repurposing
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If you live in Nashville or Denver, don't sell that old iPad
Are you a Comcast customer? Do you live in Denver or Nashville? You may wish to rethink your decision to resell your old iPad when picking up the new 3rd gen model. That's because Comcast + iPad + the new AnyPlay service means your old iPad (1st or 2nd generation) can have a new life as a kitchen or bathroom TV. For just a one-time $10 charge, Comcast will send you an AnyPlay adapter -- that big, ugly box seen at right. AnyPlay is a new service being test-marketed that allows you to stream live video to iPads in your home network. You connect it to your cable service, and watch TV on your iPad. What's more, if you have a 2nd gen iPad or later, you can use AirPlay to stream that video to Apple TV -- saving you the cost of renting digital adapters around the house. It doesn't take much to wire up a presentation frame (you can adapt a picture frame with some wood molding) with a simple power-solution to mount that old iPad to a cabinet or to your fridge. And with AnyPlay, you can add "live TV" to the iPad's already powerful bag of tricks -- including looking up recipes, making shopping lists, and more. Before you sell that iPad, think how it might better serve you in the home or car. iPad emplacements can spice up your life for not all that much money.
Original Apple TV repurposed as Nixie clock
When Apple went from the ginormous original Apple TV to the minuscule black plastic box that is the second model, a lot of owners of the first-generation unit were suddenly asking themselves what to do with the aluminum and plastic slab. While we've seen the original Apple TV transformed into a regular clock, designers at Atelier Kurth had a better idea: using Nixie tubes to create a "proto-digital clock." Nixie tubes were the vacuum tube equivalent of today's segmented LED displays. They were used in many early electronic devices, including calculators, to display numbers. Nixies give any electronic a certain Cold War chic, and the warm, flickering glow of the tubes is both nostalgic and disturbing in a "Brazil" way. Atelier Kurth's ATV1 clock uses six Nixies to display the time, with the first column of numbers showing the hour, the second minutes, and the third seconds. Core77's blog entry on the clock mentions that the tubes have an expected lifetime of 200,000 hours (almost 23 years) and that there are 108 connections behind the Apple faceplate. The clock falls back on the design of an earlier clock from Atelier Kurth that used a concrete block as a base. A video showing that predecessor Nixie clock is seen below.
Hands on: Connecting my mini to a TV
We bought our Olevia 47" on Black Friday, 2007. It wasn't a particularly well rated TV. But it was a Black Friday deal that we could afford and it gave us far more screen space than we'd thought we'd be able to purchase. It has served us well through the years, hosting any number of gadgets with its generous ports. The thing supports HDMI, composite and component, with multiple attachments for each. The back of the TV looks like a sea of cables and connectors. Its VGA connector has not seen much use over the years and I've been dying to give it a go. A lack of spare computers was our problem. When my Mac mini died this past winter, I replaced it with a fresh new current-generation mini, which we all love. The dead mini languished until I realized that I needed a Snow Leopard machine for testing during the SL beta. I ended up doing some home brew fix-it with an absolutely minimal 80GB disk bought from Newegg and a few tweaks. And for the last few months, Rome (as in the baking apple) has been my primary 10.6 beta desktop system. That all changed on Friday. Snow Leopard debuted. And I was finally free to re-purpose this system. Read on to see how.
