tnkgrl
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Acer Aspire One not immune to tnkgrl's modding ways, stuffed with Bluetooth and extra RAM
Netbooks have come a long way since the Eee PC 701 hit the scene. Gone are the square miles of emptiness surrounding the screens and keyboards as manufacturers start to put every inch to good use, but that seems to have little impact on folks bent on hacking these mini laptops to pieces -- with the Acer Aspire One the latest subject of such work. Tnkgrl has stuffed a miniscule USB Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR adapter under the palm rest and upgraded the RAM while she was in there. Next up is a hard drive upgrade and then the all-important "how to put the computer back together again." No real show stoppers, but if you've been waiting for reports from the other side before you put your own Aspire One under knife, here they are.
MacBook Air SuperDrive super hack makes it work with any computer
As tnkgrl mentions at the outset of this hack, the MacBook Air SuperDrive is a nice little slice of hotness, retailing for a mere $99, and doing the whole external drive thing with Apple's sense of style. Unfortunately, it only works with the MacBook Air due to a proprietary IDE to USB bridge, as tnkgrl discovered. For a mere $9 she was able to find a replacement part, and after pushing some internals around she had her self a Mac mini and HP Mini-Note-friendly USB disc drive. We've all been laboring under the assumption that Apple needed more than the standard USB power draw, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that she was able to pull this off with a regular part, and we demand Apple start selling $108 SuperDrives-for-all immediately. Er, please?
OQO Model 02 hacker crams in HSDPA early
We knew adding HSDPA to the OQO Model 02 was roughly equivalent to swapping out a mini-PCI card, but instead of waiting on OQO to take its own sweet time in releasing such a version in the States, tnkgrl took it upon herself to hack one up. After soldering in a correctly sized Sierra Wireless AirCard, everything works dandy, and she took pics aplenty of the process, but you might want to wait on a tutorial or a bit of common sense before you rip into your own EV-DO-equipped model in a warranty-voiding effort to rid yourself of the shackles of EV-DO.
