Jamie Regan got in touch with us to see if we would be interested in his creation: a DIY NES PC. According to him, he built this baby because he has too much time on his hands, the lucky guy. I think that even luckier is the fact that he had the creativity, skills, and patience to tinker with the device to come up with a something “new”.

NES PC

It is not that surprising that Jamie was able to pull this off as he is a qualified electrician. Still, he says, the whole project took a lot of time and effort. Go through this post and see if you agree with him that this is the best NES PC mod ever built.

NES PC Inside

Those are the innards of the device. Jamie says he wanted to keep things “as discrete as possible” so he lined the area around the disk drive with metal to achieve a neater appearance. Naturally, he also built in USB ports – two of them.

NES PC USB Ports

If you want more USB ports, you can always purchase a cheap USB hub.

I suppose those were the easy parts, as Jamie shares that the most difficult thing was to create the back panel. As you can imagine, he had to cut out space for all the inputs needed in the back panel. He still did a pretty good job in spite of the challenge.

NES PC Back Panel

Here are some of the things that Jamie used to create his DIY NES PC:

• ASRock A330GC Mini Itx Motherboard
• Mini ITX PC DC-DC Power Supply Board 120W PSU 12V
• Samsung SN-208BB 8x DVD-RW
• RAM SATA Laptop Drive
• Seagate Momentus 7200.3 SATA 3Gb/s 160-GB Hard Drive
• 1 GB Ram DDR2 ( 2x 512MBs )

If you want to make one yourself, and you need some help, get in touch with Jamie via email: jamie_regan1@hotmail.com. And if you want to make an offer for the DIY NES PC, you can also ask him about that!

This is without a doubt the craziest thing you will see all day. Someone has created a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that substitutes dragons with My Little Pony.

It’s an unholy union of two worlds that had no right to meet. Seeing realistic fire spew from the mouths of those fluffy, frilly little ponies has a certain train-wreck quality to it. It’s just hard to look away from this inevitable mashup of a childhood icon with a decidedly grown-up video game. But I’m torn over what to call it.

My Little Skyrim? The Elder Ponies? Anybody got a better one?

If you’d like to download the “My Little Pony Dragon” mod, you can find the necessary files at SkyrimNexus. The creator says that it’s an incomplete build, but has fans to finish it.

Bruce Rosenbaum is a steampunk master. After turning his own Massachusetts home into a steampunk masterpiece, he’s opened his own business and is busy crafting digital/Victorian makeovers for homes, offices, and hotels.

According to Wired, Rosenbaum got the idea when he found a very old iron oven at an antique store. The oven is a sculptural piece of artistry, and its attention to craftsmanship inspired him to bring it home and re-purpose it. He upgraded it with a glass-top stove, which caused him to start a years-long transformation of the entire house.

Today, the house is filled with all sorts of technical marvels — which are neatly incorporated into 1800s-era creations. Rosenbaum, his wife and two sons own an ancient pump organ that’s been turned into a modern desk with built-in computer; a hot plate turned wireless iPad charger; a boat’s portal (with functioning valve wheel) that Rosenbaum made into a closet door; and loads more. No detail was left untouched, from the period lighting all throughout the house to the house’s stained glass windows.

It’s an astounding accomplishment, and one can only imagine the amount of time it took to salvage all of the antiques, gut them, put them together with modern technology, and then install them in the house to look as if they were made specifically for that space.

Wired says Rosenbaum is pitching a reality series to cable TV networks, which would be produced by one of the people behind The Biggest Loser. Sounds like a good fit for Discovery or The History Channel. Hit the link above to check out more photos of Rosenbaum’s amazing steampunk home.

Ryan Kelly's 'Portal' Christmas Tree

A Reddit user named Ryan Kelly and his co-workers put together one of the geekiest Christmas trees ever: the Portal Tree! Their clever creation appears to be heading straight through a portal, frozen in time at mid-fall.

After seeing Kelly’s Reddit post about his Portal Christmas Tree, io9 reached out to Kelly to find out how he did it. And lest you fear a real tree was split to accommodate their idea: it’s an artificial that came in three parts. Kelly and friends put the bottom two parts on the floor with the top part dangling from the ceiling.

He added rope lights around on the floor and ceiling, filled in some blank spots near the top with a garland, and used black poster board to give the holes the proper look. The only tricky part came with the upside-down tree branches, which were made to be held outstretched by gravity. Kelly and his friends had to use fishing line to hold the branches up.

In my mind, this begs the question: why didn’t they just install it right-side-up? Just flip the entire setup so that the tree appears to be falling through a hole in the floor — the top of the tree would be right-side-up on the floor, with the larger bottom part hanging from the ceiling. I suppose the bottom section would have been too heavy to hang safely from the ceiling. But it would have solved that pesky branch/fishing line issue.

Regardless, the Portal Christmas Tree is an ingenious bit of holiday engineering. ForeverGeek tips its hat to such dedicated geekhood. Well played!

Head over to io9 to see more photos.

So I ran across this Xbox 360 mod that will not fail to impress; that is, if you’re an Xbox 360 fan (which I really am not) and a Transformers fan (which I am) combined. Created by Edanna, this once ordinary looking Xbox 360 is now a bright blue with orange and red hues – Optimus Prime’s colors.

That’s the whole thingamajig – complete with Diet Coke and modded controller as well.

And here’s a different angle, with the Autobots logo on the side. In fact, Edanna put the logo on both sides of the unit. This logo, as cool as it already is, adds more spice to the unit, as when it is powered up, the logo glows!

Now imagine playing late into the night with the lights turned off; only the glare of the TV and the soft glow of the Autobots logo lighting your surroundings. Tell me if that isn’t fun!

Come to think of it – even if you’re not a fan of either the Xbox 360 or Transformers, you should be able to appreciate Edanna’s work. See more of this impressive Xbox 360 mod by Edanna in her Photobucket Album.

Campaign maps

• Chapter One – Shaun’s Pad
  Players start in the shed (found in shaun’s backyard), equiped with Left 4 Dead’s First Teir weapons, and they must work their way through shauns house, onto the street, and through the neighborhood to the backroom of the Corner shop.
• Chapter Two – Mum’s House
  Players start in the backroom of the cornershop, and must work their way to Shaun’s Mum’s House, where the map ends.
• Chapter Three – Lizz’s Flat
  Players start in Mum’s House, and must work their way to Lizz’s Flat (expect some trouble’s along the way) where they enter the backside of the building and take saftey inside Lizz’s Flat (Appartment).
• Chapter Four – To the Winchester
  Players start in Lizz’s Flat (Appartment) and must work their way outside, then through some tuff situations and onto the Winchester, where they find saftey in the backroom (or so they think…).
• Chapter Five – Survive the Winchester
  Players start in the backroom of the Winchester Pub, and must survive inside long enough for the power to come on (allowing them to use the lift found in the cellar), as well as wait long enough for the APC to arrive (Upon exiting the Lift).

Left4Winchester.

My finished wood ipod mini. This has been such a fun project for me. It’s handmade (with special thanks to my 8yr old dremel) from Australian red cedar, Camphor Laurel for the clickwheel, brass plates, brass screws and the guts from the first ipod i ever had.
I was given a new ipod mini for christmas and I just couldn’t leave my trusty old mini to sit unused somewhere. So I decided to finally try a wooden shell mod on him that I had wanted to do for a long time.

More photos at the Wooden iPod Mini set on Flickr.

Via Gametrailers.

[Via technabob]

Khyrin, member of the Fallout 3 Nexus community has released this awesome GreenWorld mod for Fallout 3.
If you would love to see the landscape with a little less grey tones, this is a mod with plenty of green. GreenWorld adds plants, trees to the dark world that Fallout 3 is.

More pictures at Englishrussia.

More at English Russia.

More pictures.

I haven’t been playing my Rock Band game as much lately because of all the reports I’ve read online about the drum pedal snapping in two. The pedal is made of plastic and based from the way it’s constructed, vigorous use of the pedal will really make it break. I’ve been trying to find a way to DIY my pedal by attaching a metal pad on the pedal to reinforce the whole thing but I’m not much of a handy man.

Fortunately I met a guy online who was making custom Rock Band pedals using a magnetic switch and a real drum pedal. To say that a drum pedal is sturdy is an understatement. I can use the damn thing as a weapon if I want to. The great thing about using this sturdy pedal is that I don’t have to worry about breakage. I just kick pedal in complete abandon. This has radically improved the way I play and I’m pretty sure I’ll become more adept at the drums because of my new gadget.

Now if I can just find a way of modding my temperamental Rock Band guitar…