Those of you with an old Bondi Blue iMac G3 lying around, take note: you can actually use it for something useful. I know, it’s shocking but you’ve got to believe me. Modder Napes went and converted his old unit into a retro arcade. It uses sweet arcade-style joysticks and the 15″ display the iMac has is perfect for a two-player game. It uses MacMame to do the arcade emulation. All it needs now is a beer dispenser and we’re good to game.

Perhaps Michael Phelps is building one?
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While you wait for your NES external hard drive to finish transferring porn, you might as well start making a piece to smoke with from an NES controller. Just gouge out the D-pad and fit a bowl in there, man. Connect a little rubber tubing and a mouthpiece and you’re ready to get stoned.

Wait.

Where’d I put my lighter again?

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A unique artist named Posterchild has transformed a series of rough, old pipes into loving seats. He calls them “seating caps” and designs them out of wood and metal. He’s made five and has installed them throughout his city. I think this idea of a “seating cap” would go over well in New York. It’s a low-cost solution to loitering!

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Fancy a PDF read on a new topic? Of course you do! Learning is essential to getting into a hacker mindset. How are you going to exploit a server’s vulnerabilities without knowing any Perl? Lucky for us, the team at HackNMod found some shady FTP site (with an HTML-based index) that features hundreds of scanned books in PDF form. You’ll find titles on hacking, programming and plenty of other subjects available for download. Get on it, though. Who knows how long this will stay up before O’Reilly or McGraw-Hill sends over a DMCA takedown notice.

Obviously, bookends are not required.

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Found on Flickr user Tableauvivant’s page, this above photo shows the musical components of a Hallmark musical greeting card. I must say, this is quite surprising. I was sent a few musical cards back in May and when I took them apart, I found a tiny PCB with a piezo speaker and some other circuitry. This appears to be a speaker with gears and cardboard. Very cool. I wonder how you could hack this thing to make it play different tunes.
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Check out Guilherme Martin’s first attempt at making a robot. He uses an Arduino and motor shield with one servo for steering and a standard DC motor for movement. It’s dubbed “baratinha” meaning “little cockroach” in Portuguese. Using two micro-switches as if they were antennae, baratinha is able to detect obstacles in its way.  It’s just like a real cockroach except it won’t eat your food or leave a foul odor in its wake.  I wonder if it’d survive an atomic blast?

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With Esquire’s 75th anniversary taking place this year, the magazine released its latest issue with an E-Ink cover that comes with plenty of bits and pieces for DIYers to take apart and mess with. Phillip Torrone of MAKE points out the minor potential the E-ink cover has in regards to hacking but approves of its design with much enthusiasm. He writes:

“I know a lot of media folks & tech sites are pooping on this cover - but someone needed to start somewhere, I’m glad there’s an E-Ink cover in existence, it’s clear it’s going to be decades until it’s something that’s very common…”

Hardware fused with magazines and books?  We approve of such devices. Can you imagine Mad Magazine with an E-ink fold-in on the last page. It’d be completely electronic and eliminate the need to fold it yourself. You’d never make a bad crease and you’d always see the fold-in picture, eliminating the enjoyment and frustration as you attempt to guess what it is in the first place.

Editor’s Note: That fold-in idea is a genius!
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Know those arrows in iTunes that appear when you select a song? Yeah, the ones that take you to the iTunes Music Store when you’re trying to change tracks. Kill Apple’s dirty little secret and use this tip from TUAW to get your arrows to redirect to your iTunes Library. Instead of making impulse purchases on DRM-ridden tracks, you’ll end up discovering hidden gems from your favorite artists.

In a rush? Just rock this terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

BOOM.

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Are you a big dick player? Lookin’ fly in your G5 airplane? Step up. You need this chrome Lamborghini from German tuning firm Hamann. At $630,000, it’s a bit expensive but nothing your rich uncle can’t afford. Chrome paint job, performance tuning. Yeah. This Murcielago LP640 will make you a big dick player alright.

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Not all of us have five minutes to kill on a DIY project. Or, perhaps you don’t own the correct tools or materials needed for our previous project. That’s why we’re giving away these hot modified aviator sunglasses to one lucky Gearfuse reader! Just leave a comment on this page with a valid name and e-mail address and tell us why you want these glasses. Best one wins the exact pair of Arnie-shades you see above.

The contest ends next Friday and I can only mail these to someone in the United States of America. Get cracking!

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