Ben Heckendorn brings gladness to my heart with his clever mods and amazing home-built engineering. This latest beauty brings you the Atari, including cartridge-as-sunshade, in a portable format. Here’s the link to the engadget post, and here’s the link to Ben’s page for this project. It’s not quite nuclear fusion, but’s it’s right up there on the coolness level. While you’re there, take a look at some of the other projects. Definitely gives one some food for thought about what’s possible when you’re smart and so forth.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
As if we needed proof. I consider myself a fairly handy guy; I do most of my own repairs on my motorcycle and cars, I build and fix my own computers, I run a Linux firewall I built and configured, and I can do minor home repairs. I (mostly) successfully modded a PSP to have custom buttons. But I never reproduced the energy of the sun in my basement.
Well, in case my kids read this one day, I’m setting the bar pretty high. I want this thing powering and heating the house, and I don’t want to do a lot of maintenance.
Neither my wife nor I have a good record of checking pockets prior to laundry time, and my nano is the latest victim. What’s worse, we 
recently got a fancy new LG washing machine, which sounds like a 777 starting up. It’s a beautiful machine, but it’s not good for electronics survivability. The startling thing is the nano has some signs of life. I wasn’t getting it to start up initially, so naturally, I took it apart. I was able to sync it at that point, but it locked up on the screen you see here afterwards. Since then I had to let the battery go dead since it wasn’t taking a reset. After that, it synced again, and hasn’t locked up yet. My only problem now is putting the stupid thing back together. There’s a little 
ribbon cable connecting the click wheel and the headphone jack to the mainboard, and that’s giving me fits. In the meantime, I’m looking pretty hard at the Creative Zen V Plus as an alternative for this slot (I use the nano mostly as a workout player and for my Audible account). One can tell Apple really doesn’t want end users taking these things apart; there was some prying and peeling back glue, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get the thing back together right. If I were a smarter man, I might work on putting the guts into an Altoids tin or something.
Because a soft and soothing chirping noise seems to be the only sound coming from the Australian PS3 launch lines. At least that’s what the following picture would suggest:
I don’t deny that I probably come across as a bit of a Sony hater, but lest you think it’s due to my devotion to some other gaming console, let me enlighten you. Over the years I’ve owned a good many Sony products, from calculators to car audio. And in all those years, I’ve come to find one thing in common with all those products… they’re crap (well, I guess the calculator was ok).
Let me explain a little further…
As if I needed to be shown up in Guitar Hero any more than I already am daily on YouTube. While there are humans with wonderful skills, now we get the chance to test ourselves, John Henry-style, against a machine. Unfortunately, this fellow has no fact to melt, and so faces disqualification from most respected tournaments.
Now all I need is a robot to feed my Nintendogs, and I’ll be able to let every muscle that doesn’t chew atrophy into squishy bliss. Here’s the link to the story.
Personally, I find the whole cosplay thing a bit humorous, but the fanboys in this video display some serious transforming skillz. It boggles my mind to think that anyone would put that much effort into costumes like these, but I bet they get crazy amounts of robot nookie after showing off how many “positions” they can get into.
I hated to break up the super-fun Star Wars thing we had going there, but this was just too good to pass up. Now they just need to figure out a way to combine those Constructicons into Devastator. Now that would ROCK!!!
We’re big fans of Master Replicas here at ModStomp, and their green sabers really stand out with nice blades. I felt the hilt for the RotJ Luke saber was a little lame, though, so this is a really nice turn for them to take.
These are pricey collectables, but they’re also among the nicest toys a Star Wars nerd can have.
Click on through to see the product page with more images and information, and may the Force be with you.
R2 is now willing to accept your mail. Lucas et al are getting together with the USPS to celebrate thirty years of Star Wars. As many of you know, both Rudeboy and I predate Star Wars, but only barely. Thus, the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars kind of reminds one of one’s age.
Rudeboy commented that these had better be bolted down securely. I’m already working out plans for (uh, legally) procuring one for Modstomp Headquarters. If any Federal-type people are reading this, Modstomp Headquarters is on Dantooine. Yeah, that’s right, Dantooine.
The guys at engadget had a post on these funky TIE Fighter speakers, and I thought they were just the thing for your home theater if you happen to be George Lucas. I’d like to see a few more models than just Darth’s TIE Advance, but it’s nice that people finally realize there aren’t enough novelty speakers on the market for dorks. Dorks with a lot of money. Here’s a link to engadget‘s gallery.
