Outdoor iBook, sans backlight?

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Outdoor iBook, sans backlight?

I work at a university and occasionally in summer I can work outside. The only problem with this is that even in the shade, it is hard to see the screen on my 12-inch AlBook. My sister needs a replacement for her 600 MHz iBook, so I was thinking of buying her old machine from her for a few hundred dollars, stripping the paint from the top case, and removing both the metal behind the screen and the backlight so the sun has a somewhat direct path to the back of the screen. In reading about DIY projectors at http://www.lumenlab.com and elsewhere, at least in my head this would seem to work for a cheap machine for Terminal.app and web page viewing, all while working in the fresh air. I'm not worried (at all!) about color accuracy and OSX's Universal Access display options might help with visibility as well...

Has anyone tried anything like this or have any thoughts? Also, does anyone know if the backlights on iBooks are semi-translucent? If so, I suppose I could even try just stripping off the paint, taking out the metal, and then making a shade of sorts if I need to use this machine in comparitively dark areas. Maybe also have a frosted mirror to bounce overhead sunlight onto the screen?

Figured it couldn't hurt to ask...

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I know that the sun shines th

I know that the sun shines through the apple logo on my 12 inch powerbook pretty well, and that is going through the backlight.

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The amount of sun is what is

The amount of sun is what is washing out your screen, so allowing even more sun to get to the screen will only make the problem worse.

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Okay, maybe I'll get a hood f

Okay, maybe I'll get a hood for the machine while I'm at it...I slapped together a workable one out of a grocery bag, wire clothes hanger, and duct tape last year and that didn't really provide adeqate shade on my PowerBook. The iBook is a lot more dim.

The idea is that sunlight would be the backlight I suppose the machine would run a lot longer on battery, too.

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so try it already!

pull off the back of the display bezel and try it out! Let us know how it works.

dan k

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Re: Okay, maybe I'll get a hood f

Okay, maybe I'll get a hood for the machine while I'm at it...

If you get a hood, you won't need to pull the back off the display. A couple companies make hoods specifically for laptop use, and I remember seeing an ad in the back of Macworld a couple months ago for hoods specifically for PowerBooks. The hood will block enough direct sunlight from the screen so that the backlight will be sufficient.

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Solar powered laptop

No idea where I saw this, but in the last few days I did indeed see a laptop on the web running just this way. Dude had rigged a steel reflector behind the screen to project sunlight through the LCD. When I get my home computer back on the net, (grr inconsiderate housemates not payin gphone bill grr) I'll see if I bookmarked it.

Doing this would probably give you longer battery life, as you wouldn't be running the backlight. What would be even cooler would be to make it convertible, so you can still use the backlight indoors/at night. Perhaps the existing steel behind the backlight could be tilted back to catch the rays, using the backlight itself as a diffuser.

Watch out for creating any extra strain on the delicate cables in the display, either while hacking away or as a result of your final design.

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