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Orac^3 -- Not Your Everyday Casemod
jmke writes "G-nome has finished his amazing Orac case mod, which looks absolutely stunning." An excerpt from the site: "Ever since I saw the first series of Blakes 7 I have wanted my own Orac. For those that don't know, Blakes 7 was a late 70s/early 80s British Science Fiction series and Orac was this intellectually snobbish, difficult and incredibly brilliant computer, hand built by an eccentric scientist. The special effects were straight out of 60's Star Trek and a lot of the props were converted from (or later converted to) props from other classic BBC series such as Doctor Who and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (where the Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain looks like it was made by the same bloke!)."
I'll first congratulate whoever built this maagnificent piece of art. Very cool. You have way too much free time :) (He's also an excellent photographer. Not something you see very often in case modders :) )
But it's just not functional!!!!
All that metal tubing for the cables and stuff and the water cooling tubing must make it a nightmare to work in. Do all those tubes even go anywhere?? It seems awfuly crowded to work in there
How would you change a hard drive?
I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen.
1) Your computer gets wet
2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.
That being said, it's still beautifully crafted with incredible attention paid to detail.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Try the FreeCache link, you can at a min. view the first page
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The site is chugging along slowly, but here's a mirror of the two shots on the front page so people can get the gist of the mod.
Front
Back
Thanks to my /. subscription, i was able to secure some images!
orac3 images
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
from the story posting:
"G-nome has finished his amazing Orac case mod, which looks absolutely stunning."
from the linked web site:
by G-gnome on 9th June 2004
that's G-gnome, not G-nome. Note the extra "G".
Proofreading, anyone?
Really,
it's a very nice case mod, but has no link to Blakes7 other than the name.
With all that freedom... why is this still just a rectangular box?
Indeed. And why is it called Orac when it doesn't actually look anything like Orac?
I hate to sound curmudgeonly, and the case mod looks interesting and all, but it looks about as much like a Dalek as it does Orac.
http://robotiq.com/index.asp?category=orac
Holy crap, we killed it already. Oh well, here's the PDFs I promised, served happily again from Spymac:
PDFs in zip format.
If you're in OS X, it's not the double-clickable kind, Use Stuffit Expander to unzip it.
put one drop of bleach in there (on a side note, if you ever have to sanitize water, one drop of bleach per gallon should kill most harmful bacteria and other living organisms)
It's available on DVD now, finally.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Chances are you didn't use enough bleach. The water in your tap, has been dosed with chlorine at much higher concentrations than what you would have drunk. Haven't you ever been swimming in a pool? Didn't you swallow any? That didn't give you the runs did it? I agree with the other poster who said you should have used more bleach and left it for an hour or two. I think the water purifying tablets you can buy say much the same thing in the instructions.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Excuse me, but BULLSHIT
I design radio test equipment for a living, and you DAMN SURE do keep the RF from a device from radiating by putting a shield around it - you just TRY to get a reciever working if don't have the local oscillators in cans!
The problem with most computer cases nowadays is they are CHEEP (spelling deliberate) and poorly made. Most panel to panel connections are simply 2 pieces of aluminum resting against each other (in other words, two pieces of aluminum seperated by a sapphire insulator, as aluminum quickly develops an oxide coating) - no beryllium-copper fingerstock, no compression gaskets, no star washers, nothing. When you have a chunk of metal not bonded to the chassis, you have a passive radiator, not a shield.
If you wish to evaluate a case for RF shielding, put a light inside it, turn out the room lights, and look for leaks. Any gap longer than about 20 centimeters will act as a slot antenna for 1.5GHz(ish). Most modern cases leak like sieves.
If you ever have the chance, look at an old Atari 800 (NOT 800XL) - those things were TANKS and didn't leak any RF to speak of - potmetal case around all active components, proper gaskets - truely a joy to behold. Of course that adds cost to the system, and in this day that won't fly.
I constantly have birdies on my 2 meter rig from my computer - I have to unload the Firewire drivers any time I am not using them or I get a signal that is half-full scale 100 meters from my house. I'm seriously thinking of making a full Faraday cage for all my computer gear (save user interface elements) just to avoid the problems.
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