MYWAY

During one of my bored periods, I decided to build a PC in something different than a boring beige case. As I had a non working Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and had just found out about Mini ITX all in one pc boards, I decided to see if the two would fit together.
I ordered a 800mhz Mini ITX board online, and while I waited for it to arrive I took out the innards of the NES. Even with the innards removed the NES case looked small. I was going to have to use all the smallest bits I could to make it fit.

I went back online and ordered a power supply kit for the Mini ITX board which would plug straight in the power socket, and needed just a laptop power supply to power it, which was also available. I used Ebay to source a laptop hard drive and cd drive and appropriate adaptors.

Unfortunately I didn’t photograph the build up, so lets just say it was a very tight fit, but fit it did. I had a working PC inside a Nintendo NES case.

The picture below shows the rear of the NES PC showing the sockets, the mini ITX incorporates a graphics card, sound and USB ports as well as TV-out and serial and parallel ports. All I had to add was memory to the board.

The cartridge slot was an ideal place for the cd drive, under which I also mounted the hard drive. With the slot cover closed you’d be hard pushed to see it was a pc, but open the cover and you have the laptop cd rom drive available.

So that’s the NES PC which boredom spawned, it is running Linux and I am using it to learn how Linux works when I have time between bouts of boredom

I don’t know where he finds them, but my dad seems to find some real fun and silly stuff on his travels. Then of course it has to be tried out. The latest was this hot air balloon “toy” which should inflate and rise using a hair dryer which my daughter kindly loaned us (until it broke). Here are some short clips of us attempting to launch the hot air balloon.

Then we had hot air balloon attempt number 2 with the hair dryer repaired…

Boredom

Boredom can lead to some wonderful ways to waste time. With the advent of the net we can all waste time surfing to see how other people are wasting their time. While doing that I found this post on a blog concerning a Toothbrush Robot which is quite easy to make, and a great waste of time.

From time to time we will return to boredom and the ways we see people relieving it.