Instructables user [Mike Craghead] was in the middle of building a very compact public computer kiosk when he ran into a problem with the processor fan. It was too big for the enclosure and had to be swapped out with a fan that did not allow the motherboard to monitor its rotational speed. Motherboards don’t [...]

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If you think that your water cooled rig is pretty sweet, check out this creation by Dutch PC enthusiast [Peter Brands] (Google Translation). With his computer tweaked as far as he could imagine, he decided to spruce up his office a bit. In the process, he ended up tweaking his computer just a little bit [...]

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Instructables user [bkovac] was sick of clicking the terminal icon on his desktop whenever he wanted to launch a terminal window. Keyboard shortcuts aside, he figured the easiest way to take the tedium out of the process would be to launch terminal windows with a foot pedal. He grabbed a pedal that he had sitting [...]

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shackspace member [@dop3j0e] found himself in a real bind when trying to recover some data after his ThinkPad’s fingerprint scanner died. You see, he stored his hard drive password in the scanner, and over time completely forgot what it was. Once the scanner stopped working, he had no way to get at his data. He [...]

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[John W. Linville] wrote a digital video player for the Tandy Color Computer (aka TRS-80). The decades-old hardware performs quite well considering the limited resource he had to work with. This is the second iteration of his player, and can be seen after the break playing a promo video for CoCoFEST 2011 where he’ll show [...]

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You may not have ever thought about it, but the far-too-often-used keyboard combination of Control + Alt + Delete had to have been brought into existence by some random coder at some point in technological history. But wait, it wasn’t just a random coder. The keystroke combo is attributed to [David Bradley]. He was one [...]

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You may not have ever thought about it, but the far-too-often-used keyboard combination of Control + Alt + Delete had to have been brought into existence by some random coder at some point in technological history. But wait, it wasn’t just a random coder. The keystroke combo is attributed to [David Bradley]. He was one [...]

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[Didier Stevens] wrote in to tell us about a little piece of PC security software he put together recently. His application, LockIfNotHot, works in conjunction with your PC as well as an IR temperature sensor in order to lock your computer the moment you step away. The theory behind the system is pretty simple. Basically, [...]

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[Viktor] decided to replace his old power hungry home server with a model that is much easier on the old electric bill. The new motherboard uses an Intel Atom chip and consumes far less power than its predecessor. He figured there was no reason to use a bulky ATX power supply when all he needed [...]

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[John B] is a software engineer and had some spare time on his hands, so he started messing around with his Kinect which had been sitting unused for awhile. He wanted to see what he could create if he was able to get Kinect data into a virtual environment that supported real-world physics. The first [...]

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Ask anyone who has ever owned a car with a manual gearbox – in real life and in video games, nothing beats stick shift. Rather than shell out gobs of money to purchase a pre-made shift box, forum member [nikescar] built his own for about $20. Using some scrap wood and a plastic cutting board, [...]

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This device is called the Cumulus and it’s used to emulate the floppy disk hardware for Oric-1 and Oric Atmos computers. These 1980′s era computers included an expansion slot to which you could connect a floppy drive. That module, called a Microdisc system, also included the driver circuit which means you can’t just use a [...]

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What can you do to make sure your system is running as efficiently as possible? Take a page out of [Mux's] book, who went to great lengths to measure and adjust his system for ultimate efficiency (translated). What he ended up with is 8.5 Watts of consumption at idle and about 50 Watts under load. [...]

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This analog computer can multiply, divide, square numbers, and find square roots. It has a maximum result of ten billion with an average precision of 2-3%. [Miroslav's] build recreates something he saw in a Popular Electronics magazine. It uses a resistor network made up of three potentiometers with a digital multimeter is an integral part [...]

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We’re not sure whether to call this an Etch-a-Sketch upgrade or a computer interface downgrade but either way it’s unique. [Martin Raynsford] added a familiar red frame to his computer monitor with classic white knobs that control horizontal and vertical cursor movement. There’s even the click option by pressing the buttons in and, as you can see [...]

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[Simon Inns] has put together a lesson in digital logic which shows you how to build your own gates using transistors. The image above is a full-adder that he fabricated, then combined with other full adders to create a 4-bit computer. Don’t know what a full adder is? That’s exactly what his article is for, [...]

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[Brian] came up with an interesting PC cooling setup. He lives up north where it’s chilly in the winter. Using a bit of dryer ductwork and he was able to harness the outside air to cool his box. The system uses a window insert along with a dryer hood to suck in the outside air [...]

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[Frode] felt that using the keyboard for gaming on his old IBM XT computer was simply too noisy. He came up with a much quieter way to game by building an XT adapter for an original NES controller. If you haven’t explored the communication protocol used by the NES peripherals this is a great way [...]

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These calculators are networked together, able to pass information and play games on a multi-screen playing field. All of this is thanks to [Christopher Mitchell's] work on a package called CalcNet. This networking software takes advantage of [Christopher's] shell and GUI for TI calculators called Doors CS. To demonstrate the high reliability and throughput of [...]

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Here’s a way to display which friends are logged into chat. This uses the same G-35 hacked Christmas lights we saw earlier in the month. [Andrejk's] company uses Microsoft Lync as their chat protocol when working in teams. The service has an SDK that allowed him to write some .NET code to check status and [...]

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Hidden behind the white face plates of this machine are racks of gears that make up a replica of one of the oldest known mechanical computers. This is a working model of the Antikythera mechanism made from Lego pieces. In the video, which you absolutely can’t miss after the break, The machine is disassembled into [...]

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Here’s a fancy way to convert an ATX powers supply into a bench supply. [TG] didn’t just cut off the motherboard connector and add banana plugs, but improved the functionality. Right off the bat you’ll notice that he’s added a control panel. There is an Ammeter and Ohmmeter to let you know what the unit [...]

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Looks like some hardware enthusiasts have worked out a method to enable debug mode within AMD processors. The original site isn’t loading for us, but the text has been mirrored in this comment. Getting the chip into debug mode requires access passwords on four control registers. We’ve read through the writeup and it means very little [...]

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This swivel arm LCD screen is [Ben Heck's] latest hack. It replaces the hinges that normally only allow one point of rotation on the screen. You can still use the laptop like normal, but when space is at a premium a second adjustment, both in rotation and linear position, has been added using the slots [...]

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Why store it in the cloud when you could have a 90 Terabyte hard drive (translated) array in your house? The drives are mostly Western Digital Caviar Green EARS 2TB models which are known for energy efficiency and quiet operation. It’s a little unclear as to whether this is using one or two motherboards, but the drives [...]

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We almost skimmed right past this spooky HDD activity light thinking it was just another set of LEDs wired to the motherboard.  However, they explained right off that they didn’t want just another blinking light on their case. They wanted it to change its intensity smoothly based on hard drive activity. While there are a [...]

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[SXRguyinMA] built a replacement top bezel for his computer case. He wanted to add vents that would automatically open or close based on the cooling needs of the computer. With some careful measurements he modeled the parts in Sketchup and sent out for them to be cut from styrene with a water jet cutter. The [...]

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[Harvey] wrote in to share the Spindicator with us. The spindicator is a hard drive activity activity indicator built in a ring to resemble a dekatron. Using the pulses from the hard drive activity LED, [Harvey] tested several different methods of interpreting that data for display. The final version, negative edge triggered with a lowpass [...]

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[Jim] was the happy recipient of 11 non working Itona VXL thin clients. The units he received were 800Mhz CPUs with 256 MB of Ram and 256MB of storage. None would power up. Upon internal inspection, he found a common theme. Leaky bulging capacitors in the power supplies. Since these came with custom 50W power [...]

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[Jack Toole] and his team [Aaron King] and [Libo He] sent in their computer interface dubbed the Chronos Flying Mouse. The video above explains the concept very thoroughly, but we’ll reiterate some of the highlights here. The project uses a Chronos EZ430 with its accelerometers to wirelessly transmit delta positions of the user’s wrist. Add [...]

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