Another hack: Wiretap picture frame

Hi all,

I enjoyed putting together the last write-up so much -- and got so much positive feedback -- that I'd like to follow up with another one. This is something I built a couple of years ago and has been gathering dust since then. Here it is:

Old Gear Lives On: A Hack (Part 2)

Hi all,

I've wanted to document the technical side of some hardware hacking for quite a while. Here it is, continuing from the less-nerdy first part.

The project: Turn a 286-based Compaq Portable III into something more modern.

The motivation: to be honest, my sole motivation here was to be able to haul it down to Cafe Prado, a thou-shalt-be-at-least-this-hipster-to-enter coffee shop on Commercial. Nobody's allowed in without at least a Macbook Pro and I wanted to plunk this beast down on a reinforced surface and see what happened.

Old Gear Lives On: A Hack

For some unaccountable reason, the Compaq Portable III is one of my favourite computers. When you first see one, you're not sure if you're looking at a printer, or a disk array, or what:

A day in Drive Enclosure Hell

I hoped to celebrate my return to Free Geek after a few weeks' travel by hunkering down at the laptop table, but as usual, fate had other plans. A woman came upstairs looking for help, bearing in her hands a USB drive enclosure:

Looks innocent enough, right?

Blog Tune-ups

 Hi all!

With apologies for the short break in postings -- I'm currently in Morocco suffering from overnourishment and an excess of sun, if you must know -- I'd like to gather some feedback on the blog and suggest a few changes.

Suffering in Morocco

The Laptop Graveyard

In one of the dark corners of the warehouse is (what I call) the Laptop Graveyard. This is where laptops go to die -- well, maybe.

A moment of sympathy for the user

This Thursday one of the staff members asked me to help a customer who had purchased a laptop several weeks prior and was having ongoing difficulties with his wireless card. The customer eventually arrived on a bicycle, bearing the offending device. He seemed to be naturally pretty tightly wired, and having spent the previous evening attending Windowless Wednesdays only to encounter another problem shortly thereafter, his patience was strained.