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I’ve just launched a new site called Meat Sleeps. It’s a simple concept: pictures of people who’ve eaten too much meat and fallen asleep. Submit your own!

The Meat Sleeps

Design, New Site, The Meat Sleeps Hide

After a stagnant rest in the hardware pool, Apple Computers has finally upgraded their almost antiquated iMac line with a plethora of fancy additions and just plain smart changes. Most notably is the amazing 27-inch model you see below:

27 inches of beautiful Mac goodness.

As with any Apple update, the hardware has been improved significantly. The extra case space brought by the new, bigger screen, will allow for hardware to be spread out in a more heat-efficient manner. This means less hardware failure for iMac users.iMac users who upgrade will also take advantage of the newest in video, processor and motherboard hardware that Apple has to offer.

Also shipping with the new iMac is the new and improved MagicMouse (formerly, the Might Mouse). Taking a page out of the new Apple Slim-Keyboard design, they have squashed the aspect ratio on the mouse and turned it into somewhat of an external trackpad. All of the cool finger gestures that you can do with your MacBook, you can now do with your desktop mouse. Swipes, scrolling, pinch, zoom, and more are now at your fingertips, literally.

The New Apple iMac Magic Mouse and Slim Keyboard

Among the smaller updates to the iMac are a new set of speakers that are tuned to have much better bass response with less acoustic distortion. On my 24″ iMac, I always needed to use headphones to escape the ‘tiny, thin sound’ of the iMac speakers. You may also notice that just about every screw, tab and piece of hardware holding this baby together is completely self-contained. This means no getting inside your machine (without a fight!). Hopefully this will encourage Mac users to stay the hell out of their machines and leave the fixing to the professionals. This will surely prolong the desk-life of these computers. (I know, it’s tempting to want to upgrade your hard drive/ram/video card, but these machines were not designed for upgrading, they were designed for simplicity)

This concludes my review of the new iMac hardware. If I have missed anything terribly important, feel free to comment below using your Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or Disquis login.

21.5inch, 27inch, Apple, iMac, MagicMouse, slim keyboard Hide

A sweet promo for D9.

District 9 Hide

One of the coolest D.I.Y. laptop projects I’ve ever seen.

Chris Fenton (ChrisFenton.com) took a PICAXE microcontroller and fabricated one of the sweetest laptop projects I’ve ever come across. Complete with a 4kb home-brew OS called LINAXE. This minimalistic throwback sports all the functions of a basic operating system including text editing, a custom compiler, and even plays PONG. You’d be surprised how much you can do with only 16kb of RAM and 256kb of storage. Here’s a few photos and the specs from the site:

Hardware specs:

• Storage: 256 kilobytes total, in a 4 x 64 kilobyte  configuration. It uses 4 24FC512 i2c EEPROM chips formatted with the ChrisFS file system.

• RAM: 16 kilobytes of i2c FRAM, in a 2 x 8 kilobyte configuration. Fully accessible from within programs through the use of pointers.

• CPU:  Picaxe 28X-1 Microcontrollers. The main CPU runs at a blistering 16 Mhz, and has a whopping 4 kilobytes of onboard storage for the processor’s firmware/OS.

• I/O Controller: Another Picaxe 28X-1 Microcontroller serves as an i2c slave and I/O controller for the main CPU. It primarily provides a keyboard FIFO interface to support asynchronous keypresses during programs (can you say PONG?!).

• Sound: Dual-mono sound is driven by the main  CPU and supports a wide range of tones, beeps, bops and bloops. It drives 2 x 1-inch, 8-ohm speakers mounted on either side of the display. Volume knob or headphone jack, you ask? I say, play it loud and play it proud!

• Display: A giant 24 x 8 serial character display provides a much-needed upgrade over the previous 20 x 4 display. It also takes in data at a blistering 19200 bits-per-second, drastically improving update speeds.

• Case: Beautiful, hand/laser crafted wooden case, with a touch of steampunk. My friend Pat showed me how to build a simple box, and I finally learned how to use the CNC laser! Tip: Never try to use real laptop hinges when working with wood. Way too much hassle!

• Battery pack: 4 x AAA batteries keep this humming for hours. Think your pathetic EEE will make it on that flight to Japan? Pack this bad boy and keep hacking while your neighbors are stuck watching the third showing of “You’ve Got Mail.”

  [source: ChrisFenton.com]

EDIT: Found some more cool wooden laptop pics.

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AAA battery, Central processing unit, CNC, diy, EEPROM, Hardware, laptop, Microcontroller, PICAXE, Random-access memory, slashdot, wooden Hide

An anonymous reader from the Macmod forum wrote in with this appealing hack: “This is one of the coolest mods I’ve seen all year. Mac Moder EdsJunk submitted this mod to our forums late

Thursday night. By cracking open a MacBook he was able to put a second monitor inside of the screen. The end result is sweet. The second monitor can make the Apple logo have any kind of background, like the clown fish, or the flurry screen saver.”

Source

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Apple, hack, Mac, MacBook, Macmod, Mod, Screen Savers, Screensaver Hide

Nissan Motor Co. has announced the domestic Japanese launch of the new generation Cube, which will be displayed at the upcoming Tokyo Motor Show (Commercial Vehicles). The first-generation model, released in 1998 created a new ‘tall wagon’ genre in the small car market and recorded sales of approximately 400,000 units.

Developed around the product concept of a “magical box,” the second-generation Cube provides interior spaciousness and convenient storage features which enable the car to serve as the driver’s personal ‘toolbox.’

The exterior design of the Cube was executed with the aim of creating a “new cubic design,” and draws on themes proposed in the Nissan Chappo concept first shown at the 2001 Geneva Motor Show. The goal was to create the best box form among the next generation of roomy compact cars in this class.

The design team’s four key themes of “relaxing, compact and agile” are embodied in the design. They sought a design with clear originality, functionality that provides “joy of use, and loyalty-inspiring appeal”. [jump to Car Design News]

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• Chrysler, Nissan halt product tie-up (money.cnn.com)

Automobile, Autos, cube car, Japanese language, Nissan, Nissan Motor Co, Nissan Motors, Recreation, Tokyo Motor Show Hide

10. Make your own hours.

I think I’ll take today off. Actually, I think I’ll take the whole week off. Fuck it, call me in a month.

9. Work in your underwear.

This can backfire. Make sure you’re contacts dont use Skype, or Camfrog.

8. No Co-workers to deal with.

Finally, I can work without worrying about how to hide all these bodies.

7. No Commute!

I live in LA. FUCK TRAFFIC.

6. You’re always precisely on time.

Thats right. I meant to show up at 9:08am. Cock.

5. Smoke while you are doing it.

ATHF reference for the perpetually cool.

4. Take a shit in your own toilet.

Nothing like familiar porcelain on your ass-cheeks while you make poop soup.

3. Porn breaks.

Hooray for PORN!

2. Use you own computers.

I hate working on someone else’s computer, You never know how many times they #3′d on the keyboard.

1. Be your own boss.

Hell motherfucking yes.

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Freelance, IT, Job, Top 10, Work Hide

There are times when I’m working on a new design and I think of the perfect paper vector to go with it. I can’t recall exactly where it was but I have a vague memory of seeing it somewhere about a month ago and then I spend an hour or so looking for it. I’ve done this enough times now that I thought it would be helpful to me, and hopefully you too, to have my favorite paper textures put together in one spot. Most of the images are paper anyways. Towards the end I started throwing in post-it notes and cork textures. If you have any personal favorites that aren’t listed here please leave a link to them in the comments below!

CSS Divine has the rest.

Browsers, Cascading Style Sheet, Gift wrapping, Google, HTML, Moleskine, Notebook, Paper, Post-it note, Style sheet, Vector graphics, Web design, Web page, windows, World Wide Web Hide