Decided to take down some notes in notepad and found the following:
Your consciousness affects the behavior of subatomic particles
- or -
Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once
Wish I could remember what my thought process was when scribbled that… hmm…
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
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.
Here is my entry for the current Jinx.com photo tweakfest. You can check out and vote for your favorites here. (vote for me!)
The first place prizes are: 10,000 J!NX Gold (100 bucks), an exercise DVD, a ****ed-up duck, and a new family.
Wish me luck!
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.
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.
8 gigs baby! oh yeaaaaaa…
Unfortunately this is on my work computer…
Next step: my laptop…
Oh yes Mr. Laptop you’re next! I’m comin’ for ya.
Yay! My first real flight with my Slow Stick was a success! I decided I was going to fly until one of two things happened, either I ran out of batteries or I broke three props. Luckily, or unluckily I guess, neither of those things happened. I managed to only break 2 props after about 10 crashes, so that was pretty good, but I did eventually snap the rudder in half on a particularly nasty crash. Oh well, It was still a pretty successful day of flying. Here’s a video of me crashing it into a cactus. Oops!
[flashvideo filename="http://www.reconscious.com/blog2/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/flight-of-the-slow-stick.m4v" /]
Granted, these were just preliminary tests- spinning beams clockwise and counter-clockwise, crashing protons into blocks, etc… No actual world ending science has been done yet, but it’s still a nifty landmark that has produced some cool graphics. Here is a pic of an “energy splash” in one of the Hadron Calorimeters.
More pretty graphics and explanations of what they mean can be found here
As paranoid as everybody is about mini black holes gobbling up our planetary system, it seems like the real danger is in the cooling of the LHC. In order to keep those massive magnets at their proper operating temperatures they’re using tons and tons of liquid helium- an extremely dangerous material, but whatever.
It should be interesting to see the news coming form CERN in the coming weeks. Will we see a Higgs Boson soon? I doubt it, but my fingers are crossed anyway!
Also, the google pic was awesome today! In case anybody missed it…
I stumbled across the coolest sci-fi nerd website ever… Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS is a really neat reference site that shows you the accurate relative scales of hundreds of starships from all over the pop-culture realm. From the old school Star trek ships to the Halo Ring, this website has it all. I had a blast browsing all of the various scales laid out on the website.
It also inspired me to buy some old school sci-fi that I had always wanted to but never quite got around to reading. Start at the “Big” scale and work your way down for a real treat. Holy shit, The Ringworld and Dyson Sphere are monsters! And the Halo ring made #3, not bad!
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