Last night I found this great post in our forums where a user called Gerbal describes how he painted his XO. Unlike my motivation for undertaking such a project - impressing the ladies and the geeks at the next user-group meeting or presentation that is - Gerbal did it in anticipation of a trip to South America:
Xzibit would be proud!
I recently purchased an XO off of Ebay. I am quite taken with the little machine. It is a brilliant machine and is perfect for field work in isolated parts of Central America where I intend to work. But I had one problem with it. The colour. Travelling though areas where XOs have been deployed it is probable that carrying an XO may be mistaken as having taken it from a child. Very uncool.
True that! You definitely don't want to be mistaken for one of the guys who stole 66 XOs in Peru back in June.
He describes the process of how he went about painting his XO and gives some advice on which paint to use in case you want to do it yourself. With regard to his comments about the paint potentially coming off over the course of the next few months I remember that back in the good ol' case-modding days people used to apply a layer or two of clear coat once the actual paint was cured.
Thinking about I should still have some cans of paint somewhere in the basement. Maybe I'll spend my next weekend making my own red XO?
While changing the color will be cool, it really doesn't do much to disguise the fact that what you're carrying is an XO-1.
* The machine is still the same size and shape and has the distinctive handle.
* In use, the keyboard is still green and the "bunny ears" antennas are a dead give-away.
Finally, how do you know that the machine you got off eBay wasn't one of those 66 stolen machines anyway?
This sort of thing will be more important while working within a community with XOs. If you walk in with a painted XO people will recognise that it is different and identify it with you. When you leave the community they will understand that the XO is yours. I think that will be enough for most people.
Besides, it may encourage kids to find ways to mod their XOs.
David, I was in contact with the seller and verified that it was a G1G1 laptop.
Wait, are "the good old case-modding days" over? (sob)
Sarah, I think there's still some things going on but at least for me it's been a while since I've spent a weekend down in the basement, sanding down my enclosure, painting my mouse, swapping the green LEDs in my keyboard to for the ultra-bright blue ones, soldering a 7v / off / 12v fan-controller, adding LEDs to my transparent Papst fans and tweaking the airflow throughout my case. And who could forget the time when I got sick because I spent a long winter-night sitting in a room with open windows, trying to overclock my Pentium 4 2.4GHz C1 stepping to the max?!
Oh, those were the days my friend... ;-)
Christoph -- what, no Magic switch? (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html)
Find like minds at the XO Users Group - http://xolaptop.ning.com/
Haha, what a great story... :-)
Thanks for the link Jon!
@David wallace
by coloring it, people will know that he didn't steal the machine from a kid recently...that's at least the impression that i would probably get from seeing a foreigner walking around with a black XO