The Macquarium has been around for decades, starting as a project to make use of old compact Mac cases. Subsequent iterations have seen many different variations – beige Performas, G3 iMacs, G4 Cubes, etc.. But this latest iteration is unique, and probably has the best structural integrity of them all.
Steve Shaw recently created his Macquarium from a PowerMac G5 case (mislabeled as a Mac Pro in the video), elbow grease and some powertools. He did a nice job, bright and airy. I love the Apple logo in the rear and overall industrial look. And the totem head.
Next up we need a Siamese fighting fish in a Mac Mini…
Caffeinated: a viable contendor for your new default RSS app on the Mac
Ok, I’ll admit it: I still haven’t kicked my RSS addiction. As hard as I try to just use sources like Twitter and Flipboard to get my news, there’s something about having every article from every site I follow in one place. And in my line of work, it’s very important to stay on top of the news cycle.
For the longest time I’ve used Reeder to scan RSS feeds on all of my devices. The iPhone, iPad and Mac apps are about as good as it gets for RSS, but I’ve been longing for some competitive apps to come on the scene. On the Mac, a RSS client called Caffeinated may have way it takes to dethrone the reigning champion, Reeder.
Are you a fan of plain-text files? Are you nerdy enough to stuff your todo lists into a todo.txt file? What if I told you that you could bring a lick of modernity to the your old-fashioned, candlelit ways? It’s called TaskBadges, and it adds a numbered badge to any plain-text list telling you how many uncompleted tasks are left inside.
If you own an iPad and like to get out of bed on time, then you probably own a copy of Due, the super-simple alarm and timer app for iOS. It’s probably the easiest and best designed alarm app around, and now it is available on the Mac.
Rare Apple items: Twiggy 128k Mac, green-screen Lisa, Apple buttons, and clear Mac SE.
What does it take to be a vintage Mac collector?
A love of all things Apple and an encyclopedic knowledge of the many successful, unsuccessful and downright notorious products Cupertino has released over the years are a given. But the job can be more perilous than you’d imagine.
Just ask Adam Goolevitch. Known as “wozniac” on eBay, Adam is one of the premier vintage Mac collectors around. In just he last couple of months, some of Googlevitch’s rarest finds — including a 128k Mac with a 5.25” Twiggy floppy disk drive and a Macintosh SE with a clear outer case — have hit the web and sparked a flurry of interest.
But collecting these Macs isn’t always easy. From almost losing a finger to a PowerMac G4 Cube to mistakenly being investigated by the police under the suspicion of dealing drugs instead of Macs, Googlevitch has some wild stories to tell that prove that being a vintage Mac collector isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart.
Cult of Mac sat down with Adam to hear some of his adventures and also get the scoop on the rarest machines in his collection.
Here’s a Wednesday game from Mac Games and More to help push your way over the mid-week hump. It’s a surprisingly addictive building management game, where King Arthur has sent you away to find the coveted, age-defying elixir. Download it now
We all know that Pixar, the revolutionary computer animation house Steve Jobs helped build in his wilderness years, makes the Toy Story films at least in part on Macs, alongside other Unix-based machines.
Back when Toy Story 2 was being made in the late 90s, though, the Unix-based nature of the machines Pixar uses for their animation almost led to the complete destruction of the film when an employee accidentally used the “rm *” command on the machine the film was being stored on. In seconds, all of Toy Story 2 was lost: a year’s work of other thirty people.
Not to worry though. A Mac-loving mom she had at home saved the day, and made sure that Toy Story 2 reached theaters on time to delight a generation of kids and adults alike.
Sparrow for Mac finally supports POP email accounts.
Just a day after releasing Sparrow 1.2 for iPhone, the Sparrow team has issued an update to Sparrow for Mac. This release brings a number of new features, improves Sparrow startup times, and quashes bugs.
Chrome is in beta on Android, and it's coming to iOS, too. (Image courtesy of Wired.)
Google Chrome is quite possibly the best web browser you can install on your Mac or PC, and it could soon be the best browser on your iOS device, too. According to one analyst, Google is “definitely” bringing Chrome to the App Store this year — possibly before the end of this quarter — which is bad news for Apple.
Ninety days after the next update, Perian will be retired
Perian, the six-year old play-anything video package for the Mac, is about to be retired. It won’t be taken out round the back of the farm, forced to stand by an old bathtub and then shot in the back of the head and sprinkled with lime, but it’s close — the project will be donated to the open-source community.
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