GLaDOS Kinect

I created my own GLaDOS Kinect case mod. I based it on the white Kinect from the Limited Edition Star Wars XBox 360. [I may do a post on that soon] I added the Nyko Zoom Lens to it so it works in small areas, which gives it that big black section. I used a black paint marker to cover up the Nyko logo on it. The XBox 360 logo I covered with a small piece of white vinyl. I hand-cut the Aperture Science logos out white and black vinyl. I used two types of Xacto knives and it took a lot of patience and skill to cut the little letters in the logo. It's a bit rough looking but I'm proud of the results.

Red Bull Illume 2010 Promo

It's time to talk about the Red Bull Illume photography contest once again. The promo from a couple of years ago was pretty awesome, this year's was actually better. It's kind of interesting in a way to see the pasts analog promo up against the new digital promo. I think it just goes to show how all professional photography has really turned to digital. This year they partnered up with SanDisk to give away USB Card Readers and 4GB Compact Flash cards. Pretty awesome promo items to go with the press release. Of course, the press release and other data including 10 images from the previous years contest (which I have added to my wallpaper collection) were on the CF card. It's actually a very nice card reader too, which is good since my internal one goes on the fritz every now and then. It has 4 slots that take microSD-HC, SD-HC/MMC, MS/MS-Pro/MS-Duo/MS-ProDuo/xD, and of course CF. For some reason it is really hard to find a card reader that supports HC cards, so I was surprised this accepted them. Then again this was made for professional photographers who only use HC cards and the press release was on one. It's connected by a standard mini-USB wire and sits on a magnetic base that says SanDisk on it. As you can see it sports the Red Bull Illume logo down the side as well. The card reader is very small and light weight so I guess you can take it on the go if you needed to. The packaging was nothing really special but it's cool still.

(Yes, that is a papercraft of Gir and a Piranha Plant from CubeeCraft.)

The Beginning of my Arcade Cabinet

So for the longest time I've always wanted an arcade cabinet of my own. I've always played the games from normal home consoles on my computer. A couple of years ago I found out about an emulator called MAME which is used for Arcade games. Figuring it makes more sense to have a computer than an arcade, I ignored my urge of having one giant game in my house. About a year ago, I came across a couple of sites where people have put together their own arcade cabinets using old computers to run everything off of it. I've finally decided to make my own a couple of months ago when I was thinking of what to do with one of my old computers that were just lying around. I was originally planning on designing and making my own housing from scratch until one of my friends knew someone getting rid of a couple of cabinets. Of course, I jumped on the opportunity and gutted it for my own equipment. I have a ton of old TV's lying around as well, so thankfully it fit perfectly into the monitor bracket already inside the cabinet. Instead of creating my own control board like most people do, I just bought two USB arcade sticks. This is still a work in progress. I still need to build the controller housing, keyboard and mouse draw, wire a power button, get two USB PS2 style controllers, and get two lightguns.

As you can see I just left the PC in it's casing and threw it inside. The computer is hooked up to a RF Modulator using an S-Video cable which is then connected to the TV. I wired up the original arcade speakers up to the PC using old computer speakers. You can see the volume knob taped to the wall in the middle picture so you can still change it. I may splice the wires longer so I can move the volume knob to a more suitable position. Everything is powered by an Energy-Saver power strip that cuts the power to all devices unless the PC is on. So once you turn the PC on, everything else turns on. The computer is loaded with loads of Emulators and Roms, but I'll elaborate more on the programming stuff at a later stage in this progress.

Intel Russian Dolls

Intel started working on a new, tiny processor for computers on October 15, 2007[source: Wikipedia]. They released it in April 2008. So they had some time to also think of different marketing campaigns for their new product. Someone came up with this really cool idea to make Russian dolls to show how their processors are getting smaller. So they went to FanBase who specializes in making Russian dolls (also known as nesting dolls) and kept the last one hollow. Painted on the dolls are what I believe are clean room developers/scientists with Intel Chip logos on them. The large doll has the Core 2 Extreme logo, the medium size one is the Core 2 Duo logo, and finally the smallest has the Atom logo.

Inside the hollow Atom doll they put an actual Intel Atom chip. This thing is tiny! I took some shots of it next to a penny (flipped the chip over so you can see both sides). I think this was a really cool idea for a marketing campaign. I'm not too sure if it helped with the Atom's popularity, but it is now the processor for most Netbooks. Which makes sense considering its size.

Is it successful: Somewhat. Like I said, it's a really cool concept for a promo piece. The only problem is that not everyone knows what a processor looks like. So most people don't even realize that it's a processor chip inside the last doll since it doesn't even look like a typical one. If you're familiar with computers and electronics, you'll get it. If not, it might need some explanation that it's an actual processor chip inside.