mod

Sick of dusting off that Kid Icarus cartridge and blowing on it 80 times before you can play it? Maybe it's time to make the ultimate sacrifice and turn that cartridge into a speaker system.

Morte Moya, he of the NES MP3 controller mod, has created the perfect complementary speaker system.

Modding an old-school Rush 'N' Attack cart, he made a nice NES-themed speaker set to go along with his controller-turned-player.

Cool as this MP3 player/speaker combo is, I've still got a soft spot for Donald Bell's Little Professor MP3 player. All it needs is a … Read more

An e-mail exchange with another Craver yesterday, for one reason or another, led to my embarrassing revelation that photos exist of me at a very young age wearing a pair of big, fake fennec fox ears. It's embarrassing, yes, but after reading this post on Geekologie I realized that things could be much, much worse. The poor little munchkin in this photo will have to deal for the rest of his or her life with the fact that there exists visual evidence that he or she used to get pushed around in a Star Wars stroller. To be more … Read more

Microsoft is cracking down on Xbox owners who modify their consoles.

The company is blocking modified Xbox 360 systems from connecting to its online multiplayer video game service, Xbox Live.

According to a blog posting from Microsoft's Games Global Marketing team, when owners of a modified console try to log onto the service, they will be blocked, although they will not have their accounts banned.

"We will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of our service, the protection of our partners and the benefits of our users," the blog states.

Blog community response:

"… Read more

Those little black Moleskine notebooks, once the scribble space of choice for Picasso and Hemingway, are now pretty much known as mandatory gear for brooding coffee-shop hipsters and aspiring indie rockers. But little did we know, they also make great external hard drives. A blogger by the name of Sebastian Delmont recently noticed a correlation between the sizes of his Moleskine journal and a hard drive, and cleverly realized that he could modify one of the sleek black books as the external casing for an internal laptop hard drive--saving a lot of cash in the process.

And there you have … Read more

DaimlerChrysler's itty-bitty Smart ForTwo has been in the news recently, primarily because it's going to be made available to U.S. markets next year. The defining feature of the ForTwo is pretty much just the fact that it's about as small as a car can get without being designed for circus midgets, and it's more or less useless outside cities since it can't go all that fast, but that hasn't stopped one Greek auto enthusiast from turning it into an off-road vehicle.

Taking a hint from the design and functionality of Daimler-Chrysler's off-road … Read more

Have you ever wanted to see how your game system works? Do you scoff at warranties? Do you not mind risking your $80-to-$600 gadget just so you can screw with it? Then this toolkit is for you.

Modding peripheral companies like Divineo and Mod-chip.com are selling the Zoozen Access Pro Tool Kit v2, a toolkit with virtually everything you need to crack into virtually every game system you have. It includes a socketed handle with standard driver bits for slotted, Phillips, and Torx screws, and specialized driver bits for the "tamperproof" screws many systems use (Ever … Read more

What's a sure sign that a gadget has finally arrived? When you start to see versions of it in chrome.

The Wii has graduated from standard colors to the hard stuff: the chrome "I-Case." XCM Live is taking pre-orders for the shiny console case mod for $38, according to Technabob.

Considering how much color PlayStation 3s have gone for on eBay, that's a relative bargain.

Forget about those silly bomb-defusing alarm clocks. This is one piece of hardware that would make Jack Bauer proud (real or fake versions alike).

This case mod was designed to "look like the sort of atomic bomb that one sees in spy movies or on TV shows like 24," as described on TechEBlog. The creator is quick to add that he "tried not to base the design on any real or fictional bomb, but simply out of my imagination." That's a relief--we think.

These days, you can "mod" (that's the cool, techy way to say "modify") just about anything these days. iPods, Xboxes, computers...you name it. And now Spluch is showcasing a yet-to-be-released product (due out next month) that lets you mod your mountain bike into an "all-terrain riding machine." Called the Ktrack, this kit will turn your bike into a contraption that will ride on snow and sand. Cool, right?

But I'm skeptical. First of all, keep in mind that this is a kit, which means that there's always the chance that … Read more