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Black Is The New Beige
An anonymous submitter writes: "Spurred by Apple's innovations and the dangers of commoditization, computer makers are finally moving beyond beige. Rather than exploring diverse ideas, however, they have made a decision reminiscent of the fashionistas: black is the new beige (a NYTimes story)."
...the original Apple II in 1977. Steve Jobs wanted a neutral color that would blend in to the average home.
In my opinion Coolermaster makes the best damn cases I've ever seen. Combine that with an enermax power supply and your in business. The Cooler Master ATC-210 is particularly awesome. You can buy them at a good price from monarch.
. com/powersupply.htmlc om
http://www.coolermaster.com
http://www.xpcgear
http://www.monarchcomputer.
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the Apple II was issued in black version a by Bell and Howe,this was in the early 1980's
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The Apple blue & white G3 towers solved this problem. The case had a hinged door in front of the CD drive, with a standard drive behind it. You could only see the beige when the tray was out.
The 'cool' cases will soon be those that are reflective. You've seen the nice shiny aluminium ones, but how about anodized blue? Frankly I think that this rocks... if only it came with a factory-installed side-window. If only I had money to buy it...
... or downward pointing lightbar to illuminate controls)...
Go to Musician's Friend and search for Racklight. You might also look for rackmount power conditioners - most of the good ones have lights as well.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Yeah, but their customer service is horrible. Simple stuff like monitor swaps under warranty take weeks. The individual people I dealt with seemed ok (one of them went out of his way to finally get me a monitor) but as an organization they seem to be really screwed up. At least, this was true about 6 months ago when I got my computer. I would never deal with them again.
My friend and I decided to build new PCs at the same time to save cash on shipping etc. We both purchased Antec 1240 towers (If you've never seen them, these things are huge. The top of my machine has maybe a half inch of clearence with the bottom of my desk, and I have a rather tall desk.). The only dissapointment was that these cases weren't availible in black (through our supplier anyway). Anyway, my friend came up with a sweet idea for a case mod. First of all, we paint the cases black. The case is completely modular so we can remove everything and paint it seperately (except the top part, which involves removal of pop rivets). Then on one side, we dremel out a trapezoid (actually, we should do this before painting..). Then we take a sheet of non-yellowing Lucite, cut a trapezoid a bit larger on all sides then the one on the case. We stencil on a design, fill in some spaces with black paint, and mount it on the side, painted side facing inward, with 1/4 inch bolts with polished heads (for that industrial look). To complete the mod, we'll (eventually) purchase lights to mount in the top of the case. My friend's plan is to stencil a biohazard logo on the Lucite, black out the parts that are normally red on the logo, allowing yellow light to shine through the logo itself. Also, the light should be visible around the edges of the Lucite.
We went to the local Home Hardware a few weeks ago and already purchased some water-based (to avoid the chance of melting the plastic bezel because the cases are 300$CDN a piece) gloss black paint, a 2 foot x 4 foot sheet of Lucite, 16 polished 1/4 inch bolts, 16 1/4 inch nuts and 2 paint brushes. This should be enough to do the 2 Antecs as well as the case of my old Linux machine (as a test).
Total cost: 50$ canadian total, so 25$ each (not including the lighting of course). And we should have more then enough Lucite left over to do at least a few more cases. So with a little luck, this might just pay for itself. We intend to do this sometime next month when it's dry enough out for the paint to dry quickly. These wicked cases just got a little more wicked.