Hay Gaiz! I'm laserhawk64 and I'll be your wacky n00b today. I'll tell you the story and *then* I'll bring out the pix. Hope nobody minds. H'okay. I am a rather poor fella from a very small town that you've never heard of in North Carolina, USA. I have a seemingly compulsive need to be creative almost constantly, and as such, find myself doing a lot of drawing (I've got the artist's bug something fierce)... but sometimes one just needs to buckle down and build up something. Did I mention that I love to mess around with computer junk? The journey starts about a month or so ago. I'm bored, nothing interesting to do (house chores don't count, of course) and I can't think of something interesting to draw. I look around the house, and I've got plenty of old computer crunk that needs something to do, and lots of hardware scraps and bits of old wood and such. So, I sez to myself, I'm gonna build me a computer! Looked online for some ideas, since I didn't want to build just any old box, and I saw, over at Mini-ITX[dot]Com, a really cool cardboard cube-shaped build. Just a few problems... I don't have a Mini-ITX board, nor do I have the money to get one. Hmmm... wonder what I can do with all the scrap wood / metal / hardware / unidentifiable junk lying around the house... The first iteration of this machine sported an amazingly capable (NOT!) K6-II 233MHz CPU and 192MB RAM... I'd rather not admit how many HDDs I went through because the molex connector I was using had a loose pin... but, after many bumps in the road, lots of learning, and far more innovation and cleverness than usually goes into a machine of any kind... ...I would like to introduce to you... the one, the only, the amazing, the astounding... *drumroll* the mod known as Paper Tiger! Specs are as follows: - Allied (brand) 300W ATX PSU - PCChips (brand) M810LM v.7.1 Micro-ATX Mainboard - AMD Athlon / Athlon XP CPU running at 1150MHz - 640 MB PC133 SDRAM - 80GB HDD - Integrated Video, Audio, and LAN Paper Tiger runs Xubuntu 10.04, with a wallpaper I found... somewhere... (I don't recall -- sorry!) and a single tweak. I made it work with gnome-ppp, so that I can use the 'Net (my Internet is courtesy of Verizon Wireless and a Pantech UM175 USB Modem). VZW doesn't "officially" support it, but when I called to find out, the nice lady said that all that means is that they can't offer troubleshooting assistance. Now for the pix http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/676/img4022z.jpg http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/920/img3994s.jpg http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/5325/img3995e.jpg http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/2592/img3997d.jpg http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/6028/img3998.jpg http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/2743/img3999hg.jpg http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/8411/img4002w.jpg http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/4691/img4004j.jpg http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/8360/img4006j.jpg http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/676/img4007rm.jpg http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/1404/img4008v.jpg http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/707/img4018.jpg http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/3449/img4019t.jpg Do tell me what you folks think...
Thanks! Needs a little more detail work on the keyboard... but that's for a rainy day, methinks. All of the stickers are done by hand. BTW, there are 3 in-jokes on the keyboard sticker: - the "U" in "JUNKE" should remind you of DELL - the "N" in "JUNKE" should remind you of NOVELL - the keyboard is a "Dell QuietKey" from forever ago, and it isn't very quiet to me at all -- hence being labeled as having "noisy keys"!
laserhawk64, here is a website that I think you would thoroughly enjoy. It was one of Bit-Tech's major competitors in years of the Thunderbirds and Coppermines, when modding as we know it today was born. They used to be one of the best hardware sites on the web, but they were beaten by the huge amount of advertisement money that places like Bit Tech and Tom's Hardware generate. Luckily, the website is still intact, although infrequently updated. I hope that you can find some inspiration here. http://afrotechmods.com/
@Altron -- that site is *great* I fell off my chair laughing -- multiple times! No good ideas so far, though... although I'm getting some pretty bad ones @vmast3r -- not quite... that is hypertext. Hypertext is better than regular text, because it does something when you click on it. In this case, it magically makes images appear on your computer screen. Amazing stuff, isn't it?
Not as amazing as using [ IMG] tags Cool retro mod, though - I'd have liked to see more of a close up of the power switch and lights. Also, what's the purpose of the metal strip between the HDD cage and the PSU?
That's actually the floppy drive cage... hehe... HDD is in the cardboard box with the CD drive. The cage is held onto the cardboard box with one screw, and so gets rather "floppy" itself if it's not held down. Hence the metal brace. BTW, the floppy drive cage also holds the mobo plate in place -- there's another metal brace with an "L" piece on it, which is held to the plate with a binder clip. (I don't think this shows up in the photos...) Also BTW, that CD drive is a 24x CD-ROM... it's on my upgrade list to get a CD-R/RW drive if I can find one for less than $5. I'm a cheap ******* modder!
Hope ya'll will pardon the double post, but I wanted to provide a cost accounting for Paper Tiger, without using the Edit Post button. So here goes... $3 for black plastic pony beads (motherboard standoff material) $3 for a tube of E-6000 glue (which I ended up not using in the final design) $4 for the heatsink-fan module $20 for the motherboard ($23, actually, but a friend absorbed $3 of it for me) $15 for the power supply $10 for the hard drive (thank you, eBay!) My father took the pix, since all of mine look like they were taken at 55mph. Many parts were sourced from junk, but some of the most critical ones were had at the local computer shop. Those guys are *great*. My friend Ryan did some eBay ordering for me, as well, (I'm too poor for "magic plastic"), and for that I'm quite thankful as well. BTW, I didn't know that the word for "a child whose parents aren't married" was a swear word... I thought all of those were either 3 or 4 letters long... Merde
@burnout21 - Thank you! I'm a total n00b when it comes to coding of any sort. @SuicideNeil - Gee, thanks to you, too
Just look for this code after you upload them to image shack, it should have it. Should say something like "Forum Code" or similar. Code: [NOPARSE][IMG]http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/676/img4022z.jpg[/IMG][/NOPARSE] Copy and paste those into the forums, and you're good to go.
