The Talik

DIY MacBook Pro stand

March 23rd, 2008 | Category: cool,Hardware,Projects

It’s been a while since I’ve done any engineering/DIY posts so today I’ll change that and show you how to make your very own MacBook Pro stand.

Here are the materials you will need: (1)1.5×1.5 foot sheets .25inch of Acrylic (2)Acrylic glue (3)Table saw (4)sandpaper. First start by getting out you acrylic sheets and marking where you need cut. Here are the dimensions for the various pieces:

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After marking down the lines on the acrylic it’s time to visit the table saw. This is by far the hardest and most dangerous step in constructing the stand, but with a little common sense you should be fine. Obviously one of the most important parts of the saw is the blade. Websites that I have read suggest that you use a carbide tipped blade with ~ 5 teeth/inch. Despite this suggestion I ended up just using a normal carbide blade with ~ 2 teeth/inch and everything turned out fine (just had to do a little more sanding). Most of the parts are pretty simple to cut except the legs. To compensate for this I made a simple jig that allowed me to make the cut.

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After cutting all the pieces it is time to sand the edges so they can be glued. To do that I suggest starting out with fairly rough sandpaper, something around 50 grit should work. From there move to 100 grit and finished it all of with 320 grit paper.

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The final step is to get everything glued together. Because this was my first time I used a general acrylic glue made for aquariums. It’s more forgiving and easier to work with in my opinion, however it doesn’t look as good nor is it as strong as glues that actually melt the acrylic pieces together. So after you have decided which type of glue to use just put all of the parts together according to my diagram, let the glue dry, and you’re done!!!

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Though the stand has a old G4 PowerBook on it the stand was actually made to fit my MacBook Pro which I got soon after.

Hope you enjoy your Stand!!!

More pictures…

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Legos

February 11th, 2008 | Category: cool,Hardware,Projects

So in an effort to get back into this whole blogging ordeal I’m going to start of with a nice interesting post.Over winter break my brother, mom, and I decided to organize our Lego collection. At the end of the tedious process of assembling and finding the various legos I took a few pictures with my camera and the awesome tripod from my aunt and uncle this christmas.Without further adieu:

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more lego pictures…

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La Catrina

April 16th, 2006 | Category: cool,Miscellaneous,Projects

Here is a video some friends and I made for school. It’s the fictional 15th episode of a 14 episode movie/series that we watched in spanish class.-about La Catrina

Watch the video (27mb ipod format)

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UberWiFi Powerbook

March 25th, 2006 | Category: Hardware,Projects

Pretty soon here I’m going to be leaving to visit my Grandpa in Florida for spring break. Luckly he lives in a condo and for the past couple of years there has been a nice person with an open but weak WiFi connection. So I decided to go on a quest for ~~the Holy Grail~~ a way to better my wireless reception. I had many options while on my quest for wireless reception perfection. Should I build a Cantenna or maybe a Omni antenna, but then my brother suggested that I take apart our old broken wireless router and snatch the wireless PC card from it. After some searching I found out that the card is a USR 2410. Sadly U.S. robitics doesn’t have a OS X driver but a company called IOxperts does. Unfortunately it costs $20 and the demo version that I have shuts down the driver after 30 minutes then I have to restart my computer to get it working again. But anyway having having the external antenna increases my wireless reception pretty substantially and I’m looking foward to good, strong WiFi reception.

Here are some pictures of me taking apart the antenna and turning my normal powerbook into a UberWiFi Powerbook