"but the tablet may end up costing Wei hundreds of thousands of dollars, as representatives from Apple have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against his ass.".
Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#42Great DIY project, but I don't think it was because he couldn't afford one... for $125, you can get a pretty decent tablet in China (a good iPad knockoff or even one with a unique design and a capacitive touch screen).
Maybe he doesn't want to break the law and buy an illegal "knock-off" tablet.
nice try, Apple
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks kinda like a localization failure. If you have e.g. Chinese in UTF-8 but mess up the output (or input) somewhere it tends to look something like that.
It looks like it's GB18030, HZ or GBK. At least those are the ones that render with no unknown characters. I don't read/speak any Chinese dialects so I've got no idea which two encodings are likely gibberish.
GB18030 is a superset of GBK. HZ is generally used on 7-bit only mediums like Usenet.
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#44Love this title!
That's the spirit!
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#45By all accounts Wei is a badass hacker in the truest sense of the word. Being able to source the parts on the cheap and basically put it together by himself is remarkable and a testament to good old-fashioned hard work. I'm going to make a generalization here and say that most Americans have lost this kind of DIY spirit. Instead we just whip out our Visa/Mastercard and decide to just buy what we need on credit. Yes,…
> I'm going to make a generalization here and say that most Americans have lost this kind of DIY spirit. I disagree - most Americans in my experience are perfectly willing to DIY, just not in the same areas that you or I may DIY. When my car needs a new timing belt, control arms or brake pads, I'm perfectly happy to do the work myself. When it comes time to acquire vegetables, I'd much rather go to the local supermar…
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#46Saw it yesterday on China Daily, which is not the most reliable news source, btw. Looks like this is just an old laptop wrapped into a shiny shell with a touch screen attached. Nice gift for his girlfriend but hardly worth a news story. Wrapping old stoff up in a new packaging and then printing some expensive brand onto it is actually common in China. You can get "iPhones" here for under 100USD at everywhere.
> Wrapping old stoff up in a new packaging and then printing some expensive brand onto it is actually common in China.
I wonder whether they don't distinguish the fake from original or are fakes considered "cool" despite known to be fakes?
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#47that is offcourse very cool and encouraging. Will anyone guide me to this kind of stuff, like computer hardware assembling and making. and also where can i found these parts from internet
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#48Three years ago for Christmas I built my wife a 14 inch digital picture frame from an old laptop and a nice picture frame from the hobby store. It boots puppy linux from a usb stick, and runs through a slideshow of all of the pictures in the SLIDESHOW folder on the thumb drive, so there are basically no moving parts (old laptop with no fan, just a heat sync). It's been running strong for the past 3 years and only nee…
Cute project, but does not sound very energy efficient to me.
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the knock-offs aren't illegal. There is a minority that put the Apple logo on them, which is clearly illegal, but... Beyond that the look of Apple's products are protected by design patents and the law on them is much less clear cut and varies by country (see the Samsung case for example). There are a large number of non-iPad knock offs available for under $125, though. A quick search on DealExtreme will help…
You mean like the Apple logo that's on the tablet in the article's picture?
I'm pretty sure that even Apple isn't really concerned about a hand built, 5cm thick, Windows 7 running, rhinestone encrusted "tablet" being mistaken for an iPad.
So no.. that's not what I meant.
Re: Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125
#50Three years ago for Christmas I built my wife a 14 inch digital picture frame from an old laptop and a nice picture frame from the hobby store. It boots puppy linux from a usb stick, and runs through a slideshow of all of the pictures in the SLIDESHOW folder on the thumb drive, so there are basically no moving parts (old laptop with no fan, just a heat sync). It's been running strong for the past 3 years and only nee…
Cute project, but does not sound very energy efficient to me.
I did pretty much exactly the same thing a few years ago. The power supply is about 25W, but judging by the heat coming off the frame I doubt it uses half that. The main power draw is probably the screen. I removed the hard drive and replaced it with a CF card (basically no power draw), and the fans have been replaced with a large heat sink.
For my photo frame, I used cron and set various times for it to turn off the screen.
Obviously it's a luxury in terms of power usage, but given that it pulls about as much power as a bright energy saving lightbulb, it's not really a huge issue. In terms of cost, 25W continuous costs about 6c a day, so I'd imagine the whole frame costs less than half that once you take into account the screen-off time and the reduced power draw anyway.