The quExp widget is handy for keeping track of the enourmous amounts dropped at the Apple Store, as Macfeber’s Roger ?erg notes.

To match his car stereo, iLounge forum member ryno3xx inverted his iPod’s screen. It took “Much Patience,” he writes.

“The hardest part was separating the existing polarizing filter from the LCD, as it is hard and the LCD brittle, but when all is said and done it’s a pretty sweet looking mod.”

Here’s how he did it:

I got my filter at polarization.com

The mod is quite simple. After first realizing that anything you do to your iPod with a razor blade can cause you great sadness and monetary loss, consider the following:

1) disassemble iPod (see other posts for photo how-to, warnings, etc.)
2) remove screen
3) take Xacto knife, razor blade ( shaped like /___\ is best), etc. to remove black foam border. do not discard or damage. you’ll use it later.
4) use blade at as small an angle as possible to surface (near parallel) to remove top film. It is ~1mm thick. There are two surfaces, The outer one is the polarization filter, the inner is simply a clear film, likely an adhesion layer. Remove both. Be patient. The Filter is a rather tough material, the LCD is brittle. Too much pressure will break the LCD.

***never pull filter away from LCD. doing so will create a vacuum, bring all liquid***
***crystal to the middle, and ruin your LCD indefinitely****

5) use *mild* solvent to remove any adhesive glue left behind
6) reassemble iPod, not into its case, but just enough that it works.
7) take new polarizer filter and place over display
8) rotate to get desired effect.
9) cut out and place on screen
10) place black foam removed earlier back in place (failing to do so will let the backlight escape thru the casing.)
reassemble iPod

Who says the iPod nano is all delicate and wimpy?

Over at MacMerc, a fellow called jonknee describes how he put his new nano through the wash.

At first, the nano appeared dead, but it slowly revived and is now mostly back to normal.

“After waiting another day, the nano dried completely and at this time you can’t even tell it ever got wet (and soaped up, spun etc). The screen now looks perfect. Very impressive!” he writes.

Girl hacker Neisha Erin Stadelhofer managed to get Mac OS 7.5 running on her PSP. She loaded a 680×0 emulator on top of an x86 emulator. It’s not exactly snappy: it takes four hours to boot up.

Artist David Ellis specializes in installing turntables in unlikely places, like tree trunks.

Ellis’ Drum Painting Project mixes analog record players with speakers made of cow, deer, and sheep hide.

Here’s a surprisingly affective music video for a song called Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) by the band Granddaddy.

Made on an Apple II, it consists only of the lyrics scrolling across the screen in ways that illustrate the song.

Finally, a free demo version of DOOM 3 is available from Aspyr. Weighing 463-MBytes, the demo allows a single-player to move through three levels of the first chapter.

A bittorrent version is also available.

Here’s the best teardown pictures of the nano so far, courtesy of Japan’s PC Watch.

The iPod nano is flying off store shelves, says Wall Street bank Piper Jaffray.

As reported in Forbes:

Available for six days, the music player is seeing high demand, based on a survey of 20 Apple retail stores, Piper Jaffray said. “No store that we checked with had black 4-gigabyte nanos in stock.”

In the New York Times, Dacid Pogue says the nano will effect Apple’s market share of MP3 players. Writes Pogue:

Apple’s market share won’t stay at 80 percent. It’s about to go up.

If you doubt it, then you haven’t yet handled the iPod Nano: a tiny, flat, shiny wafer of powerful sound that Apple unveiled last week. Beware, however: to see one is to want one. If you hope to resist, lash your credit card to your wallet like Odysseus to the mast.

SafariStand is a free plug-in for Safari that adds a tabs sidebar for displaying thumbnails of open tabs in a left-hand sidebar.

Developed in Japan, the programmer says:

“English documentation is not available yet. But User Interface is almost English.”

Spotted on Flickr, a homemade iPod speaker system from someone called ianbrown42 (surely not the great Ian Brown):

“These are remote iPod speakers I scratch-built for my wife’s iPod shuffle. It’s all scientific glass and aluminium construction. The sub-woofer is an inverted glass dome, and a fresnel lens from a rail-car. The guts of the thing is borrowed from a stock computer amp, whilst the speakers themselves are Apple Pro’s.”

“You can see from this alternate view that the tripod legs are made from aluminium garden trowles, polished up.

You can see the CD player I used to test it in the bottom right corner – this thing is huge, and weighs a ton (15 kilos).

The sound is pretty good, as you would expect of apple speakers, but the sub-woofer thumps a bit. Overall a fun project!”

From Pixel y Dixel in Madrid, a striking image of a lamppost and flags.

3000 x 2000 version here.

A picture at Mac Essentials shows the perils of children and markers.

New to me: collectors of Mac boxes.

SpyMac recently posted a picture of one of its members’ extensive collections, which led me to discover dozens more:

Here’s a few of the box collectors on SpyMac.

you sure do keep boxes for a long time

Most of my mac boxs

What does “throw away” mean?

iPod Boxes

Mac Boxes

My boxes

The Mac Compact Belgium website claims to showcase “the most important collection of Belgium.”

“You could grow this collection!” says the mysterious collector. “Phone me 0472 26 39 90”

Here’s a bigger picture.

(Via LinkMachineGo)

A trial version of the CherryOS Mac emulator is once again available for download from the Maui X-Stream website.

The $50 Windows software purportedly emulates a G4 processor, allowing a Windows XP machine to run Mac OS X.

The CherryOS was a source of some controversy last year.

It’s initial release last October was greeted with a mixture of excitement and skepticism, given the claims of its supposed developer, programmer Arben Kryeziu.

Kryeziu claimed to have written the complex application from scratch in just four months, and that it performed almost as fast as the host processor — two pretty unlikely claims.

Then programmers discovered CherryOS contained unacknowledged code from a similar open source project, PearPC. Under the rules of PearPC’s license, any borrowed code should be acknowledged.

Kryeziu denied using PearPC code and promised the software would be rereleased in Q1 2005. It seems he kept his promise — at least part of it.

The CherryOS still contains PearPC code, according to a report at BetaNews:

“CherryOS boots up in the exact same manner as PearPC, and its error messages and source files are nearly identical. The emulator also includes MacOnLinuxVideo, which is the same driver used by PearPC to speed up graphics. The CherryOS configuration file also closely mirrors that used by PearPC.

According to tests by BetaNews, CherryOS launches a second process and covers the window within its own display. Thus, when CherryOS is running, a second taskbar entry appears without icon.”

From the Middle East section of the “iPods Around the World” gallery at the iPodLounge.

There are several striking images in the gallery, like this shot of an iPod in the gun barrel of a tank, and this iPod and a refueling jet fighter.

Nanaca Crash is the oddest Flash game I’ve seen in a long while.

Created in Flash, the object is to smash as many human ninepins as possible with a human bowling ball — all set in motion by a girl riding a mountain bike.

The game seems to have originated in Japan (some details here) but is currently being hosted by Roland Saekow on his .Mac site. Roland is asking players to e-mail him screenshots of high scores, which is judged in distance.

Current high score: 13169.43m by alex3305.

(Via Ffwd Linklog)

President Bush listens to a lot of country music on his iPod, according to the L.A. Times. But surprisingly, he also likes the furious, blue-collar rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival. I wonder if he likes the band’s anti-Vietnam anthem Fortunate Son, which goes like this:

“Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Yeah!
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand,
Lord, don’t they help themselves, oh.
But when the taxman comes to the door,
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yes,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more! yoh,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no military son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, one.

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no no no,
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son, no no no.”

There are some interesting facts and anecdotes about the song here. The band’s lead singer, John Fogerty, has a new album out: Deja Vu All Over Again, which as the title suggests, compares the current mess to the old one.

The new ShuffleArt website offers several custom vinyl stickers for the iPod Shuffle. The stickers are for sale, though the ‘pre-order now’ button doesn’t seem to be working.

The site joins PodSkinz, which provides some really stunning iPod sticker art from dozens of artists and designers. (No Shuffle stickers, though).

And then there’s Japan’s Shuffle Sticker Uploader, a BBS boasting dozens of home-brew designs and a downloadable template.

Hit the “Next 5 posts” button at the bottom of each page to see all the designs. There are dozens of pages — I ran out of patience before seeing them all. Because of the site’s huge bandwidth, older designs are stored at the Shuffle Art Archive, where there are more than 200 Shuffle sticker designs.

(Via Cool Hunting)

Marking Steve Jobs’ 50th birthday today, artist Tomi has created a Lego version of the Apple CEO delivering a keynote speech.

The limited-edition Lego Jobs is portrayed onstage clutching an iPod and an iPod shuffle. His image is projected on a backdrop behind him — just like a real Macworld Expo keynote

The figure is limited to 300, and will go on sale at midnight tonight (ET) for $17. See the PodBrix site.

Tomi’s last figure — a silhouette from the iPod ads — sold out in 10 hours, according to the site.

Variety: Costume designer Jennifer Rade won an award Saturday night at the Costume Designers Guild Awards for the clothes used in Apple’s silhouette iPod ads — even though the clothes can’t be seen.

“Only fellow costume designers could appreciate how difficult a job that was,” Rade said.

(Via Fscklog)

Spotted in the car park at Apple HQ.

Says the photographer: “Great car, right attitude — this driver’s got class!”

Update: In the interest of preserving the driver’s privacy, I removed the link to the original picture which clearly shows the license number. Thanks Davinder.

Oddly, a BBSpot satire from last September skewering Apple almost perfectly predicted the iPod Shuffle.

Apple: Next-Generation iPods Will Have No User Interface, Controls

Cupertino, CA – Close on the heels of a recent redesign to its popular iPod line of digital music players, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed today that the next-generation devices will have no interface, ports or controls of any kind.

“With each successive refresh to iPod, we’ve made the design simpler and cleaner,” said Jobs at a rare sneak-peek press conference Thursday. “It’s time to take it to the next level.”

He then drew back a velvet curtain to reveal reference designs for the new devices. Onlookers gasped, then stood and applauded vigorously.

“Brilliant!” said one.

“Genius!” said another.

“Editors’ Choice 2006! Why even test it?” shrieked one reporter as spittle flew from his mouth.

When asked how users will load, navigate or listen to music on the device, Jobs replied, “Uh, wait and see,” his eyes darting nervously about him. He then mumbled something about MacWorld before melting into the crowd.

In the wake of the event, Apple-related chat rooms were filled with speculation on the means by which the device works. Many think the new iPods will come pre-loaded with music you will like, recognize what you want to hear, when and at what volume, and play it via some sort of wireless neural link, possibly using Bluetooth-enabled nanomachines. One blogger believed the device is nothing more than a hard drive in a sleek plastic case and has no practical function, but was quick to add he would buy one regardless.”

Designer and photographer Bernard Belanger builds fun mods out of old Macs.

Ze Cube is a 10-inch clear plastic cuboid made from the guts of an old Mac Classic II.

Ze PowerSuitcase is an upgraded Mac Quadra 700 in a metal Smith-Corona typewriter case. Bernard hooked it to a projector for creating visuals at a concert in Quebec City.

And the SE/30-TV is a Mac SE/30 in a homemade wooden TV cabinet. It appears to be installed in a bar and displays QuickTime movies in a loop. What bar and what movies, Bernard doesn’t say.