up a similar portable suite of PC apps as you’re far more likely to run into PCs in the wild. Just for fun though, I think I might set up my new $16 drive with a Mac suite to play around with. Has anybody else here had experience setting up and traveling with one of these Geek Stick PCs?

Update: I forgot to mention that one of the cool things about the portable Mac apps is that people are loading them onto their iPods, turning their PMP into a full-blown computer (sorta). Man, combine this with a Wikipod, and you’ve turned your iPod into a pretty powerful knowledge and comms tool.

This French hardware hacker built a really cool nixie tube clock from a serious-looking Russian VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display). In the comments, he points to a Euro eBayer who’s selling a bunch of Russian/Soviet-era VFDs and other tubes, and other Soviet surplus. There’s also the obligatory video of the finished clock on YouTube. Cool loungey French soundtrack.

[Via hackAday]