This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands, and you like to doodle. I have lots of these doodles I do when I'm board. I started them in an art class in Jr. High School -- and have been doing them ever since. I give most of them away to people who like the retro-70's throwback stuff (when I was in Jr. High School, BTW) -- and only have a few of my own. I decided to do this one on the inside of an iBook

First I took the iBook apart, and used alcohol to remove the paint. This was a tedious process, with lots of soaking and scrubbing with a toothbrush. My wife complains that that toothbrush still doesn't taste right. Anyways, I was going to do the top AND bottom -- but after getting the bottom done, I decided against taking the display apart. Sorry, no pictures of the disassembly, nor audio clips of the cursing when I splashed alcohol in my eye. Also it is important to note that alcohol will take the finish right off of the kitchen table, and will let you know where every little nick or cut on your hands are.

After the insides were cleaned, I used an ink-pen, to outline my different doodles and patterns, then filled them in with another pen. When complete, I sprayed it with silver paint to opaque up the background and offer a little contrast. Clear iBooks are fine -- but I wanted to see my doodle.

NOTE: The pirate skull actually has nothing to do with software piracy (other than inuendo), it's a long story, but my family (Every) descends from Henry Every/Avery, the Arch Pirate (Long Ben). This is his flag, and a decade ago I drew up his flag and had stickers made. Each Pirate had their own logos, and actually Henry Every's was the one that had the skull and crossed bones -- instead of crossed swords, or black widow hour-glass, and so on. I use it on some things to mark my turf; cars, computers, and the like. My wife won't let me tatoo her with it though. She's just lucky guys can't do mods to their women, or I might install extra boobs and a mute button. But, too late, I digress.

By the way, I think a site dedicated to hardware hacks is way cool. I did my first major hack back in 1981 and wish there had been a place to put picture back then. For the record, I took a Commodore-64 to guts, put it in my own case (an experiment case), wired up my own keyboard (numeric keypad), rewired some of the motherboard to bring hardware reset line out and add in my special function support, added my own internal memory and addressing so that I could block the write-latch on some memory (Pseudo-ROM), burned my own ROM's to snapshot any game that was in memory when I pushed a special button, and had debug/copy-protection removal code built into my version of the OS, and basically was an obnoxious cracker that went by many names; with Commodore and others trying to figure out who was cracking their games within a day of release. Ahhh, the good ol' days, when minors didn't fear felonies, 64K was a lot of memory, and when you could solder on 2 layer motherboards without fear of ramifications.