Scotsman cools PC with IRN-BRU, dubs it the 'Aye Mac' An enterprising Scot has built a PC cooled by Irn-Bru*, and called it the “Aye Mac”. John Lawson, who runs an Edinburgh computer repair service called PC Doctor, decided to create the machine as a promotion and/or homage to Scotland's other famous drink. Sadly Irn-Bru's not the actual coolant – a liquid with the same colour …
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Neil Barnes,
I used to love dandelion and burdock. Going to my Nan's for tea, only having to eat a token sandwich before moving on to the important matter of Mr Kipling's French Fancies and Cherry Bakewells. Not to mention the Jaffa Cakes. Although I'll not forget the taste of crab paste in a hurry...
But then I had some recently. And it coats your teeth with a layer of fur. It makes Coke seem healthy in comparison. I seem to remember thinking Irn Bru was awful, but haven't had it in years.
The oddest pop I had was in Austria. It was garlic flavoured lemonade.
Yeah, I used to drink it when it was two bob a bottle, and sixpence back on the empty. So if you could find four neighbours with empties, you took it back to the shop and got a free one.
Barrs and Crystal Springs were the local pop in Wakefield; Fentiman's is some modern concoction.
Nope, those are honest-to-god nixies all right.
Russian ones. You can tell by the way that the 5 looks like an inverted 2.........because it is thanks to the cheapskate Soviets[1]. There's a lot of NOS nixies sloshing around in the ex-iron curtain places, so they're popular for home builds like this.
[1] Who would never build two things when one could be made to do the job with a hammer and/or by sending anyone who complained about the obvious bodge to the gulags.
"Irn-Bru (in an ice cold glass bottle, as shown in the picture) is the most effective hangover cure we Scots know. Preferably washing down a roll and square sausage."
Depends - if your night has been spent drinking vodka & irn bru, the hangover cure doesn't work so well.
And it's lorne, not square sausage. I could just about accept the inexplicable term "roll on sausage"...
Often as not, liquid cooled computers have the liquid coming into contact with at least two different metals and creating a thermocouple like electrical charge.
Due to electrolysis the chance that a girder might start forming where you don't want one is highly likely.
I've never seen someone as puzzled as the English contractor I used to work with in Paisley, who was asked for a swally of his ginger by one of the other engineers. Trying to explain that it's "scoosh" if it's flat and "ginger" if it's carbonated, regardless of flavour, was an interesting conversation.
Keeping it vaguely tech related, it's truly terrifying the mess Irn Bru makes of a laptop if it's spilt on it. Far worse than any other beverage in my experience.
I used to know a Glaswegian welder, living in exile in the home counties. I don't know why people had trouble with understanding him. Until he got excited. At which point only dogs could hear him, and only the Scottish ones work out what he was on about.
But not as unholy as a friend's Mum's accent. She's from southern Spain, and married a Glaswegian. She learned her english from him. Glaswegian with a strong spanish accent is interesting. I'd love to hear him speak spanish though.
> but even I have trouble being understood sometimes when darn Sarf
A former (Californian) manager had great difficulty understanding my wifes soft south Devon/Plymouth accent (which has now morphed to a Devon/Wiltshire accent complete with the complete loss of everything resembling conventional grammar..)
But not as unholy as a friend's Mum's accent. She's from southern Spain, and married a Glaswegian. She learned her english from him. Glaswegian with a strong spanish accent is interesting. I'd love to hear him speak spanish though.
I used to know a bloke who was an Italian prisoner of war, who stayed on and married a local girl from North Derbyshire. He spoke English with an Italian / Derbyshire accent - a most remarkable combination!
Cool, it even tells you how to build your own modem. How quaint
Nice to know you can still buy a Courier modem, God those were the days. Demon was the only show in town and you started with a Unix console and then went about downloading your copy of Turnpike or whatever from there.
Happy days, no Web, no AOL users and Usenet was a nice troll free place.
> Demon was the only show in town
Not quite - you could go with Pipex and pay through the nose. But only Demon had proper FAQs about how to get linux autodial and sendmail configurations working..
Ah - memories. Running Slackware 0.99pl15 on a 386sx25 with a honking great (physically anyway - full-height) 330MB ESDI drive that wouldn't fit into the case and so sat on the floor next to the case. The cats enjoyed the heat output..
Kids today eh?
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Liquid cooling can be quite expensive, so if you're going down that route you are unlikely to be messing with middling chips to start with.
The starting point will be the point where normal retailers finish, so yes, whatever the retailers offer, you can bet several dozen home builders have pushed it beyond number 11 for a fraction of the cost of a Cray.
At the end of the day, most do it for the fun of it. Yes the system can run quieter, and yes it might push another 30% out of the chips, but doing it to save money? Nope.
Having said that, you could quite easily and cheaply do it yourself by plonking your entire pc into a vat of cooking oil. You might want to take all the panels off, relocate the dvd drive somewhere a tad more convenient along with the power and reset switches and perhaps a USB hub. Oh and remove the fans. Hey presto one kickass chip fryer. No I jest, it really does work.
I dont wanna go all youtube , but , faaake! etc
I say this because the MB has no power plugged into it , nor is any of the dangerous 240v bits anywhere in sight. also no unsightly sata cables , or hard drives , or pci cards , or external cables , or external peripherals , or anything at all . in fact i could replicate the entire stunt within 5 mins of getting home tonight by dropping one of the MBs i have lying around in a fish tank
Why a fake? None of that stuff requires water cooling and the guy's just showing off what he's done. Orange dye's quite easy to add to water so the whole thing's not really a spectacular achievement. I doubt the rig would need a radiator either given the amount of liquid in it.
Pictures of it working would be nice though.
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