Both of these pairs of headphones have been in use for over 10 years. I’m amazed that they still work. Truly, an epic display of hardware durability. These models  are the Plantronics DSP-300 and the Sony MDR-CD180.

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Here we have a masterful piece of engineering and wit. The Commodore64 Laptop is an awesome throwback to the classic days of computing where bits were bits, and men were men. We did not have such trivial input devices as mice, yet only the clackity-clacking of fine mechanical keyboards.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I bought it at a yard sale for $20. It served me well.

This is by far… the coolest god-damned thing I have ever seen.

Commodore, Commodore 64, Emulator, Engineering, Gadget, game, Hardware, Retailers Hide

The Powerglove from Nintendo was probably the most under-appreciated, and before its time piece of gaming hardware ever invented. The Wii’s motion sensitive controller would not exist had it not been for this goofy, poorly designed device. Matt Mechtley has retooled the glove to modern standards, and even written a few games for it.

Power Glove 20th Anniversary Edition — Build Video from Matt Mechtley on Vimeo.

Console Platforms, Games, Glove, Hardware, Nintendo, Powerglove, Video game, Wii 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

Now, this is a really great idea. Samsung gave some geeks a bunch of SSDs and they built a 24 drive raid array with a capacity of 6tb, and over 2gb/sec transfer speeds. He’s shown ripping a dvd in .8 seconds, opening 53 apps in less than 19 seconds, and jumping on a trampoline with the array dangling by the power cables. Great marketing idea, props to Samsung.

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Array, Hardware, RAID, Ripping, Samsung Group, Solid-state drive, Storage, Subsystems Hide