Atari Reborn

This link came up today, a fantastic mod to an old system from my childhood.
The use of new bleeding edge technology such as cheap 3d modeling and printing along with cheap pre made USB controllers is a real testament of how the dropping costs of development and prototyping can enable some very neat things to be made.
Check out the link for more information on the micro Atari Disk drive.
http://rossum.posterous.com/a-little-atari-810-disk-drive

I think I'll be hooking up my atari 800xl once the computer room is finished off and I can bring my office out of storage in the dingy basement.
Hypothetical question: I wonder how hard it would be to build an interface to the atari 800xl to act as a keyboard for a modern pc ? I'd love to be using that keyboard again, such a great system.
Time to do a little research.

-Colin.

A Bushell of Apples

Ok so yes this isn't my work but it's an amazing bit of engineering none the less and something that I thought I'd share.
http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/AppleCrateII.html

It's called the Apple Crate project and it turns old useless Apple II systems into a neat bit of hardware for learning and experimenting with parallel computing.
I'd recommend checking it out for yourself and see. He's got some good music files done by each generation of the machine as well.

-Colin.