Ben Heckendorn doesn't know what he's doing to me with all this awesome.
Benjamin J Heckendorn is a villainous individual. From where I'm sitting, it would seem that his purpose in this life is to craft gorgeous-looking and highly covetable custom video-game hardware that is both too rare and too expensive for me to actually own, while also providing a near-pornographic level of detail into the build process. I don't think I can quite articulate how badly I want one of his Xbox 360 laptops to call my own. Actually, I suppose I can: badly, but not badly enough to pull together Heck's regular asking price of $5k. That's how much I paid for my car , and that was nearly a decade ago. I haven't got a DIY bone in my body, so even in my imagination, the premise of me building one of my own results in either electrocution, hundreds of dollars in broken, disassembled electronics, or some combination of the two.
Heckendorn continues to taunt me with his latest , a second revision on his existing design for a Commodore 64 laptop. Beyond just shrinking the C64 into a "portable" form-factor, this thing has got some modern technology that you won't find in a stock Commodore, including an SD-based storage solution, as well as USB and Ethernet ports. While the majority of Ben Heck's custom work is done on commission these days, this particular project is going to be auctioned off for charity. It's hard to badmouth a charitable cause without coming off like a complete jerkburger, but it digs at my covetous brain to know that this sweet piece of business will likely end up costing more than it would normally. Does that make me a bad person? Most probably, yeah.
