It’s no secret that I’m a technophile. While I am completely book-obsessed, and particularly interested in keeping books printed on paper (I do so love holding a book in my hand), I am also a huge nerd when it comes to technology. To give you an example, my television is connected to a media computer that I built myself and it runs Ubuntu Linux as its operating system; if you know not what that means, just rest assured that it’s pretty deeply immersed in the nerd-realm. I have been playing with the entrails of computers ever since my high school computer programming class had to build our computer lab out of outcast parts of machines that were already presumed dead. The end result: QBASIC and Pascal programming on 386s running Windows 3.1. Fast forward to today: I know computers pretty well.

But I decided to follow the path of a writer. Such is life.

For writing, I use my laptop — an Apple MacBook. About two years back I purchased the white model and while I was happy with my purchase, I wanted a little more from it. Over time, the white top case and keyboard became discolored and refused all methods of cleaning. Add to that the top case had a defect, as many of the MacBooks did, and cracked around the area where my right palm would rest. After buying and installing another white top case that again became discolored and cracked, I’d had enough. I wanted to trick out my typewriter.

Now it’s well known that writers have been tricking out their typewriters for years. Hemingway always painted racing stripes on the sides of his typewriters, and often added a sweet spoiler on the back to cut down wind resistance from his furious typing. I heard Faulkner had some sort of alcohol dispensing unit (think beer helmet at sporting events) on his typewriter. I’m stepping in the footprints of giants here.

What I wanted was my white MacBook to have a black interior. This is totally possible with my MacBook version; if you recall, Apple simultaneously released a black MacBook with the white one (and for some reason charged people $100 extra for the privilege of owning it). So what I did was I went online and through eBay I purchased a black screen bezel (that piece of plastic around the MacBook’s screen) and a black top case keyboard. I love taking apart computers, so doing this came easy to me. You can do it, too, and I suggest taking a peak at iFixIt for tutorials. You do want to be careful, though, as if your MacBook is still under warranty or AppleCare doing this may void these insurances. Most likely, if your MacBook is like mine, it’s long out of warranty.

But I wasn’t done there. Being the rugged individualist that I am, I wanted the little glowing apple on the reverse side of my screen to get some love too. So what do I do? Pop the screen out, of course, and poke around. The plastic apple on my MacBook version was covered with a white paint on its backside to aid in the white glow. I pulled the apple out of the shell, sanded off the white paint with fine grit sandpaper, and affixed red and green colored transparency paper to it. Reassemble it all, and look what you get: a tricked out, unique MacBook, that sets me apart (at least a little bit) from the overzealous hipster Apple fanclub. Hey, if I use this machine to get creative the machine itself might as well be creative too.

While I don’t have any pictures of the process, I do have some shots of what the MacBook looks like. The whole thing is pretty smart looking, if I do say so myself.