This pimping features my own little Snowman button (get some for yourself from my spreadshirt store in Europe or America) and about 20 postcards held together by a foldback clip at the far side. And at the close side it features a small screwdriver and a magnetic hook holding a keychain.
That magnetic hook is part of the super magnet order I placed for my parents and it’s quite fun by itself and in conjunction with the MacBook’s magnets.
Now go and pimp your MacBook and add the photos of it to the Flickr group!
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Also hooray to Futurismo Zugakousaku for the fantastic Quartz Composer work.
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Also hooray to Futurismo Zugakousaku for the fantastic Quartz Composer work.
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[Pimp My MacBook] pool on Flickr.
… we did our first multi-person video chat this afternoon. Not that we needed to discuss anything (and the technology doesn’t make the impression to be working well and smooth enough to actually rely on this for anything important), so it was double the fun. We even managed to go up to four people in the conference. But with at least two of the participants only having 128kbit/s upload on their DSL lines, it took a few attempts to establish the connections properly. And of course the image quality wasn’t too good with such low data rates.
Still a lot of fun, particularly when running across the flat with the computer and getting random flatmates to say hello to everybody…
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Come on… your MacBook wants to be in the pool as well!
Bonus question for the die-hard earthlingsoft freaks (yeah all two of you): What can you see on the MacBook’s screen? And why is that new, fun and exciting?
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[Pimp My MacBook photo pool] – add your photos there, my MacBook starts feeling lonely.
]]>Ah well, they moved out. Which probably also means we won’t see little parcels sent from places which sound like strange American sellers of christian devotionalia anymore. And instead a family moved in. And they’ve been very active in the short time they’ve been living here. Doing things like mow the lawn in the garden and playing there. They even ‘discovered’ that there’s a plum tree in the garden, picked the ripe plums and shared them with everybody. Which is rather nice… but forced me to make another plum cake today, so the nice and ripe plums don’t go off.
Unfortunately that wasn’t as easy as it should be. Not only were they out of fresh yeast at the supermarket and I had to get the dry stuff (which I’ve never used before), but also the dry yeast didn’t seem to work as well or as quickly as the fresh yeast, so waiting for the dough to rise took ages and I could only start baking the cake around 11. And then – with the plums all being perfectly ripe and even on the verge of being overly ripe – the ‘bad thing about plum cake’ happened: The juice started running out of the ripe plums and finding its way off the baking tray, dripping into the hot oven. That leaves very hard to remove stains in the oven. Eeek. I tried to clean things a bit immediately before it’s stuck there for eternity, but of course I mainly managed to burn myself in the process. Nothing dramatic, but just the kind of itch that makes it hard to sleep.
So instead I gave the MacBook another pimping. This time with the pink plastic pig which luckily has metal feet and an ever so handy pen.
Why not join the fun? I guess that many more silly things can be done with the magnets. So do them, take a photo and add it to the Pimp My MacBook! group on flickr.
]]>In addition, at least in Germany people may be even more aware of the magnets vs. computers problem because sometime in the 1990s there were some unfortunate accidents in trains: They had installed tray tables which were help up by magnets rather than mechanically. And for things to be safe, they used two really big and strong magnets which were part of the table rather than the seat it was supposed to fold up to. Apparently those magnets were in a position that coincided with that of the hard drives in many popular notebook computers at the time and a non-trivial number of people were said to have suffered from that.
And because knowing of the problems that magnets bring for your data, I have seen many people being extremely scared by the fact that the Powerbooks and iBooks used a little magnet to draw down that little hook securing the lid (a really neat and clever invention in my opinion) when you close the computer. That was just a tiny magnet and I never really worried about it – Apple’s quality control may be negligent, but people there aren’t stupid (I hope…).
And if one little magnet, doesn’t hurt, things can perhaps be taken further… leaving us with the MacBook, a computer that is full of magnets. There’s the well-advertised one to hold the power adaptor (quite a superfluous use of a magnet, I still think). Then there’s a weak-ish magnet on the left hand side of the screen’s bezel to hold the remote control (no idea why that should be useful and why there’ none on the other side) and two rather strong magnets at the upper corners of the screen to hold the computer’s lid firmly closed without needing a hook at all. That’s a great idea – although I think that those magnets are a little too strong because the force needed to actually open the MacBook can be a bit stronger that what you’d expect or consider comfortable.
On the other hand, I can use all those magnets now to go Pimp my MacBook:
Yikes!
That’s one of those situations where I really want to be a smoker. How cool would it be to turn that cashew tin into an ashtray and have a computer with a built-in ashtray holder?
Magnets are way cool. Even though their effects stopped being a real surprise, it’s still a bit ‘magic’ to move things without having to touch them. I think one of the coolest things I’ve seen was when I visited a chemistry lab where they had a