Flashback to the Best of Growing Up Otaku

We’ve been hanging out here for quite a while now. Four years at GrowingUpOtaku.com, five years since I started calling this blog GUO, and seven years from its original inception as da Toad’s Pad. Every once in a while I get a creative bee in my bonnet and surf off across the tubes of the Internet in search of some new endeavor only to report back after a couple moths with a new project and a fistful of links showing you where you can try it for yourself. These are known around the GUO homestead as “Crazy Projects”. I thought it might be fun to take a look back the booty yielded by my previous voyages. If you ever wondered where all those pennies you kindly donate to the site by using our Amazon affiliate link go, look no further. I thank you.

Growing Up Otaku – Obviously the earliest Crazy Project here at GUO is GUO itself. This humble little blog has worn many faces over the years. From personal journal to family communications hub to baby blog to mini-IGN, GUO has worn a great number of masks and fulfilled several different roles over the years. Many of those gems from before we were all about smartphones and interactive entertainment involved baby poop. The standout from this era is would probably be Jumping the Pig.

Still, there’s always been one underlying mantra: Share the love. Love is cheap and easy to mass produce, so why not give away as much as possible? It may not always be obvious but remember: We don’t complain if we don’t care.

Baby Pic A Day – Think they group up fast? Sometimes. Here we gathered together photographic evidence that kids only grow fast is short, sudden bursts. Back before the Giant Fire-Breathing Robot Baby became the GUO mascot, we had a much squishier masthead. Taken on the best webcam small amounts of money could buy, this feature chronicles about 400 days in the life of then infant Baby Girl. The album, while still online, is a bit of a wreck owning to Google dumping everything you post to Blogger into a single folder and lacking any automatic sort functions. Still, if you’re looking for baby pics (really? still?), here they are.

Click on through as we discover YouTube, create comics, and attempt journalism.

Hackintosh Thrown in Trash Can Yields Hackintosh Pro

  Hackintosh (noun): A non-Macintosh computer running Apple OS X. – The Online Slang Dictionary

There are always great PC case mods popping up on the ‘Net, but this latest one takes the cake. And throws it in the trash. To spectacular effect.

There’s no doubt that Apple’s latest Mac Pro is a real head-turner. While the 6-core Xenon processor boosting up to 3.9Ghz and dual AMD FirePro video cards are enough to get this ol’ techno-geek salivating, it is the unique cylindrical styling that has garnered the attention of the masses. Of course the $4,000 price tag of this lil’ beauty places it far outside the range of most computer user’s justifiable budgets.

Enter intrepid DIYer sascha288 and his quest to place a power packed pill of a PC on his personal pedestal. sascha288 assembled an arsenal of modestly priced components including an Intel Core i3 processor and an AMD Radeon 7750 and, quite literally, threw them in a trash can.

Alright, maybe “threw” isn’t quite the right word. This brilliant ‘case’ has been extensively overhauled to allow for the computer’s I/O ports and fitted with custom fans and vents to mimic the vertical cooling solution seen in the new Mac Pro. It is an inventive reimagining of Apple’s revolutionary new form factor.

Check out the full build and tons of great step-by-step pictures (as well as a little Internet drama from the moderator of the forum where this build was originally posted) over on tonymacx86.com

Minecraft Sales Hit 14 Million on PC, 10 Milion on Xbox 360, and A Whole Bunch More on Mobile

So… Minecraft. You might have heard of it. Seems to be popular. Since its alpha debut as a java-based browser plugin the survival-adventure-LEGO set has sold 14 million copies for personal computer systems. This is especially astonishing when you consider that the creator’s own minecraft.net remains the only place to purchase it since the original release in 2009.

Furthermore, a port of the game to the Xbox 360 by 4J Studios has sold another 10 million copies in 2013. A PS3 version was released in December of that year and sold one million units in its first week. Adding to the already incredible sales number, Minecraft Pocket Edition has racked up another 11 million on iOS and Android back in May of 2013 when the company stopped giving out sales figures. Still, Minecraft Pocket has never left the top paid charts of either app store since release.

Don’t get Minecraft or just want to gush along with the masses? Below you’ll find Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, the feature-length Kickstartered documentary of the Minecraft phenomenon by 2Player Productions.