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Making Stuff Out Of Broken Computer Equipment?
Class Act Dynamo writes "Recently, my keyboard stopped working, so I bought a new one (nice cordless number, really excellent). I was about to throw the old keyboard out when I thought it would be interesting to take all the keys out of it and turn them into refrigerator magnets in order to have a simple 'megnetic poetry' type of thing going. As the fumes from the industrial strength glue went to my head during this project, I began to wonder what other types of craft-type projects people had undertaken with their unusable old perpherals and such. Then I began to wonder why there was a purple octopus on my couch. I decided to ask slashdot readers the first of these questions."
What about the good ol' Celeron Paperweight?
Because purple octopi like to watch TV too.
And yet half of the answers will be to the second!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Most computer have lots of useless parts inside...but hard drive magnets provide hours of entertainment!
Fun party game: Stick to magnets together with random body parts in-between. Not THOSE kind of body parts you sick perverts!
I have a purple dino, red monster, and a BIG red dog. But the cat in the hat is still my favorite.
I've got an old pentium 2 or so that I use to hold papers and notes on my desk. Then there's always the fun RAM keychains and motherboard clipboards I've seen around.
I've discovered a remarkable proof, but this margin is too small to contain it...
Kill the purple octopus, stuff it and mold it into a desk. Four tentacles for legs, two to hold a tray for the top of the desk, and two more to hold dual LCDs!!!
out of old HDDs http://afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeaker s.htm
I made a night vision panel out of an old LCD panel from my old laptop and a old sony handicam with Night Vision mode westcoastphreakers.eclipse-business.com
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
My cousin has made many, many things. She has turned old hard drives into clocks, PCB from old AT motherboards into a giant table, and AT motherboards (this time with all of the components left ON the board) into clocks as well. She has made various other things that I can't think of at the moment.
Her website, including links to some kickass PC mods that she had done, can be found here.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
I make computers out of them.
Even God makes typos.
Computer cases with clear sides make great hamster cages! Just make sure to file down the really sharp stuff. Add some tubes from case to case and papow! You've got your first Hamster-powered cluster.
-- dK
I'm working on my CowboyNeal shrine already!! Really, though, how much old pr0n do I have?
a classic use for old computer bits is making them into jewelry- things like capacitor earrings, pendants made out of those little copper-wrapped magnets, pins made from colorful heat sinks and interestingly-patterned chips.
They make good refirgerator magnets, as well. And if you're patient, you can make your own motherboard clipboard.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
Back in high school, there were art projects displayed in the library. I remember a few that were made out of hacked-up circuit board that were glued into interesting shapes and then painted black. It kind of looked like the ruins of a (modern) city or something.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There's always the classic-Mac aquarium. See some at The Apple Collection
Athlon 1.4Ghz BBQ.. ssssmokin'
A few years ago, there was a small store in my home town that sold all sorts of stuff made from old computer parts. 72-pin SIMMs made into ear-rings (Yes, they were paired with same capacity chips... otherwise it'd just be silly), that sort of thing. My favorite thing there was a lamp with the body and shade made from old mainboards. I just thought it looked cool.
The original, classic broken computer mod is probably still the best place to keep your purple octopus. Various references are available.
Breakfast served all day!
I think this is one of those submissions we should ignore and pretend doesn't exist... just like the squid.
I distinctly remember seeing someone selling "RAM Buddies" at a local art fair around here awhile ago. They basically took that really old ram chips (the one that used rectangular sockets), bent the pins outward, and stuck eyes on the front and a tail in the back so they kinda resembled little caterpillars.
is the one they put the printer to in Office Space.
PC Load Letter?
John Kerry is a Joke!
The air from my ceiling fan keeps it constantly spinning, so I'm happy. Might want to give it a try. Doubt it works well for whole keyboards, though. ;P
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
I suggest finding a microwave you don't particularly value and put your motherboard in it. If that doesn't entertain you enough, a light bulb can have an entertaining reaction.
I are winner
I'd imagine it would be difficult to write anything with only one of each letter.
There is a pile of 386's and 486's in my basement that could be considered as an art project...
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
A friend of mine a while ago would make neck chains out of old HyperSPARC and SuperSPARC processor modules, ala Flavah Flav from Public Enemy.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
The octopus wants to eat the keyboard cord.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
yeah, HDDs are the most useful eq.
they can be used as ashtray, weapon... and working one can be used to store some data on it too.
/ss
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The answer is three weeks.
Three weeks until your girlfriend gets sick of asking you to clean up the overflowing pile of old and unused components that's steadily taking over the office. Three weeks until you come home and find your monitor decorated, in a most Martha Stewart-like fashion, with superglued sticks of RAM and old CPU's.
Message recieved.. loud and clear. Over and out.
Back when I worked in the computer room at K-W Surplus (please excuse the horrid website, it isn't mine) we took this box of old 486DX chips and glued them onto the ends of these long thin plastic pencils. They made excellent back scratchers. We sold them for $0.99CA I think.
I stuck them to either side of the flap of skin between my nostrils. Going to the doctor to get neodynium magnets removed from your sinuses isn't fun.
I use my ex-speaker magnets for finding lost metal items.
My ex-cabinet houses 3 birds.
I use my earlier corrupted HD for slicing soft items after making some big changes in its circuitry.
I have mounted my CDROM's tray on wall, cut out a piece of plastic artistically and now it holds abt 10 pens, a cup of water, and upto 5 CDs, all separately in diff slots.
I take all the bits and pieces of old systems and strategically around my office on shelves, in boxes, and on the floor to give it the productive, lived-in look of a technological genius. I might just have them fooled.
1.) Tear apart old crappy computers nobody else wanted
2.) ???
3.) Profit.
I have a dead hdd that I keep meaning to turn into a desk clock.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
First of; I make my living buying discarded computer stuff and reselling it. A lot of this stuff is broken and gets trashed. When I do have time I tend to strip the stepper motors out of disk drives and printers as well as the printer guides for CNC / robotics stuff. UPS batteries are an excellent power supply.
However mostly I use discarded equipment to put a working system together again which can be used for all kinds of things: If you are handy with linux you can make excellent routers; web servers, media servers, a TIVO, CNC control equipment out of the oldest stuff.
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
Curse those evil octopi!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
* I have a motherboard from an ICL 286 (complete with EGA graphics card [8-bit ISA] and I/O card [16-bit ISA, connects to MFM hard disks]) hanging on my wall. I call it a "talking point".
* I have a friend who used an old keyboard to practice his martial arts skills. He eventually cracked the back board with a fingertip thrust, after a number of kicks and punches failed to have much impact -- apparently, they're flexible enough that a gentler but more persistent strike does more damage.
If you've still got the rest of the keyboard you can wire up the controller to some buttons and make yourself an arcade controller. If you're really ambitious you could even go the whole hog and build yourself one of these
You'll find the answer to this question quite a few times over at Mini-ITX.com.
The people there shove a mini-itx board into everything - the front page shows a Commodor 1541 drive and a Sega Master System.
Granted, some of them are absolutely horrible (There was this God-awful Mac SE mod that looked terrible, ill-fitting pieces, a huge cut for the optical drives, etc - though I can't find it, but I did find this beautiful one instead. Damn, suppose I'll stop doing my mod now hehe) but they give you a pretty good idea of what can be done with those little motherboards
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
The best I've heard is a gutted SNES system used as a tissue dispenser. Not bad, huh?
I never got around to doing anything with it, but one day my obsession with manual transmission vehicles game me the idea to make a "manual keyboard". This idea came about a year ago.
At first this had literally no practical application, however in the beginning of this summer I realized that, at least for me, if it was done right it could be very useful.
My prime thought being: typing numbers. When I program, or even when I am just typing. It's a pain to move my hands to type numbers, and if I'm trying to type them while still keeping the rest of my hands in the "home position" errors are too high for my liking. What if the "clutch" in my manual keyboard would allow you to type numbers, but on letters. I guess having a whole pedal on the ground devoted to this would be completely unecessary, you could simply put another key on the keyboard, perhaps just above the shift key.
It may be worthless and useless, but I still like the idea.
--Information Belongs To The World--
I have a P3 800MHz keyring after one broke at work and was a mere week outside of it's warranty. ;).
Fifteen minutes with some clippers and a soldering iron removed the pins and a further minute with a Dremel to drill a holy for the ring and it was done!
Unfortunately, 2+ years in my pocket have taken their toll on it - the core has been virtually destroyed and there are some nasty chips out of the side of it. Looks like I need to blow up some more hardware to replace it, an AMD64 would be a nice keyring upgrade
On a project to turn some old scsi drives into a MIDI instrument, I *LOVE* the sounds really old scsi drives make (think 4GB micropolis drives). Plan to use it in a composition :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Personally I've make a keyring out of a set of PCI bridge chips here I've also built coasters out of a cut up logic board and some plexiglass, similar to the ones at thinkgeek The light elements from old scanners are nothing more than CCFLs so there are any number of uses for them when you pair them with an old wall wart.
I use a dead HDD's magnet to hold all my spare change together in my pocket.
Old hard disk packs make excellent Klingon prayer wheels. BTW, the purple octopus is wondering if you're edible.
C|N>K
Currently I'm colleting stuff to put in my front garden as decoration and an ode to the tchnology. But remember to take all the boards out as they should be recycled. You don't want to have that high concentrations of heavy metals in the wild (your garden in this case). Also I'm thinking about a fishbowl from a monitor...
im hoping this wasn't an attempt at a first post, and rather something about being the first ever purple octopus to ever make it to his sofa without being disassembled and stuck back together with industial glue. (What type of glue is that anyway?, super?)
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I used a server case as a small pool for my gerbils to swim in. they found all the fans, holes and etc as a sweet deal to swim through and such. Much fun. Just... use a lot of packing tape. A lot.
THis horse is called "All Keyed Up" and was aprt of the 2003 "Horses on Parade" exhibit in Rochester, NY.
more pictures
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Personally, I got an old and LARGE 386 server from HP as a nightstand next to my bed. Quite sturdy and gives my bedroom that geeky/functional look.
Rest in peace Malin "looxn" Kristiansen. We miss you...
http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot//
I've been working on a project for a few months now, utilizing parts from old drives. I'm time deficient of late, but I'm hoping when I finish a current work project, I'll have more time.
All you tinkerer nerds out there, if you haven't looked into BEAM robotics, look into it. You can utilize a good deal of junk electronics.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
that, my dear friend, is what the sun-walkers out there call a woman
don't touch it, don't feed it, don't talk to it. If you stop washing yourself & brushing your teeth, it's supposed to go away by itself.
dunno if this matters, but you have all slahsdotters sympathy. We're standing right behind you like one geek. Let us know how it turns out.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I once had similar ideas for reusing the bits out of all the old PC's that collect around me (mostly P233's and desktop cases, for some reason, but I've got a PS/2 hiding somewhere).
:-)
Was going to use the old fans to make sure airflow went through my PC and even throughout the wooden cabinet that my PC is in so that it wouldn't get too hot.
Or:
Actually once crafted a primitive noise baffle for the exhaust fan from a PC by using an empty 5.25" casing and some defunct floppies arranged so that the air would zig-zag through the 5.25 case (off of a CDROM if I remember rightly, with the bits taken out).
Or:
The metal casing of an old PC is good for keeping all those ADSL routers, printer server boxes, ethernet hubs etc. that are on 24/7 but just get in the way when you're rereouting cables.
Bung them inside an old desktop case (even mount them in the drivebays or whatnot), run all the cables through the PCI backplates and power them off the inside of the power socket (even room for a power strip with a few "brick" power adaptors in there). If your stuff needs 12 or 5v, you could even run it direct off of the old PSU, I suppose.
That way, one box and plug powers all the silly peripherals but you haven't got millions of wires tangling and twenty brick adaptors stuck to the wall.
You can move the bits inside around so that you can see the LED status of things from the drive bays etc., can power from the power supply, can even re-use the PSU or case fans to make sure they have adequate cooling etc.
Or:
Some people try to hide their computers in their furniture (e.g. wooden cabinets/cupboards/desks), why not go the other way... convert the front of a desktop case to become a fold-open drawer or storage area.
Or:
See how many LED's you can fit onto the outside of an old PC case so that you can have that authentic "Star Trek" feel. Bonus points for them actually working, extra for flashing effects etc.
Or:
Build a race track using old PCI cards as barriers, upside-down motherboards as the floor and the balls from mice as the "cars", like blow football, only more geeky.
Take one old jalopy, a couple of hundred dead cards/motherboards/memory stix/etc., and a large bucket of epoxy, and mix well.
Instant Art Car.
Is it fascism yet?
A couple friends of mine went to an art fair in a division that went by the name of 'machinery art' or something along those lines. Anyway, the rules were simple. They were presented with 3 computers, including monitors, mice, keyboards, speakers, the works, a few other pieces of industrial machinery, and what came down to a couple baseball bats. They could demolish the materials in any way they say fit, to make something artsy fartsy. The result? I don't have pictures, but it ended up being a 6-foot, 70-pound behemoth that was reminiscent of the robot from Short Circuit. They named it Trogdor, and actually managed 2nd place after someone they swear had bought the judges. It wasn't actually functional (obviously) but it was darn cool looking.
Let me give you an example. I have been looking for weeks in the UK for a newer VAXstation (my first hunt was for the 4000/60, since everyone I spoke to US-side said these boxes are rather nippy but also exist in stacks in warehouses).. now there are about 5 companies here who sell the refurbished parts, but for at least four times the final price of US sales on eBay. I'm an hobbyist and student, and I want to learn about these machines, what made them successful, what ideas we can re-use from them, etc. - I neither intend to make a mint, nor can I afford to spend a mint on them.
So, for the sake of my sanity (and yes, this is a selfish request, but it will also benefit lots of geeks like me with similar interests, and we are geeks, right?), please, please, if you have some even mildly interesting hardware, consider offering it up to those who would willingly pay a fair price for it, or at least to ship it away from you, on eBay if you like, or better on some of the specialist newsgroups / boards. We will be eternally grateful.
It just so happens I have a nasty blood blister on my left-middle finger. Hard drive magnet accident.
:)
Not only are these things dangerous around your media they can physically hurt you as well. Also don't you DARE think about sticking them onto anything with a painted finish. I've warned you.
Not that that makes them any less fun of course.
Some of the wind power people use the magnets from the disk drive head actuators for making magnetos or converting motors to magnetos.
Sometimes they use the disk bearings for small mills, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A hot air paint stripper will surface mount components even more easily but it's hard to use surface mount components.
I think many people neglect to realize that the computer components were designed to operate in a closed box and to have very little direct contact with people. There is plenty of lead and other nasties in these components that I certainly wouldn't want to handle them frequently or for that matter my kids. Now things like keyboard key are obviously safe, but motherboards are another thing.
Since you're only using the keys from a single keyboard for your fridge magnets, a question arises: what's the longest english word that only uses each letter once? How about the longest sentence?
i use my former state of the art kyocera laserprinter as an anchor for the family boat
I'm sure I've seen "toys for girls" that look just like my MS wheel mouse. I'm sure it can't be that hard to plug in a vibrating motor and some batteries. If you make it a wireless one you could even use a caddy to charge it. And the best thing is that you don't have to worry about someone finding it in your desk draw. You just say it's an old broken mouse. Kill two bird with one stone. Hell you could do it and have it stay as a fully functioning mouse too.
Hrm... I have a few of those suckers stuck to my fridge...I have cracked many a nail trying to pry them off. Incredibly strong, even managed to stick a porkchop to my pridge using one.
You also can use the brushless motors from your defect CD-Drive for RC-planes.
Some made a business out of it. (Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
A local (for me, local = Des Moines) band (long disbanded, alas; they were quite good) used broken terminals as a backdrop for a performance. They weren't hooked up to anything (save the outlet, of course), but they were sufficiently fried that the CRT traced a pattern on the screen with no input at all.
a classic hack (i don't know who first thought of this) is to take a handful of 128k macs and line them up and run software to display the time of day, one digit per screen. you can get arbitratily complex, with or without seconds, with a screens for the colons (flashing or not), date, networked or not, dali morphing, etc.
I found my personal style at http://www.motherboardinc.com Check it out.
Say hello to my little sig.
I once made a necklace our of a dead mac mouse... just fed the end that normally attached to the computer back into the mouse case, and voila!
On a dare, I wore it out one night (while still in college). I took it off when a hot girl asked me why I was wearing a medic-alert necklace.
I do two things: I made a plexi.topped table, with UV Cold Cathodes shining onto the PCBs I had stripped of all 'high' components (capacitators and whatnot), illuminating the highliter-tracing done to every single lead on said PCBs. Gorgeous!. The other thing was a life-size mannequin built out of computer parts, kinda like the TRON suit, but not suitable for wearing...
Red would indeed be a better green, If only it was a little less yellow.
Since I'm too cheap to buy paintings and other shit for my naked walls I decided to hang defective components on the wall. Recently a laptop here broke, and it looks really cool with all the internal parts hanging on the wall along with a dozen open harddrives and some atx motherboards. For things like defective cdroms and such, just open them up a bit so people can see the guts. In most occassions, this looks really good in the room your computers are at.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Other then the tried and true practice of using toasted CDs as coasters, a friend of mine found old processors (of the socket 370 variety) made an excellent comb for his goatee.
At a computer place where I volunteer, they hand out old RAM chips cut in half as key chains. They slide the ring though the holes where the memory would click into place and slap a sticker with their name and phone number on the back. A big bowl of them sits on the front counter and the majority of people who come through take one.
telnet://zombiemud.org:3000
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And if you know what I'm talking about, you too, are a FF geek. :D
out of broken computer stuff, a full box of broken computer stuff, for the trash.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
In school i was always the geek, the odd one out etc...
Just check http://djsmiley.blogdns.com to see.
Sometimes i would play on this fact and i 1st made a keyring out of some old ram i found in the computer room. (now i find its been done before =[ )
Then, i found a LARGE ISA card and stuck that on a keyring, to take the piss. The 1st years were loving it, til i hit one of them over the head with it and split it in half =/
Over time this story of this keyring got around, with people asking to see it... Eventually i got bored and dumped it.
Then i saw hackers (the film people, the film!) and decided i wanted a new keyboard, for some cheap pc i brought of a friends uncle, i had 2 cans of spray paint... I just forgot to mask the letters off. So then i ended up with a keyboard, only i could use... It became the most "bling" necklace ever, as i walked into 6th form waring it around my neck!. (using the cable as a string).
This was the high light, but i also decided after we tried to fix the school computers (taking them apart and putting the working parts in the same one), and finding it still didn't work, that if i took lots of NON-working parts, and placed them in a broken machine, it might just work...
how ever it just got attacked by the mobs and left on a bus somewhere.
So, paint your keyboards and go hang out on the west side...
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I made a mod out of my poop once.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I found out that printers, especially those made by Lexmark, make very functional doorstops.
I purchased a lexmark printer last year and it turned out that they didn't make win XP drivers for it. I called tech support and they told me that I could use my printer if I reverted back to win ME or earlier.
Having no use for the printer, I affixed an appropriate sign to it expressing my discontent with lexmark and used it as a doorstop. It worked well for propping the door open a few inches, the flex of the plastic helped to bounce the door back so it wouldn't hit so forcefully, and best of all, whenever I was pissed off, I could just kick the printer against the wall.
Break the mindless monotony!
That Purple Octopus is on your couch because your floor is too cold. Try placing a small towel on the floor
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You can wire up a joystick and a few buttons to be used to interface an old keyboard into a MAME Machine's arcade control panel.
I made a digital picture frame out of a broken laptop.
http://free.one.picturehost.co.uk/DSCF0022.JPG
Harddrive magnets are great. In fact, they are rather expensive, and quite strong!
Even better, if you have a broken CD/DVD-player, you can extract the electric motor. It's a high-quality product. A lot of people convert them into small, high-performing engines on R/C aircraft. This is one example
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I find the best use for old equipment is to sit in my closet for years and years. I just can't part with my old equipment.... cough* PackRat! I really should get rid of some of it.. but maybe later. However sometimes I get crazy and make shadowboxes of my old stuff... for example http://www.dcliquidators.com/cpus.jpg
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
we have several walls lined with old motherboards.
_________ Help me get a PSP!
Making stuff out of broken computer equipment in nothing. Back in my day, we were making computer equipment out of broken stuff. And we were grateful! Seriously. Have you ever made hundreds of NAND gates out of broken TVs and radios from the junk yard and used them to build a huge binary calculator? With multiplication? You might laugh, but in my opinion that was something to be proud of.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Some of my co-workers use old 20 Mb HDD plates as teepads. Looks cool and does the job, too :-)
Ok, people. For the record, the correct plural of octopus os OCTOPODES! Octopi isn't a word. It comes from Greek, not Latin, so the i at the end doesn't work.
I'd love to get my hands on an IBM 3270 and turn it into a fishtank. I'd paint the inside of the case black, and use a green backlight.
I have pulled out random PCBs from various electronic devices and found some to be a yellowish-green UV reactive color. They look nice as decorations in a room lit with blacklights.
Break the mindless monotony!
I built a 4 color marble sorter out of two stepper motors from 5-1/4 inch drives, a photo-sensitive cell and some PC software driving parallel port inputs and outputs. It won $150 in a engineering contest at Auburn University.
Commonsound Collective (see 4MS section) has a line of DIY stompbox effects you can build in the privacy of your mad scientist laboratory.
4MS specifies electrical junction boxes as chassis since they are cheap and durable. I've always found them a bit too tall so I use dead hard drives for the chassis instead.
They do require a bit of grinding but the RF shielding seems to be far superior to junction boxes.
I recently pulled an old SCSI drive out of one of 3 dead DG Aviions I have (which make fantastic speaker stands, by the way) and have it all cleaned out to make a Noise Swash.
Noise Swash info
http://www.clvquilts.com/
Go to the gallery and see ones like "Mootherboard Meltdown" and "System Overload."
'megnetic poetry'
Ironically enough, you wouldn't have been able to spell megnetic with just the keys from your one keyboard, however you would have been able to spell magnetic.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Oh, and before you start asking stupid questions--no, it wasn't in Soviet Russia. But those NANDs and NORs--it surely was an impressive cluster of those!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Recently I took apart several old 2.4 gig full height hard drives and recovered the magnets. These guys are extremely powerful and will cause injury to fingers if careless handling two of them at the same time.
Anyways I found them to be very good stud finders as they will quickly locate the screws or nails hidden in drywall and are powerful enough to hold themselves in place.
I have taken two of them and fashioned a small clip on top and pulled a chalk line between them. This arrangment is great for creating a nail line.
Also a placed one in a small pocket in my electrical tool holster. Then fasteners and small parts stay attached to the outside making them very accessible. In fact, when working on something I just throw the small parts in the general direction of the pocket with the magnet and they stick.
I used Linux, TerminatorX a broken optical mouse and a $10 used turntable I bought from a grandmotherly looking ladies garage sale.
Picture here
Too bad the brushless ESCs are still so expensive ...
One time my cousin Walter got this mac stuck in his ass. True story. He bought it at our local mall, so the whole fiasco wound up on the news. It was embarrassing for my relatives and all, but the next week, he did it again. Different mac, same results, complete with another trip to the emergency room. So, I run into him a week later in the mall and he's buying another mac. And I says to him, "Jesus, Walt! You know you're just gonna get this mac stuck in your ass too. Why don't you knock it off ?" And he said to me, "Brodie, how the hell else am I supposed to get the one button mouse out ?" My cousin was a weird guy.
I built a 'Phased Plasma Rifle' in the 2 mega-watt range out of spare computer parts. Darn thing fired off accidentally and blew a hole through my PC monitor.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Not exactly computer equipment, but I made a robot out of a toaster. It beeped twice, zipped around the room for five minutes, and ran straight into the wall. Fun fact: The fire department will not respond if you say your robot toaster started a fire. Go figure.
This subject has been visited on Slashdot before.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
You can strip out the power supplies and with a few small mods turn them into stand alone 12 volt power supplies for other projects.
I use them for low-power Ham radio equipment.
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
I have somewhere, a five-ring binder that has a PC-board cover (three pieces, front, back and spine with metal hinges) The PC board used was recycled, but never had components soldered to it. My guess is it was a memoryboard for an old mini-computer.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
To make a sentence using the 26 letters only once, you need acronyms, initials and such.
Here ya go:
Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJIQ.
I don't use that particular sentence as much as this one though:
Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q.
More fun, leave the magnets mounted in the little cage they come in, and drop a quarter or other suitably sized metal coin between them and amaze your friends with the magnetic breaking action.
Why isn't there a purple octopus on your couch?
The question is not what age she becomes jailbait, but at what age she ceases to be
I keep old, broken processors/motherboards on my wall for decoration. I know, I'm a freak.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I'm God's appointed representative on Earth, and I know for a fact that there is no way that we would ever see a genuine post on Slashdot from God.
You, sir, are grand-delusional.
I've had ideas for things to do with dead hardware, but I dont have enough of it layin around. Where do you guys go to find good stuff when you have a project in mind? Right now I'm think I need some dead hard drives, which I could probably find if I jumped into a computer shop's dumpster. But it'd be nice to get my hands on something larger than a 3.5".
I broke a keyboard at one point (I smashed it into the side of a desk during a BSD using win 98) so now I have a necklace with '42' in keyboard keys, sanding helps a bit for the sharp edges
... heee... heeee... *cough* *cough*...
can't... heeee... breathe... heee... heee...
My brother and I took and old 386, a set of rail road spikes, and a large sledge and made a mobile for the IT office where he works. If you've never done it, pounding a rail road spike through a hard drive, CDROM, power supply, motherboard, keyboard, mouse, and various exansion cards is a lot of fun and great stress relief. Esp when they've been giving you hell and acting up.
I used to make clocks out of old hard drive platters and cases. Makes for a nice executive clock (watch the biuld quality) and great gifts for everyone. Also, since I haven't read the rest of the comments, use the logic boards off the bottoms of the hard drives for little notepads. Let everyone know you're a geek and use that to take notes with (if you're poor like me and don't have a PDA or handtop yet).
Cliff
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I'm thinking of the classic boat anchor. I've seen some big old Hitachi drives that would be perfect. Tower cases wouldn't have enough drag. Rob.
Install pegboard to entirely cover one wall of your computer room or office.
Mount the boards via standoffs to the pegboard.
Bonus points:
Can't believe no-one has pointed out that you can use some of the working parts from old machines and a piece together a nice firewall. I've set up a dozen or so Smoothwall firewalls http://www.smoothwall.org/ with 486 parts. My personal Smoothie is a P1 with 160 Megs of RAM. While it runs like a dream, the old setup, a 486-100 with 64 Megs RAM did the same thing. The only difference was the web interface speed.
5 7248&tid=172&tid=106
With everything that the smoothie box does, for the price of a couple of NICS and cables, I'm more than happy with the performance and security that Smoothwall brings to my cable connection. So don't be so quick to make yourself a key chain or clock, when you could be adding some security to your network and have Linux running 24/7.
Prior Slashdot coverage http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/08/21
On the wall above me... Stepper motor from a floppy drive (pretty!), Socket to Slot CPU adapter, and a harddrive - nice gallery :)
:) Logitech mice have that nice balls that collect dirt without letting it get to the rolls... so my new A4tech mouse rides on Logitech ball from a dead Logitech mouse. get a nice battery of fans taken from old power supplies, place them on your desk, power them up, really handy on the hot days. Amiga joystick? On parport interface. Etc, etc...
I actually took an optical encoder from an inkjet printer and used it in my thesis work. (you see, it pays better to buy 2 printers and take them apart to remove the encoders than to purchase one such encoder from a distributor...) - same about sliding axis of the CD-rom head (try to order a REALLY hard 3mm diameter axis somewhere! Good luck!)
Diodes from the power supply work well somewhere in the car electronics.
Floppies... Really nice plastic! So many uses!
But usually I take things apart and use them in other computer related stuff. You know, 486 can be really quiet if you detach the original cooler and radiator and attach an athlon radiator -without- any cooler instead...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Platters from dead hard drives make really cool sounding wind chimes. They also develop an interesting patina after a little bit of outdoor weathering.
..but I've made a lot of stuff out of left over electronic components; for instance, Dolby, the Stereo Bug. But he is form without function. (Though he does emit good chi.)
cut the cables off, put them both behind the rear tires of a front-wheel-drive car. roll car back onto keyboards, engage emergency brake tightly so rear wheels stay locked over the keyboards. put car into gear, slide around and do donuts on your new plastic "car skates".
People make weekend /. stories out of broken computer equipment all the time...
One day when I was bored I took two hard drives apart and wanted to make a windchime out of the platters. I found that the platters didn't actually make a loud/nice sound when they collide, so I ended up making a wind chime out of the circular metal washers that seperate the platters from each other instead. They make satisfying "ding" sounds when they collide. They are now hung from the motor that spins the platters. Also I made a keychain out of one of those top panels with the screw holes that hold the platters down, and the insides of the covers of Seagate hard drives make nice mirrors. =)
read the bunni comic
Seriously though ... I have 8 spare PCs from my last job when the company shutdown. (Outsourced EVERYTHING to India!)
:-)
m /
I arrange 5 spare PCs in a configuration for a weight bench.
Mathematically, PC case height = 2 times PC case width. Also, the PC case is certainly strong enough to hold your upper body laying on your back, plus an additional 150 lbs of dumbbells. PCs make a great benchpress bench. Perfect height. Perfect width.
Besides, can you think of any other useless usage for PCs since the software programming jobs are now gone forever?? lol!
H1B Visa FRAUD: OUTSourcing - Dr Norman Matloff
1) GOTO http://www.hannatroup.com:81/USA/20040120_Dean.ht
2) CLICK ON "Subscribe to Dr Matloff's newsletter"
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
P-P-Powerbook!!!
Wasn't really me, but I laughed my ass off reading the story. :)
There are always the classics. Mine is a Mac SE model and has been working flawlessly since 1997.
I had two broken which I used together with a very old but still working laundry machine to build a typewriter.
I donated it to South Africa and those poor guys have now a decent perspective of getting an honest typist job.
Ah, the joys of contributing!
My girlfriend who is a mechanical engineer by training made me a keychain by chamfering out a DIMM. It sometimes pokes when it is in my pocket, but otherwise I like it
http://www.tvdsb.on.ca/banting/ICE3M/unit6/floppy/
There was too much local Technet and MSDN cd's which we didn't use at all, stuff like original IIS 1.0 Koreans or Visual Basic 4 Albanian.
It was collected on 3 larg plastic bags as bulk garbage, waiting for someone to get paied in order to just transfer them to trash.
I was thinking of using one of them under my cofee cup. Kindda geek stuff when you put your cup on a Japanees Visual C++ 4 CD, I thought. So I asked the manager if I can have some of those 'garbage' cds.
He looked at me with a 'Master-to-slave-look' but confusing, trying to understand how can someone ever ask for something like that. Well I got some anyway and consequently used some of them at home with the same purpose which in turn was discovered by my fellow geeks and they asked if they can have some too!
In less than 3 days I was spending some times daily to look through the plastic bags and find some 'special orders' by my friends, like '-hey can i have a japanees Visual Fox Pro?...' and I even went to: 'well believe me danny I searched them all there is no any [country_name] left anymore, do u want a [another_country_name]?...'
At The end they offered me to have all 3 bags at once, in order to stop wasting my work time everyday looking through them which I accepted immediately!
Every christmas we make a tree at work out of dead motherboards and cards with a broken monitor tube for a base and strung with broken cables. No pictures to hand though, sorry...
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
I've scavenged a couple of analog VU meters from an old tape deck, and I'm thinking of mounting them in a walnut case for that Victoriam elegance, and hooking them up to the HDD activity light and the NIC activity light in my main box. They need a suitably sized resistor in series to drop the voltage down to a useful range, but that shouldn't be hard. My other project is to take my firewall machine (PII-233 vintage) and mount the essentials inside an old Heathkit tuner case. I'll then connect it into my stereo and rip my CD collection onto it, controlling it by VNC or some such from the main box.
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson
I have a friend who used some hard drive magnets in the gas tank of his '65 Mini so it would collect all the bits of rust and metal to it instead of feed them through the pump and clog up his fuel filter. Mind, it would have been better to replace the tank...but hey, it's cool.
I have a laptop that died about one hour after this article was posted. Any ideas about what to do with it? Maybe...
Use the screen as a window (less expensive then buying a new one!)...
Use the wires as little twisty-tie things...
or...
Use the plastic parts + some stuff from http://www.newegg.com/ to build a new one!
I have a shitload of VERY accurate stepper motors from old harddisks and floppy controllers - those would cost a fortune if i ever intended to buy them. Also high voltage capacitors and fans from old power supplies, led displays from old cases, assorted electronic parts from old motherboards and hardware.
One man's junk it's another man's treasure!
I work on different art projects, and one of my current projects involves using parts savaged from chucked out PC's, printers, montiors, and the like.
My carrying structural element is a plastic milk bottle, common down under.
Out of all this and with the help of a black marker, I create little Milkbottle People (old CD's are great for ears).
I wanted to make people smile, when they see them. Thinking especially of kids. Then at night I go around, and hang them up in different places. Trying to integrate the Milkbottle Person, with its environment (e.g. make them look at something specific).
In another project, I use broken bits of circuit board to draw portraits. This is more difficult, and to be honest, I haven't managed to create a satisfying object yet.
I have also used the discs of hard drives, to create a mirror for a geeky friend of mine, who needed a little mirror for shaving.
Last but not least, I use the empty cases to build my shelves, desks, and other non-secific-use objects (coffee table, morph, laptop table, morph, lamp stand,...). Besides the fact that I don't have much money to my disposal, I can't be bothered with worrying about my furniture every time I move. Which I seem to be doing a fair bit.
Yeah, too bad quarters aren't magnetic. Moron.
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but U.S. currency contains no ferrous metals...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
http://www.ipcop.org
more configurable, larger community...'nuff said
I used to rummage through Wean Hall (@ Carnegie Mellon University) during the wee hours in studio. I would find old computers dumped out in the hallways. I took them apart, screwed all the motherboards into the wall behind my studio (architecture) desk. I then plugged in all the ISA/PCI cards I found, and used them to hold small things like lead pointers, lead, pins, and other drawing and modeling supplies.
My dad is going to build a clock out of all the different kinds of media he has worked with over his career.
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
How about a video wall?
I like to make containers to hold my chips out of my old wireless antennas. I also like to cook my noodles with some of the other old computer parts.
Me and a few friends brought a bunch of old hardware down to a farm one of my friends family owned and went way out away from any other people. We stacked the hardware against a hill and the pulled out an impressive array of firearms and plenty of ammo and spent the afternoon shooting the computers. It was quite fun and quite a mess to clean up afterwards.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Looks like Apple had been planning the Aqua interface long before any of us realized...
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
My wife makes and sells custom collages out of old parts... typically framed 3' x 4' works of three-dimensional art.
Kewl in hi-tech lobbies, conference rooms, offices etc. Much better than sending the stuff to a landfill.
See example.
This person is plastering his wall with failed and used cd/dvd's
http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=92727
I reprogram old telecommunications supervisory cards and re-use them as digital clocks.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Good ol' TVGA 8900... :) Yep, 1MB RAM in that SuperVGA (wow) card. Enough to play SimCity 2000 (therefore, enough for everything! ;) ) I remember it wasn't hard at all to drill it. My father did it, using the regular drill we had at home.
;-)
The nice thing is that it is a small chip, rather discrete. Doesn't look geeky to non-trained eyes, and it's instantly recognizable to those of Our Kind.
The filesystem is the package manager
Collecting old parts to make a set of plate mail, also using aol CD's to make a lamp+shade.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Trying to be as green as possible, and not wanting to toss old circuit boards in the trash and introduce all those noxious chemicals into the environment, i gut my old electronics of their PCBs (including dead computers) remove all the dangling wires and spray paint them all funky colours. Then you can do almost anything with them. I like planning sculptures with them or drill them onto plywood to make art pieces. I like the robot man in my living room made out of 80s era mobos and modems.
That got me to tear up an old hard drive, magnets used in there are likely the most powerful ones you'll find at home. They are usually placed in some metal assembly, keep that with the magnet! It helps contain the magnetic field mostly inside the assembly. If you remove it, the magnetic field spreads way further, can erase magnetic media fairly quick, and distort CRT screens (permanently, if you're not careful). Also, watch your fingers! I kid you not...
MacQuarium, baby!!!
Honestly, other than using hard drive platters as chimes in my Computer Store, this has been it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Actually, the English system for pluralization is quite simple compared to many languages. We do in fact have a fairly regular pluralization scheme. There are several exceptions to the simple -s/-es pluralization, but take a look at some other languages. Latin has 5 different declensions, each with their own pluralization. Even with this many classes, there are still exceptions. German pluralization is very complex. Nouns may pluralize with -n, -en, -e, -er, or by remaining the same (there may be even more, my German is a bit rusty) based on the ending, and sometimes involves a vowel shift somewhere else in the word. Old English, like these other languages, had several noun classes with several pluralization schemata. It is only due to the Normal conquest in the 11th century that Middle English and Modern English are as simple as they are in this regard. English during the Norman occupation was a language of the common people, with Norman French being the language of court. This led to a lot of simplification in the language. The words that have irregular pluralization are generally the result of one of two scenarios. If the word is Germanic in origin (as are all of the examples you gave, as well as many more: child, sheep, deer, fish, ox, etc.) then generally is has kept a version of it original plural because it was so frequently used. Each successive generation could hear the "proper" plural frequently and emulate it, while being corrected by their parents if they improperly pluralized it. This would not happen as frequently if a word was not used as often. We can see this even now. We are much more likely to know that the proper plural of child is children than we are to know that the proper plural of matrix is matrices. The other branch of irregulars are words that were imported from another language, such as octopus (Greek in this case). I don't think that the person (or persons) who corrected the pluralization of octopus were doing so to make fun of the individual who pluralized it as octopi. I know when I found out that the plural was octopodes, I was highly entertained, and told lots of people about it, because it is one of those instances where many of us (myself included, in this case) try to sound educated by using the "proper" plural instead of saying octopuses (which is a totally acceptable plural, by the way), and it turns out that octopuses would have been closer to correct. We just overgeneralized a rule that applied to Latin loan words and used it with something that is not from Latin. Also, I disagree with your suggestion to strike all irregular plurals from the English language. Language is a free-flowing thing. For years, countless people have tried to change language to suit them and what they see as logical, it just doesn't work. If you were to succeed in your vision there, we would not really be speaking English, but rather a created language based on it. But don't worry, we seem to be moving closer to regular pluralization. A lot of the acedemic imports from Greek and Latin are at least beginning to get -s and -es endings. Children and feet are probably going to be around for quite a while, but time will probably regularize many of the less-frequently-used irregulars. OK, now that I am done with that frightfully long and very off-topic soliloquy, let's get back to using computer parts in innovative ways.
A friend of mine had a keyring made out of a chunky EDO memory stick sawn in half. It looked very cool (well, if you're a geek anyway). I think EDO sticks even have a hole drilled, so you can just clip them on a ring.
Dear AC,
Thanks for the tip.
Dad
There was a small craze when 1 meg memory chips got cheap, to glue the old 256K simms together to use as a pencil holder for your desk. I had one for a while, but I don't know where it is anymore.
Personally, I've made an aquarium from an old monitor, and countless clocks from 3" and 5" HDD's. I've also made a few photo frames from old laptops. Usually I end up giving them to friends and family since they're sort of first to request. I've also made the (already mentioned) keychains from ram chips, but I can't think of what to use all the HDD magnets for. I also have a ton of HDD, misc PCI, and MB PCB's that I can't decide what to do with. I've seen cufflinks on Thinkgeek, and clipboards a few years back, but I hate ripping off all the components from the boards...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
My dad is a technical desiner for an orthotics unit, and I was brought up surrounded by bits of interesting electronics, and love making them into little trinkets.
;)
I use alot of old DIMMs and SIMMs as zip tags, and have a truckload of old 486's and Pentiums that I'd love to turn into keychains (if only I could find a drill bit that can punch through that ceramic!)
My old mouse mat was a recycled PCB (no components) that was about the size of an ATX mobo, but it doesn't work nicely with optical mice.
Incidentally, the PCB was bought from a guy going under the name of Electrickery. For those of you who live in London, he has a stall on the Spitalfields Market (nr. Liverpool Street) where he sells a pretty amazing collection of lamps made from recycled PCB's of every shape, colour and description - well worth a visit (no website I can find unfortunately) if you're looking for an interesting light feature to hide that CRT-tan
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Calamari at a nice Italian restaurant - about $16.99 or more.
The look on your 10 year old's face when you have an octopus on your fork and then eat it; priceless...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I made this a few years ago: http://www.particlesphere.com/gallery/animeart/Lai n_Assemblage_1
particlesphere.com - quantum
After watching those commercials for that Ionic Breeze air filter, I got to thinking it wouldn't be too hard to make my own air filter using fans from old power supplies and cases. One applebox, 8 fans, 1 power supply and a carefully cut piece of fabric later and I had a pretty decent air filter. Just cut holes for the fans in the box, connect them to power supply, and stretch fabric over open top of box. Works like a charm.
Also, I use heat sinks as handy desktop business card holders.
I support a lot of public schools, and I have a master building key for most, which are kept IN the school. I use 72pinn dimm's as keychains (use the existing hole), so when I loose it (not good to do with a master key), everyone knows who's it is.
Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q.
Not bad, 26 letters, 1 hyphen, 1 apostophy, and 1 period. Unfortunately you failed, there aren't 4 space keys on the keyboard.
Better luck next time!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Usualy when I come along a old case to a useless computer I take them to the shooting range and pump a box or 2 of 9mm ammo in to it.
Last time I did this it was a early 90's Gateway pc. Just so happen a group of WV state police officers were there and got the biggest kick shooting this poor case for a about a hour.
This Sig for rent.
...when it turns out that the octopus isn't quite dead yet? That one'll stick with your 10 year old until his dying day. (-:
BTW, you could get squid rings about the size of a truck tyre, but won't because squid use ammonia to adjust their bouyancy, and the larger squids use more than the littlies. Windex on a stick, yummo! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My gf likes to pull apart old computers. She wears ram in her hair (on a head band), and has installed a cpu fan in a pair of pants (rigged up to work with a battery). Those pants also have a number of resistors stitched down the seam as a binary representation of the asci characters: 'V', '=', 'I', and 'R'. She is currently working on using old motherboards (and other components) to create body armour.
The 5.25 inch floppy disk drives are great because they contain nice stepper motors and they are very sturdily built. They also contain some a rotating platters which you can use to build interesting stuff with. By gluing a jar to the rotating platter you have a nice mixer (if you tilt the contraption slightly). We did exactly that back in school to mix gunpowder (teachers not knowing).
><////>
Known as LogLan in a previous incarnation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually one of the reasons english is so screwed up is cause it's such a bastardized mix of so many languages. Including French. When France conquered England they banned the speaking of English. So of course people still spoke it secretly but had to use French for day to day use. When the French were finally kicked out of the island and English could be spoken again it was mixed in with french.
My friend used to use a 486-DX2-66 chip as a comb. Worked pretty well too as I recall.
I always cut the number pad from keyboards and velcro them to anything that doesn't already have one, like old microwaves, bedroom door, old phone, etc.
I've seen quite a few hard drive clocks; those are pretty cool on your desk!
Sweet, I just drilled a hole in a celeron i had laying aroung (i wasnt alive to see anything much older) and now i have a pinpin keychain. Very east to drill through the side, andd seems pretty strong. Nice Idea!
water. jet.
Seriously. Take it to a shop nearby, and have them cut a hole whatever size you want at whatever location you want. There are many places that cut steel, ceramic, or stone regularly.
Might cost a few bucks... But hey.
I comb my moustache and beard with an old DX66.
Works great.
Canadian currency also has a quarter, which is affected by magnets. I'm sure there's many other countries with quarters too.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My Wife once made me watch a a movie where some guy thought Windex was good to cure all kinds of ills [I was gonna put a link here to some gross skin condition, but didn't want to slashdot anyone]!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Actually, isn't all computer equipment broken?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Then I began making lamps out of translucent parts. ISA cards, some PCI cards and mobos up to around the early pentium era tend to have lots of open, translucent area on them which gives a nice green (sometimes yellow, somethimes orange) glow when a light is behind them. One type of lamp uses four identical cards bolted to a small metal plate to form a five-sided box. I mount a light on the metal plate, then it can be either a hanging lamp (metal plate on top w/ light shining down) or a table lamp (metal plate on bottom, light shining up). For the table lamps I use 5-1/4" floppy drives as the mounting base.
For a wall sconce I cut a sheet of sheet metal from an old case, bend it to form a three-sided box and bolt on a mobo to from a four-sided box that's open at the top & bottom. A flourescent tube mounted on the metal back of the box shines through the mobo and casts lights out the top and bottom of the lamp.
Another kind of lamp I make from CDs. I get about a seven inch tall stack of CDs, bore out the center hole to 1-1/2 to 2" in diameter, epoxy the whole stack together and mount a small flourescent tube inside the stack. This gives an interesting effect as the light shines out radially from the edge of each disk.
Just for giggles I put several of them into an art show at a cafe. They have long ago taken the pictures down but here is a link to a story that describes some of the pieces better than I do.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
You can make quite interesting ancient-Egyptian-looking (sort of) necklaces out of various resistors. Packages of new ones, to be had cheaply at the Shack, are better for this purpose than recycled ones.
We have a Mac-Quarium here in the house, created by my son. All I can say is that it's a mixed blessing. If you decide to build one, cultivate the friendship of the person who cuts your glass for you--you'll be seeing a lot of him. It has leaks despite the best prescribed adhesives. It also won't accommodate the heater, filter, and aerator needed for any sort of interesting tropical fish, so you're pretty much limited to a goldfish or two.
I believe ours has become a Mac-Terrarium for that reason.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
me and this other tech at a mac repair shop were taking apart a dead Umax scanner one day, and had a handful of parts- a motor, a couple of switches, a power supply, a flourescent lamp, and a big metal bar.
The motor was dead, or at least we couldn't get it to work, but it seemed the power supply was still putting out voltage, so when we hooked it up to the flourescent lamp it turned on! The possibilities...
Being a repair shop, we often had to dim the lights to do monitor adjustments. The other techs (not having night vision goggles) would have to stop their work and wait through this.
So, connect the dots- We got some drywall screws, attached the flourescent bulb in it's housing to the bottom of a shelf over the bench, hooked up the control panel from the front of the scanner to the power supply so when you held down 'SCAN' the light would come on. The best part was that the buttons were some kind of varistor, so the power to the bulb was variable, a pressure-sensitive dimmer switch! Of couse we also made a real flip-switch so you could turn on the light without having to hold the button down constantly.
We kept the metal bar around beat the sales guys away when they came back to try and sell our tools to the customers...
-mike
Database ---- Databi???
--- skorpion_of_ranax
"A computer without a Microsoft OS is like a dog without a brick tied to its head"
I want to make a Tie Clip, Cuff Link, and Finger Ring Set. of small IC chips and surrounding PC Board.
Probally end up taking a jewelery making course at Oakton CC
I can;t seem to come accross any of the Artsy Types that though to make jewely sets
I used to have a nice little Macintosh Classic footrest, but then I upgraded to a Iris Indigo footrest (with dead clock battery). I've also seen a larger old SGI machine used as a coffee table. Hurray for CPU furniture!
Nickel can also be magnetic (though 1/20th the amount of iron). So a nickel might work.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I have been smoothing out the pins and selling old 64k memory sticks with key rings in the holes with great success. It is especailly good seeing as I can can get a handfull of them for $0.25.
I bought a cool book that shows how to build robots out of parts from old floppy, CDROM and hard drives plus some other stuff.
Check it out at http://junkbots.solarbotics.com/
When somebody wants to do her, duh.
My friends sister once gutted out a dead monitor and managed to shape various internal parts into flowers and little bees and such then she arranged them in the monitor to make the monitor look like a picture frame with the flowers and such kind of popping out of it. It was really neat.
I still have some earrings made out of a pair of decapped Motorola 68331s with clear epoxy over the chip "to bring out its natural beauty and to highlight the golden tone of the connecting wires", as I wrote in the ebay description when trying to sell them (unsuccessfully).
Speaking of decorations, if you go to CompUSA, they sell all sorts of decorations made out of old PCB blanks. Which is kinda lame. Because, if you ask me, the nail-sharp components are what makes old broken PCBs the useful decor items that they are. Where I lived a few years back, we had a wall in the living room clad in old PC motherboards. That is, I nailed some (a lot) old 386 and 486 motherboards to the living room wall.
Then we decided that that was too geeky, threw away the motherboards, and re-decorated the wall by hot-glueing a 1000 CDs to the wall. In case you're wondering, the CDs were free, a thrown away defective production run, 1000 count, found on the sidewalk next to a CD factory.
When I had a job in Unix sysadmin at a library we had to take down an old 8ft phone cabinet and replace it with a box the size of a TV. I took the circuit boards out of the old cabinet, grount the backs smooth, drilled them, and wired them together into a suit of armor.
Unfortunately, I didn't weigh the suit before I put it on; I ended up having take parts off and wear a half-suit because the full suit weighed almost 100lbs!
In a similar vein, UV-erasable EPROMs make great earrings.
for *enclosing* paragraphs, not ending them (there is a difference).
It'll make thing much easier when you wake up to 1999 and start using CSS..
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Ferrous metals aren't neccessary to the demonstration of inductive braking. The relative motion of the coin to the magnets induces eddy currents in accordance with Lenz's Law. The eddy currents generate their own magnetic field opposed to that from the magnets, causing the inductive braking effect.
With strong magnets like those found in harddrives, the effect is quite pronounced with a simple coin.
Please refer to this article for more information and links.
Am I the only one who read this as...
Then I began to wonder why there was a purple octopus in my Crotch
Good thing you posted as an AC, because the coin need only be conductive to exibit the inductive braking effect caused by eddy currents induced in the coin by motion relative to the magnets.
Doesn't matter. Magnetic braking is caused when conductive material is moved through a magnetic field. The induced current causes a resistive force in the moving metal, slowing it down. This works very well even in completely nonferromagnetic material such as aluminum.
Magnetic braking is in fact used in vending machines to slow coins by just a certain amount, to test against slugs. Wrong alloys will be slowed too much or not enough; either way, they can be rejected.
See question and answer #14 here for more details.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
I'm getting too much noise trying to search for it, but wasn't there some kid (young guy) that placed pretty high in a science fair by building a working solar oven out of AOL cds?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I squirt butane fuel into every broken computer part i have, flambe, then hang it from my ceiling or throw it on a table somewhere as art.
There were a few guys who ripped all the platters out of the harddrives, put them all on a metal stick, made them spin really fast, put the stick of platters at the start of a corridor, and launched the platters at a high velocity rolling toward targets at the other end of the hall :D.
Handicam's in the US use NTSC. Most laptops use a propritory digital parallel interface. Most are VGA and above. They DON'T use the slow television sweep speeds. Unless they used a scan converter, broke out RGB analog and converted it to RGB digital, I doubt anything as simple as connecting the output of a camera to the input of the LCD display happened. Using a portable DVD player with a video input would be more believable. Getting consumer NTSC video into a laptop display has never been an easy patch.
Better night vision can be had with an IR sensitive monochrome security camera and IR LED floodlight. Find a camera with a removable IR filter or one without one made for IR use.
The truth shall set you free!
I took keyboard keys, pasted them onto cardboard so it read a certain message, and I painted the cardboard artsy colors....
If I had them, I'd mod you up. I've played around with laptop LCD panels before and never even got off the ground. I know this is impossible unless you drop a crapload of cash into an ADC and somehow tweak it to work with the panel. By far NOT an easy thing to do.
Take old motherboard, apply pressure across it with a sledgehammer, screw to wall near door, and finally humor pizza delivery people into thinking it *really* still works.
Actually, France never conquered England.
The Normans managed it in 1066, but Normandy was a Duchy and therefore a separate nation at the time. The Normans spoke their own language (Norman-French), which is what was forced on the English people
I made a table out of a disk platter.
Yes, one platter.
Yes, it is that big.
Yes, measured in feet.
No, I don't know where to get one this decade.
What barbarians you are. It's octopodes.
I am guess you or someone you love (or at least someone you live with) is a Detroit RedWings fan, as I can think of no othger logic answer to why you would have a purple octopus on your couch.
some?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Was I the only one who was left wondering how much poetry you can write by using each letter only once? My guess is that vowels are the limiting factor...
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It looks like the Mac users are one step ahead of the PC folks again. Check out this site. Mac Aquariums Yes folks why settle for XFish when you can have a real live world behind your screen. (Imagine putting a Keyboard in front of one and watching people trying to shutdown your "screensaver".
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
nt
...The phallus with the clit stimulator is pretty popular.
Thank you! I'm flattered. I finally got some good PR.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Polipo is octopus.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
to stop sniffing glue.
I like to keep my important driver disks held together with hard drive magnets.. it works great! Picture
you need to replace the paper, whatever you are printing is a different format than what you have paper for... I work for a multinational company and get this whenever I try to print an A4 sized print and only have standard 8.5 x 11 loaded. there is some way to bypass it, but it probably depends on the printer. Same thing might show up if you ran out, but I'm not sure.
Ah, but space is a character, not a letter. So according to the original challenge, this is a success.
Never mistake "can" for "should".
OK so it's not a *working* robot. My brother gradded from comsci and I couldn't think of a decent gift. In the end, I grabbed some CPUs, and ISA lan card and some SIMMs and made them into a human-sort of form. The head was an old mouse, one hand was the read-write arm from a HDD, and the thing stood up on top of HDD platters, with headsinks glued onto them to take the SIMMs and make it stand up. He loved it.
put some sticky felt on the bottom of those old 3.5's and set your drink on them. if you actually still use floppies for real data ... well, i can no longer hang out with you... but also, you should mark the ones that are for drinks (write COASTER on them with a sharpie) so drinks don't end up on the real ones. my roommates lost some homework this way after i spread felt-coated floppies all over the apartment's flat surfaces. haha... serves them right for not getting a flash drive or something...
Pull the platters of hard disk drives and make wind chimes.
Forget the motors, there's a LASER inside them!
I once had an old Intel P1 chip dangling from the rearview mirror in my old car. The only problem with it was that whenever it would swing around, the ceramic corner would knock tiny chips of glass out of the windshield. Never stopped me from continuing to use it though. ;-)
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
A few dead cases, bolted to a decent sized piece of board, with random other components and other industrial tat stuck to them, makes for a fantastic Necromunda/Warhammer 40k game board.
Using multiple smaller boards makes for easier storage, and the ability to change it all around.
questions?
No one over the age of 12 has become fluent in Navajo. I believe there been attempts to document it since the 50's, but I'm not sure how successful that's been.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
It's a big waste of our time to keep using senseless languages. Esperanto is fully developed, totally consistent, and consequently actually more expressive than languages like english.
http://www.esperanto-usa.org/
not exactly.... 1937 Pennies were made of steel because of the copper shortage. (I know, I have some)
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
...Money. There's this thing called "Ebay" and this other thing called "junk collectors"
Took a couple of surface mount ICs and pushed the ends of the chip through the lapel of the jacket from my business suit. Bent the pins over on the back so it laid flat.. presto! Geeky lapel pin!
:-P)
:-P
Did the same with my camera strap- adjusted it to just where I wanted, then poked a couple surface mount ICs through the strap and bent the pins over flat on the back, and it keeps the strap from sliding, plus adds instant ID for my camera... (once was able to positively ID it as mine based solely on the chips... too many other models similar to mine to ID it else.
Took keycaps from a few old keyboards and used them along with some computer candles for designer cake decorating for some geek friends of mine: spelled out "Happy Birthday " for each of them using the keycaps.
Had a friend take one of my old 386-to-486 upgrade chips (had a cool metallic green heatsink) and poke it through the pocket on a sport jacket- looked really cool.
Also used the IC chips as decorations for backpacks while at school. And zipper pulls, etc.
RAM chips (SIMMs) made good keychain pulls, but only if you didn't want to put the keys in your pocket afterwards.. kinda uncomfortable.
I'm also seriously contemplating taking some resistors and capacitors and making myself some drop earrings, and possibly a necklace as well.
And I tore apart an old hard drive, magnets work extremely well on the fridge.. (bwaa haa haa) and the rest of it makes a good wall decoration. Or take the platters and use 'em as Christmas tree decorations... or as frisbees.
...
Gobe
that was 1943... in 1937 they were still copper. doublecheck your steel pennies.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
And I know from experience they can be a VERY dangerous weapon. I am short one tooth because my roomate threw a harddrive disk and it happened to strike me across the mouth.
Others have mentioned the MacQuarium, but let us not forget the original computer recycling hack - the VAXbar!
$ show systemBAR/VMS V1.0 on node VAXBAR 28-JUN-1997 18:11:08.82 Uptime 2190 17:43:42
Pid Process Name State Pri I/O CPU Page flts Pages
00001010 REFRIGERATOR LEF 4 1212 0 00:10:12.23 4125 150
00000800 LIGHTS COM 6 9121 0 00:34:23.11 1231 343
00000412 BLENDER HIB 4 3412 0 00:23:49.32 1341 111
00000169 SINK LEF 3 211 0 00:01:12.66 231 222
$ logout
BARTENDER logged out at 28-JUN-1997 18:11:23.75
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
I convinced one of my suitemates to let me rip apart his faulty 80gig drive. I stole the magnets, and with with a little tape the casing made an excellent ashtray.
I work at Holly Community (www.hollycommunity.org) a non-profit that builds computers for disabled people, her some of the stuff we made out of old computer parts
Key Chains (32 pin ram)
Air Compressor diaframs (5 1/4)
Plant Potter (Mac Ls II)
Wall Art (about 20 assorted boards)
KVM cables (Mice/Keyboars)
Finger Guards for people with CP (Keyboards)
Digital Clock (Dell 486 Mother Board)
Analog Clock (same Dell 486 Mother Board)
Last Donut hider (old CD rom gutted)
probably made about 1000 other items, just can't remeber
--Monster Kabasue
Last year for Christmas my company wanted us to make stars for the company christmas tree. We could make them out of anything we liked, as long as they were reasonably sized to hang on the tree. I took an old Pentium server mobo and scribed a star around the CPU. I used a dremel with a cutting disk mounted to chew a starter hole in each ray of the star and finished the cuts with a jigsaw. WEAR A MASK AND GOGGLES IF YOU TRY THIS! Capacitors and diodes spark when you cut through them and the dust is probably toxic. For Christmas I got you toxic waste! (chuckle)
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
I have several now including a 286, 386DX/33, and a couple of 485DX/66's. I like the keyboard magnet idea... will have to suggest this to by sister inlaw with 2 pre-school kids.
"Ack. Yech. Barf. Snort." - Bill the Cat
you're right my mistake
Octopi is a perfectly cromulent word: http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_cromulent.htm
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
Making some cat 5 cables last year I fouled one up and promptly cut off the end, stripped a few inches off and spread the four wires out like legs, the plug looks just enough like a head so that now I've got a network bug on my desk that I can squash and rebuild when tension strikes.
-Truth Is Still Truth, Even If You Don't Believe It.
The idea I came up with for our department's large area of empty floor space was to create a miniature golf course from old computer parts. Sadly, the space is gone now and we have no place to build it. And I was really looking forward to putting up a ramp and through a hollowed out monitor.
My 1.5 year old daughter has become facinated with our computer, and loves to click the buttons on our light up optical mouse. We gave her an old keyboard to use (it worked for a while, but she figured out we only use the other keyboard). I had an old 3 button mouse with a bad cord and some old LEDs, so I ripped it apart, cut holes in the sides, and wired 2 AA batteries to the switches in the mouse and on to each led (red, green, orangy-yellow). I had to leave out the mouse ball to make room for the batteries, but it makes a neat toy. My wife and I played with it about as much as my daughter (she has lost interest in it now - sigh).
You turn it into a VAX BAR!
You can see it here. I've really not heard of anything that can top that, in terms of the size and quality of the conversion...
The left over CD spindles that blank CD-Rs come in is great for keeping a few doughnuts or bagles fresh for a while.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Just last week I decided my PC needed additional cooling, so I removed the cooling fan off a busted ATX power supply I had sitting in the closet nearly a year and soldered on a connector. The fan only required 12V and the right connector.. works great as an extra system fan. If more people scavenged like this our landfills would be better off.
.... No Really, I work for an IT department in a High School. I not only donate IT castaways(relax, dead mice and keyboards and cables only), and all of my broken electronic equipment boom boxes, hair dryers, elecrric razors...you name it our house has gone through it. Some they fix and use in the studio(i.e boom box), others they cut apart and make art.
Sig Hansen?
by this point I already was getting a new computer, so I ended up taking apart the moterboard and using various pretty green and yellow parts for photo assignments. Then I turned them into ceiling hangings...they looked sort of like futuristic space crafts.
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
I spent five years working with malacologists on the largest molluscan collection in the western hemisphere. I have seen many dead octopi floating in alcohol, and I have written many lines of code that dealt with octopuses.
You'd be suprised how often the snail doctors get asked this question. And they always answer it the same way: "We use octopuses, and fishermen use octopi, but either is correct".
Nobody ever even tries to bring up any nonsense about octopeet, and rarely is octopodes brought up, because that is Greek for all eight-legged creatures (cf. arachnids) and not just octopuses.
See this article about octopus hurling in the on-line Cephalopod Database.
Chinese is harder... it's tonal.
And Gaelic, Basque, and Tuvan are all several orders of magnitude harder. But as English speakers we don't consider those languages "major"; Tuvans might disagree.
I learned it from watching you, Dad! I learned it from watching you! *sobs*
I have a keyboard propping open a stubborn window at home.
(No, not a Windows(tm), a real window.)
You can make windchimes from old HD platters. I've got a set where I used dental floss to hang three of them from a triangular bracket so that they touch each other when they turn. I hung it from my computer room ceiling because it only takes a slight draft to get a gentle "ding" every now and then.
I just returned from QuakeCon with a fried 700VA UPS. It worked on-site and hadn't been used during the trip home. So, after determining the UPS was officially f*cked, we gutted it and took what components we could.
:-) Gotta love electronics!
Ironically, I had just won a bid on eBay for an old Atari 2600, but it didn't work. The old Atari was DOA. Sooo, seeing as how I wanted to repair it, a friend of mine helped in the UPS donor project and salvaged a hundred or so parts from the UPS to be grafted into an Atari.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I'm surprised that the more creepy /.ers around aren't planning to use any chips or whatever as earrings
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)