DoodleBook

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DoodleBook.jpeg

DoodleBook: I hacked my MacBook by doing a custom paint job, and making my MacBook a bit psychedelic.


The other day I was playing on some of the sites. I found a site called Applefritter that showed off various hardware modifications and custom paint-jobs to computers. This is just good clean geek fun. Well, I'd done a few of these over the years. Here's one that I did: an iBook that I had doodled all over the inside.

DoodleBook.1.jpeg

This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands, and you like to doodle. I have lots of these doodles I do when I'm board. I started them in an art class in Jr. High School -- and have been doing them ever since. I give most of them away to people who like the retro-70's throwback stuff (when I was in Jr. High School, BTW) -- and only have a few of my own. I decided to do this one on the inside of an iBook

DoodleBook.2.jpeg

First I took the iBook apart, and used alcohol to remove the paint. This was a tedious process, with lots of soaking and scrubbing with a toothbrush. My wife complains that that toothbrush still doesn't taste right. Anyways, I was going to do the top AND bottom -- but after getting the bottom done, I decided against taking the display apart. Sorry, no pictures of the disassembly, nor audio clips of the cursing when I splashed alcohol in my eye. Also it is important to note that alcohol will take the finish right off of the kitchen table, and will let you know where every little nick or cut on your hands are.

After the insides were cleaned, I used an ink-pen, to outline my different doodles and patterns, then filled them in with another pen. When complete, I sprayed it with silver paint to opaque up the background and offer a little contrast. Clear iBooks are fine -- but I wanted to see my doodle.

NOTE: The pirate skull actually has nothing to do with software piracy (other than inuendo), I just use this Pirate flag as sort a stamp of personalization.

By the way, I think a site dedicated to hardware hacks is way cool. I did my first major hack back in 1981 and wish there had been a place to put picture back then. For the record, I took a Commodore-64 to guts, put it in my own case (an experiment case), wired up my own keyboard (numeric keypad), rewired some of the motherboard to bring hardware reset line out and add in my special function support, added my own internal memory and addressing so that I could block the write-latch on some memory (Pseudo-ROM), burned my own ROM's to snapshot any game that was in memory when I pushed a special button, and had debug/copy-protection removal code built into my version of the OS, and basically was an obnoxious cracker that went by many names; with Commodore and others trying to figure out who was cracking their games within a day of release. Ahhh, the good ol' days, when minors didn't fear felonies, 64K was a lot of memory, and when you could solder on 2 layer motherboards without fear of ramifications.

Conclusion

Things like this are why you need to keep nerds busy; otherwise they'll waste time doodling on their computers or hot-rodding them. You'd think my wife would keep me busy enough around the house; but alas, I'm always doing weird little art projects or things while watching TV.

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📚 References

Written 2003.07.04