PC take a dump? Filler ‘er up…with fish. [PC Aquarium]

Ok, I officially want a dead computer now. To some, such a dream sounds ridiculous as a dead computer is pretty much a useless computer. That is, unless you get creative and turn that busted piece of silicon and plastic into something unique. What exactly is “unique” about a reincarnated PC carcass you ask? How about an aquarium? The good ‘ol geeks at Instructables set out to make an old PC they had sitting around into a new home for a few lucky fish. The real kicker here however is that the old PC actually boots — though it’s too old to be of any real use. Still, a working PC with a fish tank inside and cut out window for the swimming creatures to peak through is all kinds of awesome. As is the case with all water/electricity projects, if attempting yourself, be careful in not actually mixing the two.

Once I acquire an old PC, I know exactly what I’m doing with it. Anyone else intrigued?

Follow the steps over at Instructables

Survey says: NBC blows Olympics, sucks at life overall…

It’s no secret that the general consensus surrounding NBC’s handling of the Olympics is that it sucks. Plain and simple — horrible. Between tape delays, “old farts”, and utter lack of any real selection of online content means for an increasingly digital generation, the Olympics was an epic let down. Don’t believe me or the countless other sites highlighting such travesties? Just look at Crimson Hexagon’s data (above) collected across various online sources, namely 20,000+ Twitter posts and 5,700 blog posts, social networking comments, etc.

While 20-40,000 data points are hardly enough to generalize across an entire country of 250 million+, the sentiment shared by the internet going crowd at least is pretty unanimous — NBC’s Olympic coverage sucks. Seeing as how I have to use a VPN to fake that I’m in another country just to watch a damn live stream of any particular event mean NBC is doing it all wrong. Very wrong. I can only hope that they either get their act straight for the next Olympics or someone else takes over. Because as it stands now, NBC is bad for the Olympics.

TechCrunch

Can we finally pwn n00bs on the Mac OSX? *changes pants*

Okay, I love my Mac, I wouldn’t dare to ever by a Windows machine, over 20 years and counting to not owning one…But, I do have Windows running under Boot Camp on my Mac, the reason for this is…Counter Strike:Source running under Steam(Valve). I love this game, and it has forced me to run an inferior product. I have been involved in countless marital spats because of this game, and soon, hopefully, I’ll be in a hell of a lot more.

A post over at the Steam Forums has been gathering a lot of ‘steam’ and been blowing up about the possibility of Valve’s Steam being able to run on Mac OSX, and possibly even Linux. As you can see in the image below, you can see Mac OS X components in the file directory. I am hoping this is more than just a possible OS X theme, just because it is extremely inconvenient to have to re-boot every time I want to slay 16 year kids with my M-4, knife, and smoke grenades.

A lot of work will have to be done, as the entire Steam store will have to be ported to work under OS X, but, this at least gives us some hope of a better future. So for all of those Counter Terrorists out there that hate paying the dynamic weapons pricing, just think, you might be able to do it on the Operating System God intended us to be using!

Mac Rumors <-> Steam Forum

“This is Steve Jobs from Apple calling.” GET THE F*** OUTTA HERE!

Earlier this week, Wednesday to be specific, the Almighty Apple reached their 10 billionth song downloaded from iTunes. Apple was holding a contest that whosoever downloaded the 10-billionth song from iTunes, would be graced with a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Old Jobs thought that since this was such a HUGE milestone he’d give the winner a call. Here it is, a chilly February  afternoon, you are sitting, probably watching The Price is Right(since that is what 70 year old people do), your phones starts to ring, so you get up, grab it and answer, like any normal person would…But, normal people usually don’t hear what our lucky friend Louie Sulcer heard…“This is Steve Jobs from Apple.” His answer, which obvious, is “Yeah right, I have a son that loves to play tricks and he does that every now and then — calls me and imitates somebody.”

After asking who the heck was calling him 3 or 4 times, he happened to glance at his trusty caller ID to see it read Apple, which now made him believe who was really on the phone, and that he actually could be the winner of the $10,000 iTunes gift card. Louie Sulce, who was just profiled by Rolling Stone Magazine, is a 70 year old father to 3, grandfather to 9. The guy was just sitting in iTunes grabbing some good old Johnny Cash songs for a mix he was making for his son, and just happened to grab the right song at right time. The 10-Billionth song downloaded was Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way.”

I honestly don’t think it was Mr. Jobs himself, just because I don’t think he is to be bothered with everyday normal people things, I’m pretty sure it was his assistant, but, as I don’t download music from iTunes, I can’t be sure…

Rolling Stone

EU lays down the law: Google has to re-snap all of EU land every 6 months.

In the current economy, acquiring or even maintaining a job is pretty hard stuff. If you are lucky enough to keep a job, work is often sporadic and pay is stagnant or reduced. “Job security” is highly sought after. If job security is really what you’re after, Google is “the” place to be — specifically the Street View team.

A new EU ruling documented in Article 29 states that the current 12-month time span is a “too disproportionate” amount of time for images to be stored. Ok, fair enough. The new limit proposed is a mere 6-months. So, every 6-months the street team has to go around re-snapping all of these pictures — bingo, job security.

My question is, unless there is a major change such as a new building or road added, why take a picture if nothing has changed? So some guy with a completely blurred face has been on Street View for 12 months, what’s the big deal? Am I missing something?

(Google, are you hiring Street View drivers…?)

Pocket-Lint

[Image Source]

Being green and frugal in true geek fashion [Mod]

While not your typical “mod” (usually depicting some sort of computerized machine) the LED light hack “Mathias” whipped up with his fish tank and new LED lighting shows that being green can actually be pretty geeky and cost effective.

By replacing the old fluorescent bulb over his massive fish tank and swapping it with an LED, he garnered quite a bit of savings up front. Next, he routed heating tubes through the light mounts to suck up any excess heat from the LED’s and in turn used it to heat up the water.

Ingenuity folks. It’s all about ingenuity. Anyone care to share their feats of geek strength?

Hack-a-Day

BlackBerry slider details leaked. [Rumor]

Yes, another rumor. But what kind of gadget loving, human eschewing geeks would we be if we didn’t thrive on such things. Carry on. The BlackBerry slider has been an on again off again rumor that has stretched over several years, though failed to materialize into anything tangible. The leaked image above and accompanying symphony of letters paints a different picture in the near future.

According to a few Gizmodo ninjas, this so called BlackBerry slider will be a portrait oriented device and come to market featuring OS 6.0 and “100%” support for 802.11n WiFi. Unfortunately, it’s already outdated in my book with the now outdated display resolution of 360 x 480. Hopefully RIM corrects this if it is in fact a real device being proposed for sale.

For the touchscreen hopefuls, no mention has been made yet, but, given how long RIM has also been rumored to be tinkering with touchscreen + QWERTY combos, I wouldn’t rule it out just yet. As far as carrier support, the rumor for now is GSM/HSPA. So that’s a big NO CDMA support initially.

Sounds pretty exciting on paper, though I’m hesitant to get all excited for something that has a slim chance (for now) of making it to market. How are you fairing?

Gizmodo