I don’t remember ordering that…

Then, we arrived at the Neighborhood Boys and Girls Club in Irving Park, where the Chicago 2600 meetings are held.

We’re usually fashionably late by an hour or so, which is why it was dark out. When we got there Jaku stole my camera and went on a food run to Burger King with Josh so I don’t have any clear photographs after that point. There weren’t any presentations this month, so it was pretty calm. Many of the hackers were discussing their past experiences from NOTACON and their plans for going to the upcoming NOTACON 5 that is next month. Some people had ASUS Eee PCs and someone even had an Everex CloudBook, which I personally think is much cooler. There were gadgets galore and people doing all kinds of things, from playing DOOM to writing programs for the iPhone. If you live in the area and have nothing better to do than learn and play with computers on the first Friday of a month then you should check it out, it’s loads of fun and the people there are great to talk to.

My handle/alias is “TinMan,” so b1rd got me a gummy heart.

It was delicious

I didn’t take pictures of the scrolling LED gift card before I transformed it into a belt clip, but here’s a set of pictures I found on Flickr of it new and then being taken apart. I thought it would make a great belt buckle so I opened it up to see what I could do with it. You may want to pop out the plastic piece that pressed the buttons so they don’t get accidentally bumped, I did this so you would have to be trying to press the buttons to actually press them. It fits the plastic shell nicely so I put it back together and just covered the front with black electrical tape. Then I set it upside-down on a cardboard box and cut off the excess electrical tape along the edges with an x-acto knife. I used a piece of cloth strap material from a small bag and folded it into a loop that would fit snugly around my belt, then I stapled it like that and melted the cut edges of the plastic-like-fabric with a lighter so it wouldn’t unravel where it was cut. I didn’t have any way to attach the belt loop to the gift card other than by taping it with thick electrical tape, so I did that. You could wrap it through the inside and screw the plastic shell shut so it would pinch the strap in place, but then the strap would be in the way of the buttons on the back of the gift card.

I like it with just “TINMAN” as the message, but I got at least three comments on it in an hour while shopping in Chicago with it displaying “Stop staring at my crotch” :]

Click below for a YouTube video of it in action:

Instead of building or buying a carputer I realized that my N800 would be perfect for the job, it has support for many media formats, AM/FM radio, WiFi for Wardriving, USB port, low power consumption, touch screen, etc.

Right now I’m thinking:

• The N800 should be held by a turnable dock that it can be removed from easily
• The dock would come out of the expansion bay on the car dash
• A USB hub and external hard drive with my music on it should be mounted in the glove compartment
• For speakers I’d have speaker boxes on the floor in back

Now I need to figure out:

• How to make the N800 dock adjustable and be able to hide it back in the dash when it’s not in use
• How much power it will need
• How to connect the car antenna to the N800, it’s earbuds (headphones) are the stock antenna
• How to power the external USB drive and USB hub so the N800 can play media off of it
• Where I can get good boxed speakers that will fit on the floor and how to connect them to a normal headphone jack

So far I’ve got my N800 set up for it software wise, I loaded the latest firmware onto it yesterday and re-installed all my media applications.

I’ll document the project once it starts coming together in the car, it seems like the perfect carputer. I’m sure that other people have used it as one since you can run Maemo Mapper on it.

-TinMan