I was never jealous of my friends who had those Viewmaster slide-viewer toys when I was a kid—they just seemed kinda boring, but I would have been jealous if the toy was as clever as this mod. This guy's taken the toy and added an Arduino-driven display unit, accelerometers and a Bluetooth connection to a PC so that it generates animated colour-based chromadepth 3D imagery. There's even push-button control of the imagery, which reacts when you shake it. Waaaaay better than clicking through boring 20 3D-ish static cartoon frames, though the psychological effects its psychedelicness may cause hasn't been tested. [MickeyMann via Makezine]

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Acidmods just can't get enough of hacking up our console controllers, and now the company has replaced the Wiimote's A button with a clicking trackball (a la Blackberry Pearl). The result is an easier way to scroll through webpages and certain menu systems, as you can see in this video:

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Some of you may be suffering from Steampunk fatigue, but I still get giddy when I see it done up right. Master toy modder Sillof, whose work we've covered a couple times before, has tickled my fancy with an update to his original Steam Wars action figure line. This time you've got even more detailed Steamtroopers, a mob boss-like Jabba the Hutt, vicious Ewoks and (for the boys) Steampunk Slave Leia. Check out the gallery, and his website. [Sillof]

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Hanging out at sites like Giz may have instilled in you an insatiable, pocket-emptying gadget habit. But now we're entering a new era—the old guys on the TV are saying that soon we may not even have pockets, let alone money for them. Don't panic though: You've probably got a wealth of gadgetry sitting underutilised in your living rooms, closets and basements, just waiting to be given powerful new (not exactly authorised) features. For free.

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Parallax has just released their NES controller socket to the delights of modders everywhere. Instead of forcing them to chop up an old NES to get the 7-pin socket, Parallax has made it available for only $US2 on their site. The NES controller would be great for all kinds of little projects, from robots to old-school gaming devices, and we're really looking forward to seeing what inventive modders can do with the humble and much-loved controller. [MAKE]

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It's the Holy Grail of Wii piracy—load DVD game backups without any sort of hardware modification. And it's just been demonstrated in a very legit-looking video.

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Nothing brightens up a tech geek's room like an awesome LED cube, and Hack n' Mod has got a couple of do-it-yourself instructions for building your own glowy box thing. You can get started with a small, less ambitious 3x3x3 cube design, maybe step it up to a 4x4x4 design if you're more confident, and ultimately build your own 8x8x8 cube (like the one after the jump)! Of course, you could always just buy one from LED Cube manufacturers like Seekway, but where's the fun in that? [Hack n' Mod]

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Retro gaming fans that enjoy a good DIY project will certainly get a kick out of the latest work of a console modder that goes by the name "Bacteria." Basically, he has devised a way to cannibalise those Plug-n-Play TV gaming units into interchangeable cartridges that can be plugged into a single, portable system (he also claims that a GBA add-on is currently in the works). Unfortunately, Bacteria continues to be uninterested in details like aesthetics and ergonomics (as we first noticed in his previous project), but that is something you can probably correct should you decide to take on the mod yourself. Hit the link for the complete instructions. [Modded by Bacteria]

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Taking inspiration as well as construction cues from the massive NES controller table built in May, SCAD Inc., which I will charitably call a garage-based novelty enlargement collective, set out to build a giant-sized SNES controller, complete with functioning buttons. A few months later the build is complete, and it looks, well, huge.

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This custom case mod made for Bit-Tech is just eye-grabbingly bizarre... from the outside alone. Built by a guy called Craig, Bloo Balls was over a year in the making, which included and a whole lot of careful design, redesign and fabrication. There's a mass of careful plexiglass-carving in there, including a hand-made, custom-crafted liquid cooling system for both P4 processor and northbridge. Plumbing and CPUs don't often mix, which is why the build included one fried motherboard. Check out the gallery: it's amazing, inside and out. So amazing, it almost warrants its own genre name... we're just wondering what to call it.

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