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Creative use for empty whiskey bottles
Japala writes "You might have seen computers built inside of toasters, radios, garden lamps etc. As motherboards keep getting smaller and smaller the possibilites on where you can embed then increases. As it turns out, you can get them to fit inside an empty glass bottle. Whisky PC for a whiskey lover that needs a small and silent server."
well, it is certainly more portable and better looking than your average tower. I think that there could well be a market for these things, in all different types of bottles or shaped glass cases... If you wanted to go all out you could put a plasma screan on the side... set it to show the original label as a screan saver if you want to go all out...
I wonder if it's kept its nice wiskey smell...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Is there any site that lists all the motherboards and components you can use to build these tiny machines? I've seen mini-itx.com, but it's very hard to navigate to specific boards, cases, psu's etc. It's mostly a news site, and it seems like if you don't keep up with it every day you'll have no idea what's up. So, where do you go to find these little things? I'd love to build a PC based alarm clock.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I like the concept, but cutting holes for fans was cheap.
Putting sufficient airpressure in the top usually pops the bottom off a glass bottle, look at the mould marks in any spirit or beer bottle to see the join. To apply such pressure, decend the palm of your hand onto a bottle mostly filled with water, should make a clean break.
You should be able to drop one of those SIMM sized linux modules in the mouth of a Mickey's Big Mouth. If only they had an equally small wireless module, you might fit the whole thing including enough AA batteries to run for a few days and have a working linux bottle with the cap on.
This mod, while very cool, would make an excellent semi-portable monitoring device, say, to keep an eye on the stockroom at your restaurant or whatever. Stuff some kind of thin webcam in the bottle neck, lay it on it's side, headless (cords to the wall, somehow) and you'd have an inconspicuous camera that can store images/video locally or ftp them somewhere remote (then you could skip the laptop drive altogether and run the whole thing off the CF card, perhaps allowing a smaller bottle), and looks like an empty bottle on a shelf. Extra points if you mount it in a wine rack with a few real bottles.
;)
Of course, you could also probably break an empty bottle, drop in one of those wireless network cameras, and glue it back together, but that wouldn't be half as cool.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Indeed. I haven't heard of anybody doing that level of surface mount construction, but it should be possible. The constraint would be that you'd have to build the computer with only small enough chips to fit through the neck. That would eliminate many LSI and larger chips. The whole thing could be built with SO-14, SO-16, SO-20, and SO-24 pin packages, though, using conventional 'logic gate' design. Lots and lots of soldering, though.
In practice, "great wizard" is far more commonly used than any formal title, because if you can't buy the right shape piece of glass off-the-shelf, then you need to find someone to grovel before. I know of at least one research project that was derailed for almost three years when the previous master retired "unexpectedly" at the ripe age of 80, and his 35-year old Journeyman assistant who got promoted didn't have half a century of expertise under his belt. Requests that the old guy used to craft flawlessly in one day, the new guy sometimes needed four to get what they wanted exactly right... or worse, almost but not quite exactly right.
Which just goes to show, loss of critical personnel isn't only a problem in IT.