geeky blog: Sham Shui Po

Thursday evening after work i took a bus down to Sham Shui Po ( 深水埗).  Its famous for its computer/electronic shops.  As you recall, my laptop is in need of a new fan, so I found some time to run down to do some shopping.

As I neared my target, I saw encouraging signs:

OK,  but still a few decades behind,  I needed to keep going.

Eventually I found my target, the Golden Computer Center.  Its like the computer city + electronics mall + the game mall (all in Wanchai) only bigger and a lot geekier:

This place actually has a lot more components and bits and pieces, where as the ones in Wanchai sell more peripherals and systems.  Also the dirty secret of the Wanchai one is that most of the shops are in cahoots (multiple stores are owned by the same people/companies and all stock basically the same stuff at similar prices).  but this place seemed to be a lot more independent, small shops with more variety.


Case in point - this store was selling microcomputers and various components.  Its too bad I'm not teaching my Mechatronics course next spring. I could have made some cool shit out of this...

I found what i was looking for too:

Fans galore!

actually 90% of the fans they had were for desktop systems (big 12V fans, etc). They had some really over the top cooling systems too... 'heat spreader' metal cases to go on your DIMM RAM,  even some with water cooling for CPUs (meaning there are water tubes which  run into the computer case and circulate water over the CPU! talk about a disaster waiting to happen!)

I found one place that had a fan /similar to/ the one need to replace, but no one had the exact one.  I'm going to have to try to jerry-rig it to get it to mount in the same screw holes as the old fan I think...   So I decided to try looking for a secondary fan I could mount onto the outside grill to suck air out too. (they sell some obscenely small 5V fans... as small as 1" diameter even.

But instead I happened upon this lucky discovery from a Taiwanese company called EVERCOOL:


Its called the 'Evercool Fairy' (isn't this name a bit of an oxymoron!)  its a squirrel cage type fan that clips onto the grill over the cooling vent and sucks air out... basically assisting your existing fan (or in my case,   making up for the fact that my fan is crapping out).  You can tell it really works because the  air that comes out is quite warm. 

Of course to keep up with the latest geeky trends it also has some LEDs inside to make it look cool... unfortunately the black version i got has red LEDs and the white version (which doesn't match my laptop) has the blue LEDs.  I am a blue LED otaku (see the bottom of this entry for more info),  so I would have preferred blue!

One of the nice things is its relatively small so its much more portable than bringing my laptop stand around to keep my broken laptop from melting. :-P

Unfortunately the clips that secure it to the grill are too far apart for my ultra-portable fujitsu p7010, but i was able to jam one of the clips into the 'security locking point' and get it to stay on. 

So I haven't actually had time to replace the fan yet, but with this Evercool thing, I guess I can wait...


Addendum:  Bob wanted me to explain what I meant by Blue LED otaku... here are exhibits A-C:

A) Desktop cooling fan


B) Blue LED mod I did on the bud vase in my NB after I bought it


C) Strobing lights I put on my bike in Japan (video!).  I actually added some cool blue neon tubes later on, i have to go back and see if i can dig up some more pics sometime!

I even like to take pictures of things with blue lights on them... :-P