20 cent Apple logo mod

So I decided to hack apart my laptop and give it a bit of color this weekend. I had seen people with custom apple logos on their laptops around the net for a while now. I eventually tracked them back to icolours.ca. They sell quite a few custom filters on their site for only five bucks a pop. That’s not a bad deal, but I figured I could pull off the same look on my own for a fraction of the price.

I had some green and red velum left over from my paper lantern project, so I figured I’d go with the red macintosh look. If you want to go this route Hobby Lobby sells velum for cheap. Usually about 10 - 25 cents a sheet depending on the color and pattern.

Logo with back lighting on

The whole process was pretty easy for my Macbook Pro. All I had to do was remove two small screws and pop off the back of the LCD screen. Once that was done I just taped the cut velum over the clear plastic apple logo and replaced the white filter. I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to try it yourself you can check out these sweet video instructions. Happy logo modding!

Logo with the back lighting turned off

Being sick is boooooring

So, yea, being sick is really boring. There is only so much TV a guy can watch before getting all loopy headed and depressed, right? Right. So I’ve been trying to come up with little projects to keep entertained while not over exerting myself…. you know what that means right? Yea, lots of nerding out on the computer…

Songbird
I decided a little while ago that I’ve had enough with Itunes. I never really liked the interface, and I especially didn’t like that it started deleting my music without telling me. So I did a bit of research and happily discovered Songbird.

Also I discovered I really like Dr. Steel

Songbird is a full featured completely free open source music management application developed by Mozilla. Perfect! I had actually discovered songbird a couple weeks ago, but it wasn’t until my downtime that I had a chance to move my music library over and get it all configured. I’m still getting used to it, but my first impressions are all great. Just like firefox it supports a multitude of awesome plugins, and if you want to change the appearance of the app there are plenty of “feathers” for it too. Feathers, cute huh?

New Dock
I had known it was possible to modify the dock under Leopard for a while, I just hadn’t had the time or motivation to do it. Well… this week I’ve had nothing but time so I figure I should get to it.

Truedock + Power Indicators + Dark Separator

The process was actually much easier than I thought it was going to be. All you need to do is replace the default “scurve”png files in your dock resources directory. You can find all the required info here as well as quite a few pre-made doc images. I ended up mixing and matching to create something that worked for me.

AdBlock Plus + Add-Art
I also installed some new firefox addons… AddBlock plus in conjunction with Add-Art has made for more pleasant web browsing. Addblock plus blocks ads and Add-art replaces them with art. My one complaint has been that so far the “art” is almost more obnoxious than the ads are. I mean, wtf is this?

“this was the worst I’d ever cut up before. I cut open my old appendix wound, stuck pins on the inside of the wound and swallowed a broken light bulb.”

Seriously? I mean, in context I’m sure this is a powerful story… but I really don’t want to see it while checking my Hotmail.

Add-Art cycles the art every 2 weeks, so I’m willing to wait it out and hope the next round of art is more palatable.

Mother Bear Update!

Well I figured Mel would probably finish her bear before me…. but two? She finished two bears in the time it’s taken me to finish half of mine. In my defense however, she is using a gigantic yarn, and as a result she only has to use half the stitches I do. Anyway, we’re having a good time making them. I know it’s not a race, but even so, I’m going to try and finish mine tonight…

Skittles the photographer

This year Skittles got his very own camera for Christmas. It attaches to his collar and sees everything he does.

Skittles has been wearing his camera and taking pictures for a couple weeks now so I figured I would start showing off all of his hard work. Skittles has his own photoset on my flickr page that I will continue to update as he takes more and more great pictures. Check it out here.

Projects Update! Layered Transparent Light Installation complete!

I’m just about finished with the Layered Transparent Light Installation! You can read all about the final steps here.

Mother Bear

So a couple weeks ago I stumbled onto the website of a really wonderful non-profit called Mother Bear. Their goal as stated on their homepage:

“…is dedicated to providing comfort and hope to children affected by HIV/AIDS in emerging nations, by giving them a gift of love in the form of a hand-knit or crocheted bear.”

“The simple gift of a hand-knit bear with a tag signed by the knitter has touched children with the message that they are unconditionally loved.”

Since Mel is an expert knitter and I’m just learning how to crochet I figured this would be a wonderful project for us to do together. Our patterns just arrived in the mail today. Check back for updates!

Happy Birthday Me!

Yay! A quarter of a century old. Go me!

Also, Melissa is a culinary genius. Best cake ever.

!@#$!@%

My laptop died last week, and when I say died, I mean it really died. It’s a pretty little aluminum corpse…

So there I was just browsing the net when it randomly shut itself off. I figured it wasn’t a big deal, the battery had probably just run down and caused it to auto-shutdown. That’s happened before, no big deal, however this was not the case. When I tried to turn it back on all I heard was a couple of spinning fans and dead silence. No beep. No HD noises. Nothing. I called applecare and they had me try all the normal stuff, resetting the pRAM, trying to boot in verbose mode, trying to boot to the install CD, etc… nothing worked. So now I’m waiting for apple to send me a box so I can send my poor little laptop to the doctor.

This sucks.

Projects Update! Layered Transparent Light Installation

The Idea here was to stack multiple translucent prints on top of one another to create a composite image with more depth than a standard print. I would then install a light-source behind the stacked prints to illuminate them from behind. The light source could either be a static bulb, or more interestingly, I could use the bulb from a scanner to both provide the light for the piece and record the candid reactions from the person viewing the installation. I’ve already finished the art for the piece, now I need to print and assemble it.

You can read the detailed worklog with lots of groovy pics here.

Friendly Folding Keychain

So ever since I can remember I have haaaated carrying keychains. They’re way too uncomfortable to keep in your pockets all day, they make it hard to find change when you need it, they scratch up everything around them, be it cell phones, cameras, etc.. and when you really think about it, your standard keychain is really just a terrible design. Why would you subject yourself to that? Well I’ve decided enough is enough and set out to make what I think is a much more friendly and functional keychain. My criteria for this new design are as follows:

- Compact and foldable
- Comfortable in the pocket
- Easy to distinguish from all other possible pocket contents
- Not rough or abrasive
- Aesthetically pleasing
- No jingling!

I found this great little Crank Brothers M5 Tool that was the perfect start. It is designed for cyclists and as such is very lightweight. Not only would it be the perfect housing for my keys, but it also sported a variety of allen wrenches and a philips head screwdriver. Sweet! If that wasn’t motivation enough, it was cheap. I ordered one along with a swanky new Messenger Bag from BackCountry.com.

After all of my goodies arrived in the mail the first step was to take the M5 apart and see what kind of tolerances I would be working with and how everything was going to fit together.

I was pleased to find that my keys fit perfectly so I wouldn’t have to worry about adjusting their lengths. The only part of the keys that really required any modification at all were the little square holes. I imagine there are key blanks out there that have a large enough hole to work right out of the box with no modification at all, but alas, I would have to make my square keys fit a round peg. I grabbed my trusty metal file and went to work.

After I had filed proper size holes into all three keys (2 house keys and one car key) all that was left was to put everything together and admire my work.

I could have just left it at that but I’m picky and didn’t like how much the outside edges of the keys poked out on each side. So, once again, I grabbed my file and went to town re-shaping the exteriors of the key. Normally you would want this wide part on a key to provide proper leverage when turning the lock, but since my keys would be firmly attached to a larger piece this wasn’t a concern.

I filed each key down until it had a nice rounded shape. I also opted to file a little corner into each key so that I could easily flip them out with just the tip of my thumb.

Ta Da! All folded up it measures about 3.5″ x 1.25″ x .75″ For reference, you could fit 2 of them inside the footprint of a credit card. I wanted mine to be as small as possible, but if you didn’t care about a small form factor, or you needed room to accommodate more keys you could always go with the Crank Brothers M-10 which is the same length but twice as fat.

Look how compact and comphy looking this bad boy is! Don’t you just want to slip it into your pocket? Oh yea, that feels niiiiice…