The thing had been sitting on a makeshift shelf on the garage – very close to the roof. I had only tested it briefly after I had acquired it from an estate auction in Dec. 2002 (too bad, I missed to get the compatible Canon printer in the same auction!!! Grrr).
Back then, it was still fairly a popular hobby for hardware guys to hack this piece. But, back then, maybe I got too much stuff to attend to and forgot the iOpener altogether.
Suddenly, last month – after I set up yet another PC/TV for my parents in our living room – using the assortment of PC hardware strewn in all parts of the garage – the final product doesn’t seem to appeal to me aesthetically. Ding! Ding! Why not use a hacked iOpener instead?
Maybe it’s fortuitous…Parts for the hack would have been considerably steeper had I done it earlier! Now, I’m simply waiting for the UPS truck to arrive!!!
—notes:
You can see the ‘blow by blow’ account’ of the iOpener transformation (hack??) here.
After a month of on-off-on work, on 6/01/04, the hack was done. You can see the finished product here.