
Student can't afford tablet for girlfriend, so builds her one for $125 - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/student-cant-afford-tablet-for-girlfriend-so-builds-her-one-for-125-20111125/
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marquis
>One thing Wei may not appreciate is Sun taking the time to stick rhinestones
all around the edge of the casing he so lovingly created

What's wrong with her personalising this? That piece of editorialising was
unwarranted, I'm sure he was delighted that she fell in love with it enough to
put her own mark on it.

To the critics below: it just made me sad because if my boyfriend made me
something awesome like this and I wanted to decorate it, I don't want him to
feel bad if others comment on it - as if it were something so girly to ruin
his hard work (and I own zero rhinestones).

~~~
rewind
I think it was just a humorous comment. I don't see the harm in it. BTW, you
just asserted the opposite of the opinion you disagree with without any
additional information beyond what the author had ;-)

~~~
marquis
True, I guess that they just look really happy in the photo.

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sliverstorm
Heh, this reminds me of high school. iPods were a year or three old. I managed
to get my hands on one with a catastrophically failed hard drive in pieces,
for free. I took it home, reassembled the hard drive and the iPod, got it
working, and gave it to my girlfriend of the time.

As best I know, it still works to this day. And the more I have learned about
computers, the less I believe it myself- among other things, there were
_fingerprints_ all over the platters!

~~~
X-Istence
I've taken hard drives apart, removed the platters, wiped them down, shoved
everything back together after not finding anything really wrong with it (and
this wasn't being careful or nice with the platters/heads) and it has worked
fine now for the last 6 years... still not sure why at one point it stopped
spinning up.

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jtchang
By 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, a solution to the problem
nonetheless. But the amount of learning that you gain from doing a project
like this should not be underestimated.

~~~
Anechoic
> _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 supermarket or farm stand and buy the them.

On the other hand, my mom has a mechanic do all her car work and grows her own
vegetables. I could go on about my friend who makes her own pottery and
stationary, my brother who does his own carpentry, a friend who makes his own
beer, etc etc. We are all DIYers in our own way.

~~~
tankenmate
Necessity is the mother of invention.

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megamark16
Three 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 needs a reboot when the house loses
power. I love DIY projects.

~~~
middus
Cute project, but does not sound very energy efficient to me.

~~~
leoedin
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.

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jakeonthemove
Great 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).

~~~
16s
Maybe he doesn't want to break the law and buy an illegal "knock-off" tablet.

~~~
nl
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..

~~~
whotooktwitch
You mean like the Apple logo that's on the tablet in the article's picture?

~~~
dmak
What should I do with my iPhone with an Android sticker logo on it? Come on
man... Jeez.

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RockyMcNuts
the videos of the build are pretty cool -

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6TAguL2nFU>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk7vO7uDjeI>

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yaix
Saw 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.

~~~
Yaggo
> 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?

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dailo10
Wait - what about the cost of Windows 7?

Oh, I see - it must have been included on the used laptop he purchased. Makes
sense now. ;)

~~~
yaix
Here in China? 5 Yuan in any electronics market. Usually with Office and
Photoshop included (and probably some spyware).

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shasta
Comes with DIY games Angry Rectangles and Rectangle Ninja.

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Rajiv_N
Kudos to the kid for doing this. Certainly better than selling your kidney to
buy an iPad2 ([http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/02/boy-sells-kidney-
to-b...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/02/boy-sells-kidney-to-buy-
ipad/))

On a side note, is that an apple logo I see at the bottom of the tablet?
Wonder how apple feels about that? :)

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Groxx
"roughly the same thickness as an ipad" - the photo strongly implies
otherwise. It looks nearly an inch thick.

Epic build, I would love it if anyone could find the construction details -
hackaday would probably like it too :)

~~~
dmak
It really looks thick. I am almost sure it is not close to the size of an
iPad.

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adammacleod
That image has one hell of an alt text.

~~~
sbov
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.

~~~
simcop2387
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.

~~~
yuhong
GB18030 is a superset of GBK. HZ is generally used on 7-bit only mediums like
Usenet.

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ennovates
that 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

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doki_pen
I assume it's a pirated copy of Windows at that price.

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TruthElixirX
78 dollar laptop running Windows 7?

Hmm...

~~~
jiggy2011
That was my first thought as well, but what was he supposed to run on it?
Unity?

It does look quite bulky though, but that is often the way with DIY things.

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10100101001
Love this title!

That's the spirit!

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stupandaus
How long will it be before we see the following headline?

Apple sues Chinese hacker for counterfeit tablet

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stfu
Cudos to his girlfriend for conditioning him that well.

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nikcub
"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.".

