Steampunk Hackintosh build

Hackintosh is the term used for a non Apple computer running Mac OSX. I had heard about Hackintosh a few years ago but heard that it didn't run well and had stability issues, so I didn't give it much thought.

   Recently me and my friends were talking about computers and Hackintosh came up, so when I got home I did some research on it. I found that if you use the right components you can end up with a very stable machine. I was all over the idea because I have always wanted to build a desktop from scratch, but still wanted to run osx. Also, you can make a very powerful machine for much cheaper than buying a real mac, granted one of the the main reasons you buy a mac is for the high quality hardware, but I still prefer osx to windows.

  I wanted to choose hardware that was similar to the hardware used in Apple computers so it would be as stable as possible. I ended up finding a Gigabyte z68x-ud3h-b3 motherboard with 8gb of ram on craigslist for 100 bucks! Very good price for that board and the ram. The board has an 1155 socket, so it takes the second gen. intel cup's. I went on ebay and found a used intel i5-2500k cpu for $150, which is also a pretty good price. The 2500k is a quad core 3.3ghz overclockable cpu, a big upgrade from my current 2ghz core 2 duo! I picked up a 700w power supply from ebay for 40 bucks which is pretty good. The video card is a Geforce 9800GT with 512mb of ram, which is plenty of video power for what I need. As for hard drives, I have a 320gb drive for osx, a 250gb drive for linux, a 250gb drive for windows, and when drive prices come down, I will get a 1tb drive for media/data accessible to all of the os's. I might eventually upgrade the OSX drive to solid state in the future. 

Heres all the guts on the table running successfully running 10.6! The computer is very fast. when I'm done, it will be quad-booting 10.6, 10.7, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows 7.

I wanted to go with a steampunk style case. Of course, there isn't really any commercial cases that are very cool in my opinion, plus I'm broke s usual, so this is a budget build. Therefore, the only option is to build my own case. It will be built out of wood, with metal accents. I plan on over clocking this computer so I will also build a custom liquid cooling system for it.

The frame is oak, the wood slats are made from mahogany plywood I ripped into 2" sections.

The frame is much stronger that your average computer case. Its pretty much built like a piece of furniture, so it can easily hold a person or three.

You can see the cable management area on the side. All the cables will be hidden back there, so the inside will be nice and clean looking.

The edges will be banded with steel angle iron.

I will probably end up using an old heater core for the radiator. I wanted to build a radiator from scratch, but copper is expensive, so ill just have to buy one instead.

The cables are all hidden back behind the right side piece.

There will be an exposed liquid cooling reservoir on the front. I might even put some nixie tubes or something on it for added awesomeness. 

 

Some random sketches of what to put on the front.

I welded the pieces of angle iron together and ground the edges so it looks like one piece.

My welder wasn't feeding right, so the welds are a bit rough, I will redo them later. Ugh... another thing to fix...

That looks pretty sweet, if I don't say so myself.

I bought this brass heater core of eBay. Heater cores generally perform better than actual pc liquid cooling radiators because they have a higher fin density, plus they're way cheaper.

I cut holes for two 120mm fans that will blow air through the radiator.

I made a shroud out of some really thin brass, but it looks kinda crappy. I think I will just end up making a nice wood shroud.

I got the cool claw feet mounted.

As you can see, there's screw missing. I still need to pick up some better ones for the feet.

Here it is in some different lighting.

The hard drives will be screwed to these two pieces of aluminium, which in turn will be bolted to the bottom of the case.

Just bought some copper and some brass fittings to start work on the liquid cooling.

Here's the water reservoir. Just a piece of copper tubing with plexiglass at each end. There will be a round porthole on the front of the case and the reservoir will be mounted behind it. The water will glow from the lights in the case.

I soldered a copper pipe to the top of the res. The tube will act as a fill port and will stick out the top of the case with a cool screw on brass cap.

I made some cool cutouts on the front of the case. There will be some brass mesh behind it along with a fan that will blow onto the hard drives.

This pipe will be mounted on the front of the case.

I JB welded the ends onto the reservoir. It looks like crap so I will end up making a new one later. 

Its hard to get stuff done now that I have a job and work everyday along with school.

New Needle!

Vinyl, according to most audiophiles and me, is the king of formats when it comes to fidelity. Last summer I picked up a nice Thorens turntable at a garage sale for free. It had a nice Ortofon ff15xe needle that sounded fantastic. I put a nice clean record on and it was probably the best quality audio I have ever heard. But, what I didn't know was that the turntable wasn't working quite right and I didn't notice that the tonearm didn't lift at the end of the record, so I went to flip the record and pushed the tonearm back not knowing the needle wasn't lifted and SCRATCH!!! I wrecked a perfectly good needle... I was pretty depressed for a while. I looked to see how much a new needle was and it was like 60 bucks. For me, thats a lot of money. I have since fixed the turntable, but it still doesn't sound that great with the crappy needle.

  Just the other day I looked at needles again and realized the place I was looking at before was selling the needle AND cartridge. I didn't need the cartridge, just the needle, which I found was only 15 bucks. I bought one and installed it and couldn't be happier!

Spinning a clean copy of Zoso.

Ipod flash conversion

I recently acquired an iPod mini from someone I know. I really like the old iPods with monochrome screens, and I like the click-wheels more for some reason. Another think I like about the old ones is that they are MUSIC players. They are simple, no apps, no other crap, just music.

  So anyway, The iPod mini has a tiny 4gb hard drive that is hardly adequate for my 90+gb music library. The ipod minis have a "microdrive" which is a tiny hard drive in a compact flash card casing. This is great because I can just buy a higher capacity CF card and pop it in. The advantage of an actual CF card over the microdrive is the fact that it is solid state, which means its less fragile, faster and uses less juice. So I went ahead and bought a 16gb CF card and installed it. I wanted a bigger one but they start to get pretty pricy past 32 gigs.

the 16gb CF card

Ipod mini disassembled. You can see the microdrive on the bottom right, its exactly the same size as a CF card.

CF card installed.

After you plug in the CF card, just go to iTunes and reformat the ipod and thats it! This can work for a few other iPods too. A long time ago I did it with a 4th gen with the use of an adapter.