Hasta La Gadget!

The best, nerdiest and probably funniest cartoon from the stickman comic XKCD was the sandwich strip seen above. If you don’t get it, then it doesn’t matter. If you do get it, it is quite amazingly hilarious. Sadly, trying it out in real life won’t work — it’s about as likely a transition from comic space into meat space as putting on a pair of glasses, re-parting your hair and expecting to be unrecognizable (we’re looking at you, Kal-El).

Happily, maker extraordinaire Bre Pettis and his trusty sidekick Adam Cecchetti decided to fix this, and built the Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot. The robot consists of a toaster oven, and bread and cheese delivery devices, just like the mechanized screws you see in vending machines. The robot is, of course, hooked up to a computer running a Unix variant. Type "Make me a sandwich" into the command line and it throws an error message: "What? Make it yourself."

Type in "Sudo make me a sandwich", however, and the robot goes into action. Check it:

There seems to be something about the XKCD comics that inspires people to bring them to life. In fact, we fully expect somebody to hack Kindle 2 to display the legend "Don’t Panic" upon startup.

Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot [Bre Pettis]

Sandwich [XKCD]

See Also:

• The Kindle’s Dirty Secret
• The Love Mattress: Not What You Think
• New Devices Replace Passwords with Pictures

The Problem: My desk is a mess, and, if you are anywhere near
normal, so is yours. It’s not the coffee cups and papers that bother
me, though, but the tangle of cables hanging down the back and trailing
across the floor, twisting like Tarzan vines in a particularly fertile
rain forest.

This weekend, I decided to do something about it. There are plenty
of tutorials on the web detailing intricate schemes for cable
management, most of which involve drilling holes, installing wooden
screens or other long-winded solutions. I’m lazy, and I’m also fussy
about how things look, so I thought about the easiest (and cheapest)
fix I could make. Read on to find out how, with some street scavenging
and five minutes of easy work you can have a neat and tidy workspace.

The Solution: In Barcelona, my home town, these plastic crates can be found everywhere thanks to a healthy lack of respect for the supermarket — regular shops and real markets rule, and so these useful containers abound. They can be cut down to be used as in-shower shelves or fixed to bike racks to carry shopping. They can be stacked in cupboards and upturned for use as impromptu seating. And they can be used to fix my mess o’ cables.

I found this one almost as soon as I had decided to do this project and, double-lucky, it fit right in between the legs of the folding table. This means that it met my criterion of being easy. Check how snug it is:

Next, to decide how to fix the crate to the table. As the crate has plenty of holes, cooling won’t be an issue and the whole thing can be snugly pushed against the bottom of the desktop. The problem there, though, is that those handy gaps front and back aren’t quite big enough for easy access. I figured I could either get fancy and install some kind of hinge to swing it down, but that would quite obviously be too much effort. So I checked to see if there would be legroom if the casket was mounted on a permanent slant:

Here it is slotted in underneath. As you can see, swinging it down a little won’t significantly restrict what little legroom this desk already has. So, having decided that I could fix it in place, it was time to choose the manner of attachment. Cable ties!

The ties weren’t quite long enough to reach, so I just doubled them up:

Then, it was a matter of threading them through a nearby gap. This shows the second advantage of the plastic crate: lots of holes means lots of mounting points. And because it is lightweight, you only need a few ties to hold both crate and power strips.

Easy, and – if it weren’t for taking all the photos – a ten minute job. The hard part was in finding the right sized crate and there I got lucky. The finished piece:

Now, right there it looks pretty conspicuous but, when returned to its home with the crate-side to the wall it will be a lot less visible. You obviously don’t have to use a crate — a cardboard box would do (along with some air holes if you plan to put any hard drives in there).

As you can see from the picture, though, the crate is ideal: It is easily attached, it has a nice big gap at the back for throwing in new hardware and it has plenty of holes from which to run those cables to the computer above. Heck, with the ventilation I could even throw the Gadget Lab Hackintosh netbook in there, hook up a monitor and use it as a permanent desktop machine.

Next up: Actually tidying the cables away — a rather formidable task. Take a look at the mess I have to deal with after pulling the table out of the room:

Over to y’all. Anyone got a neat and tidy desk hack? Post in the comments here, or add your photos to the Gadget Lab Flickr Group.

This may look like a beloved iMac, but make no mistake, it’s just a shell of its former self. CGCC forum member Logicdustbin decided to gut the all-in-one and replace its innards with a Sega Dreamcast and 15-inch LCD monitor. The result? The iCast, a beautiful homage to simpler times. Hit up the video after the break to see this Fronk-en-shteen in action, playing a game that’ll assuredly prepare our children for a post-apocalyptic world.

[Via hack a day]

Continue reading Apple iMac murdered, reborn as all-in-one DreamCast mod

Filed under: Gaming

Apple iMac murdered, reborn as all-in-one DreamCast mod originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bikes, unlike bigger means of transport, are pretty easy to modify to fit the will and needs of the owner, for carrying strange cargoes or perhaps to just look more awesomer. Sometimes, though, there are some chop-jobs which are quite inexplicable. Here we’ll look at a few, and try to decode the more unusual.

First, this bike above, photographed this weekend in Berlin’s slushy streets. We have dubbed it the "Pizza Bike" for its round cargo section, but it is clearly not used for delivering pizza. Not unless it’s by a restaurateur with a strange grasp of gravitational laws.

To be honest, I have no idea what this is. There’s a small, rectangular hatch in the side, and it appears that the top tube pierces the disc — if not the bike would be pretty unstable. Is it for small parcels, a kind of slow, old-fashioned courier bike? We’re flummoxed, so help out with suggestions in the comments.

Bike Water Pump

The presentation is something of a mystery — the rider is playing air-bongos to a bongo soundtrack, but the mod is a good one: it’s intended to draw water from wells in Senegal. This is a bike with the front wheel removed, the seat rotated and the rear wheel rigged to pump water. Maybe it’s an art "happening" or perhaps just a cool demo. Out in the field, though, this would be way easier to use than a rope and bucket. Designed by Baay Xaaly Sene.

Bike Culture Break [Bike Hugger]

Treadmill Bike

The point of this bike is somewhat questionable — the Bike Forest sells it as an alternative to the gym, saying that it "offers the same fat burning benefits of a conventional treadmill without the membership fees."

Surely, though, a normal bike offers the same "fat burning benefits" as a treadmill? Nevertheless, this is a crazy, Rube Goldberg contraption, the front end of a bike welded to a treadmill, which is itself hooked up to a small rear wheel. We’d suggest using this to actually get to the gym and, once there, standing in the changing room, holding on to the coat hook and reading a book whilst swaying slightly, as if you were taking the metro.

Treadmill bike [Bike Forest]

Photo: frankh/Flickr

Tall Bike

The caption put on this picture by the photographer, scob89, cannot be improved upon:

20" Rear tire, 16" Front Tire, One fucking speed, The bearing in the head tube are shot, Dual rear dirtbike shocks on the back, No brakes, Give me some sugar

Care to try riding it?

Google’s image search reveals hundreds more wacky tall bike mods. (Thanks, Dean J!)

Photo: scob89/Flickr

Shoe Bike

Wheels? Who needs wheels when you’ve got heavy-duty spokes with boots on the end? This photo, from Bike Kill 2008 in Brooklyn, New York, shows just one of the many mutant bikes that can be seen at the annual event. (Thanks, Armitage!)

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com.

Longfellow Cargo Bike

Matt Ritter’s "Longfellow" is a homemade cargo bike capable of carrying a couple of passengers. Ride it gently, though: The chain is so long that you can derail it simply by shaking the bike. If you like Ritter’s mod but don’t want to do welding, check out Xtracycle’s cargo bike conversion kit.

Photo: Tim Anderson / Instructables

If you know of any more crazy bike mods, or even better, if you have done one yourself, let us know in the comments. And don’t forget to tell us just what the vertical Pizza Bike is really for.

This article was written on November 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s that time again! Yep, time for more Microsoft leaks. This time around a “hack” has been exposed that will let existing Windows XP users download and install a Release Candidate of Service Pack 3 (SP3) via Windows Update. If this sounds familiar to you it’s probably because a similar hack was already leaked back in October for Vista SP1.

Early reports are estimating that XP SP3 has roughly a 10% performance increase over XP SP2, which is a rather large difference. That’s definitely good news for XP users, and might end up pushing more users to make the upgrade

So what do you have to do? Not much actually. Just copy some text into Notepad, save and run the file, and then check for updates in XP. Running the file will modify the registry a bit, but it won’t screw up your system. I did get around to trying it out, and it worked flawlessly:

1. Copy and paste the following code into Notepad:
   @echo off
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set. Please check for updates in Windows Update.
pause
2. Save the file as XPSP3.cmd (it’s important to include the extension).
3. Run the file that you saved in Step 2 by double-clicking on it. Restart your computer and check for new Windows Updates.
4. Windows XP SP3 should be found, and it is a 337MB download so give it some time to download and apply the updates. When all is said and done your version of Windows XP should be: Windows XP Build 2600.xpsp.071030-1537: Service Pack 3, v.3244

Enjoy the better performance and stability! You can hold off until next year if you want to download XP SP3 when it is officially released.

[via Softpedia & Computer World]
Thanks for the tip Storytellerofsci-fi!

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