New Toy

Got myself a new 11" MacBook Air (base model)

No, I won't be pulling this one apart (not just yet...give me a couple of years until it's next to worthless residual value), but I will be testing the performance between this and the air/keyboard project.

As amazed as I was with the original, this one is even better. About as close to a netbook Apple is going to give us I think. :)

New MAcBook Air's

So, we got some new MacBook Air's finally :)

What does this mean for hacking I wonder? Hopefully it means some cheap second hand RevB Air's come on the market but the more interesting thing is the new 11" form factor, integrated SSD's and external ports that aren't on a flip out door would make for an awesome Mac keyboard mod.

Anyway, unless someone wants to buy me one, it won't be happening soon.

New designs for the Mac keyboard case will be up shortly.

No posts for a month! WHAT!

Thanks to reader Nathan for the post title ;)

hmm..yes...no posts...the replacement parts I bought off ebay still sit in the box and I haven't progressed any further. The dremel is still sitting on the bench, plugged in and hasn't moved in a month. Scraps of plastic still lie where they fell. The corpse of a once beautiful laptop rests under a pile of papers, bluetooth keyboards and the hat I wore three weeks ago...

There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that the place I have a day job re-structured and I had to re-apply for my job. This took up a bunch of time and some emotional effort to get past and there wasn't the 'free' time to go play in the garage by myself (although doing as much would have been good therapy). The other reason is that I have been away on and off doing other things and I was hoping to have had this thing finished already but I hit a few stumbling blocks and I lost the momentum.

Never mind...I have used the time to have a good long think about the case design and after seeing this nice unit I'm going to try for something that isn't as cramped (but not made of wood). What I will probably end up doing is having the battery located under the keyboard/trackpad and shifting the internals rearward a couple of centimetres. This means the pitch of the keyboard won't be as pronounced as it is at the moment and some other components won't be forced into positions of potential failure which is another issue I had (the ribbon cables and connectors are't exactly built for multiple bends/insertions and I broke a couple...hence buying spare parts)

Anyway... hopefully I'll have something a bit more substantial to show in a short while.

Still here

Still here.

Haven't managed to work on anything for the past week. Been away and will be busy this weekend shooting a wedding (doing that other thing I do).

Trying to re-think the whole battery thing. Might need to do some minor modification of the casing to make it fit right but the danger there is accidentally puncturing one of the lithium cells and we don't want that.

Replacement parts and Amiga's

Well my replacement to case turned up today...that gives me spares of quite a few bits which will be good.

I've also picked up a narrow heatsink for the CPU/GPU to help dissipate the heat somewhat. Should be able to finish this little project up next week.

All this (plus some comments from readers) has re-lit the spark inside me that I reserve for the Commodore Amiga. I fired up WinUAE for the first time in a long while....I still suck at Shadow of the Beast. Part of me will always wonder what would have happened if Commodore didn't go bankrupt....would we be using Amiga desktop machines or would they have been just another also-ran like Be or Acorn? Who knows. All I can say is that the Amiga is one thing from my childhood that I can look back on and they still look cool :)

So I made a little image that merges the two together :)