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Hardware Reuse Contest Entries Revealed
teqo writes "The outstanding German computer magazine c't had a contest in which they challenged readers to submit their coolest recycling projects for obsolete hardware, and the entries have been revealed to the public now. There is an artsy and a practical category, and although it is in German, the pics make lots of submissions intuitively grokkable." (On the right hand side of the page, click the links beneath "Kunst" -- artistic -- and "Funktion" -- functional.) My favorite is the laptop with a solar-powered backlight.
Follow the links under 'Kunst' and 'Funktion' on the right side bar.
The only german I know is "Die Bart, Die", and it isn't on the site.
I'm lost!
TELESCOPE!
Click here for a machine translation of the site for you English readers.
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
My first thought was the Super Bowl Ad close to the end of the game (maybe even right after) in which the kid builds the robot in the garage. Its a Nationwide ad and is hilarious. If you have not yet seen it, watch for it!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Poor heise online servers, they just survived days of SYNflooding and now they're being slashdotted.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I see that someone else had the same idea... http://www.heise.de/ct/machflott/projekte/55850
I've been doing this since I had a broken piece... years ago...
I still have about 15 30pins Simms (Goldstar) left... Anyone want a keychain?
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
well if you americans hadn't gotten involved in WW2 you'd all be speaking german now..
Would be easier if the site was actually readable to someone in the United States.
Not to the intended readership, no. Much easier to read German than English if you are German, you know.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Do they have a precise definition of what constitutes "obsolete hardware?" If they're talking about functional obsolescence, then a calculator may not be obsolete for decades. A CD-R becomes obsolete the moment that someone copies an AOL CD. A Pentium 4 becomes obsolete the moment that it belongs to my grandmother.
Its a PITA to keep it tuned, but it has at least 4 voices!
g econtent?lp=de_en&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de% 2Fct%2Fmachflott%2Fprojekte%2F55771
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pa
man, I feel like mold.
I haven't really had the time to browse all of the ideas here, but this one really stands out to me
RFID and Barcode Beer Fridge
If looks aren't decieving, you can use this baby to check your beer supply, and maybe even let you check from work to see what you need to pick up on the way home for the weekend.
When I turn my laptop's backlight all the way down, the battery lasts 2-3 times as long as if it is all the way bright. I would like to have a solar powered display.
Mach flott den Schrott
Ihre Meinung ist gefragt: Bewerten Sie die Einsendungen des Recycling-Wettbewerbs
Mit der Ausgabe 25/04 startete c't Ende November 2004 den Recycling-Wettbewerb Mach flott den Schrott, der die originellsten, schönsten und nützlichsten Konstruktionen aus High-Tech-Schrott belohnen soll. Die wesentliche Teile der Objekte sollen aus gebrauchten Computern oder ausgemusterter Peripherie stammen und sie sollen anders genutzt werden, als der Hersteller sich das ursprünglich gedacht hat.
Der Wettbewerb hat zwei Kategorien: "Funktion" und "Kunst". In der ersten sollen Werke antreten, die im weitesten Sinne eine technische Funktion erfüllen. Dazu gehören beispielsweise Roboter, Messgeräte, Uhren und Lampen. In die zweite Kategorie fallen alle Werke, bei denen allein der künstlerische oder ästhetische Wert im Vordergrund steht.
Auf diesen Seiten präsentieren wir die Wettbewerbsbeiträge. Sehen Sie sich um, staunen Sie, lassen Sie sich zum Nachbauen anregen und diskutieren Sie in den Foren mit, die es zu allen Projekten gibt.
Außerdem bitten wir um Ihre Mitwirkung an der Online-Nominierung der Endrundenteilnehmer. Bewerten Sie jedes Projekt bis zum 18. Februar nach vier Aspekten mit Schulnoten. Dazu finden Sie unter den Objektbeschreibungen jeweils einen Link.
Die besten Konstruktionen nehmen dann an der Endrunde auf der CeBIT 2005 teil, wo wir sie auch auf dem Stand des Heise Zeitschriften Verlages (Halle 5, Stand E38) ausstellen. (je)
---
I hope that that was immensly helpful to all of you!
Vast ist dis? Neiner blinkenlights?
I cut the DIN 5 connector (old style keyboard) and the PS2 mouse connector (MiniDIN 6) off very old obsolete motherboards.
Then I combine them with a 40 cent microcontroller (AVR Tiny11) to make MIDI tone module controllers from standard PS2 keyboards.
It works really well. Press the keys, notes go on, release keys, notes off. Just like a piano keyboard but smaller and much cheaper. There are, however, certain key combinations that don't play full chords. I'm not sure if it's the internal keyboard matrix decoding or the microcontroller's firmware.
Is there a plan to recycle their webserver?
And my favorite one is the LED/IC insects. Go figure. http://www.heise.de/ct/machflott/projekte/56058
http://www.heise.de/ct/machflott/projekte/56016 :)
Thats a nice hard disc bike
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
http://www.larkfarm.com/honeywell_answers.htm
M R- V13.html#Animals
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TheCompMusRep/TC
My father used to have a miniature of the Honeywell Animals kangaroo as a paperweight.
Ich kann nicht Deutschen lesen Sie unempfindlicher Klumpen!
Actually, if you live in the United States and can read German, then technically it fulfills your requirements. As it is, I'm an American in Japan and I can read it just fine. Maybe it's just a question of geography? ;) (Doesn't hurt to speak German, though.)
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Alles touristen und non-technischen peepers!
Das machine control is nicht fur gerfinger-poken und mittengrabben. Oderwise is easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowen fuse, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Der machine is diggen by experten only. Is nicht fur geverken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseenen keepen das cotten picken hands in das pockets, so relaxen und watchen das blinkenlights.
Instead of trying to do a solar-powered backlight, I wish more manufacturers would offer the option of a reflective or transflective LCD screen. This is like the screen used in the Gameboy Advance-- in bright sunlight, it looks fantastic. Indoors, they're not quite as nice as backlit, as they are typically sidelit to bounce the light off the rear reflector. It's a tradeoff. But you could use your laptop with no backlight power as long as there was good ambient light.
There was at least one laptop made with one of these-- If I remember right, it had a Transmeta CPU, but it's been a while. NEC Versa Daylite, or something close to that, and I think some of the Panasonic Toughbooks designed for outdoor use have them as well.
Since skirt star need a guitar, no meal remained for me: ... Amiga 500 + guitar neck.
Coworker: Andre Pluemer and friends, those from time to time parts of the Sperrm?
Rock on... berzerker!
Macquarium: http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/macquarium.shtml
It seems like most newer keyboards don't have the problem of recognizing too many keys at once. I remember playing mortal kombat on my old 386 with two people on the keyboard and the trick wasn't skill, but to press enough buttons to keep your opponent's key presses from being recognized.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I don't see why this was modded funny. I have several German friends who are quite sensitive to the subject of WWII. They hate Hitler and Nazi's just as much as anyone else. To jest that they would invade Poland out of boredom or ressurect the 3rd reich isn't just in bad taste, it's plain wrong.
Perhaps if we ('we' in my particualr case being the US) didn't have slashdot we would be incarerating Japanese born US citizens, or hosing down black civil rights protesters! Funny, no? Didn't think so.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
So, you are suggesting that the company should redo their website because somebody posted an article about them... In an age when machine translation is perfectly understandable with a little effort, and the article is mostly pictures, and a significant amount of slashdot's readership doesn't have english as a first language? Twit.
The best feature of this is that you will extend the life of your product by a long time. PDAs, Cell Phones, MP3 Players, video game systems, Digital Cameras... they would all benefit. Sure, the initial hardware cost might be a little bit more, but in the end I think the cost would be worth it.
See my post on the phone discussion posted right after this story.
While the solar backlight might be interesting I just can't ignore these
they're just so darn cute.
I made a key fob out of an old IBM Token Ring PCMCIA card. My keys are impossible to lose :)
Or locking people up on an army base in Cuba to sidestep your constitution?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Those light shades made from a thousand CDs are pretty cool looking. I want one for myself, but it seems pretty hard to do in the post AOL cd error. I guess I need to start collecting. Here is the link http://www.heise.de/ct/machflott/projekte/55857
mnewberg.com
I know quite a few Germans myself, and they don't agree with your German friends at all.
So don't think your German friends represent a clear majority opinion, in Germany.
I know quite a few Germans as well... which is because I'm German ;-) I can tell you the vast majority of Germans nowadays really do hate Nazis and racism.
Yes, there are still some idiots that didn't learn a thing, but luckily those are mostly dumb people that don't even know that Hitler was an Austrian and are generally very uninformed about history. And yes, in East Germany some right-winged parties have managed to get a noticable amount of votes. But that doesn't make those people the majority.
It seems you didn't notice the anti-Nazi demonstrations that every demonstration of right-winged parties (NPD, DSU) face. And you didn't notice what happened a few weeks ago when some right-winged politicians from the NPD boycotted a minute's silence for the holocaust victims and later on said stupid things the we Germans were the real victims in the war instead of the Jews. These caused an outrage in Germany and re-started a discussion to forbid the NPD for being anticonstitutional.
There are laws in Germany which make it risky to express your true feelings in public, and so many people would not admit that the Germans still feel quite some pride when they think about the days of the Third Reich.
As for those laws : you can't legislate the true sentiments of a people.
I have no idea where you've got that from, but it's just plain wrong. There are laws that forbid to lie about Nazi crimes, e.g. it's forbidden to say "The Nazis never killed any Jews", but it's not forbidden to say the truth or what you feel.
And yes, we are proud of some things we managed to do during WWII, namely building V2 rockets and developing jet planes as well as parachutes and other technological advances. But we know all too well that many thousands of innocent people lost their lifes to develop these things, and nobody is proud about that.
In conclusion, I really think you either know very twisted Germans and mistake them for being the majority or should listen more carefully what they say.
Being a grammar Nazi today... Ich hoffe, dass das äußerst hilfreich für euch alle war!
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
can only second it.
dunkelfalke
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
It's about time they focused on recycling computer parts. I have to admit I wasn't too wild about their prior recycling efforts. All they came up with are things like lampshades, book covers, yarn, felt & socks.
Speaking...
...four languages - is an interpreter
...three languages - is an interested
...two languages - is usual
...one language - is american
"Anal fisting" sounds a bit too much like invading somenone anyway <wince>
Dave
artistic
- objective sculptures
- shape, light and sound objects
- symbolic stuff
- flat objects
- environment
- jewelry
- fancy stuff
functional
- computer equipment
- furniture
- home and garden
- kitchen equipment
- light engineering
- measurement engineering
- robots and models
- sports and toys
- sound and picture
- clocks
- miscellaneous
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Another stupid Troll moderation. The parent was actually being rather funny by offering a reversal of the tired 'If it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German' routine. Read the post next time before jerking that knee and waving the Stars and Stripes.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Shweet, a German Grammar Nazi. How fitting!
thanks for explaining my joke
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
and a significant amount of slashdot's readership doesn't have english as a first language?
Well, even though English isn't my first language I'd prefer text to be in english rather than german. Just because you don't natively speak english that don't mean that you know all other languages.
So on an english site it is preferable with english texts, as that enables everyone to read, rather than just a small group of gearmans/french/italians/swedes/etc.
But ofcourse they don't want to translate the site just for slashdots sake, but that's another discussion.
At least it's only painful to a maximum of two people.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
There is an ad for the "Robots" movie in the third quarter, but no ad for "Nationwide" or did he mean nationwide? There doesn't seem to be anything involving kids and a garage either.
As an outsider (my grandparents emigrated from Germany in 1935), I always wonder why it is that that Germans nowadays not only hate the above-mentioned, but also practically everything German? By which I mean ethnically, culturally, liguistically and historically, amongst others. I don't have a problem with getting rid of the bad, but why should the good go with it?
In Germany one is hard-pressed to find a radio station that plays anything else than the American mass-produced pop crap. Germans nowadays use a lot of English words and grammatical constructs, as if the German language is incapable of expressing these things. Germans in general seem to be racist in a very "politically correct" sort of way. And while on the subject of racism, it seems almost like a fashion statement to have a life/love partner with a dark skin (other merits like personality seem to be distant secondary considerations).
These are just some (admittedly subjective) observations made while travelling Europe. Any Germans willing to discuss this with me in private?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
***Commercial Spoiler Ahead***
The kid puts together a robot and then brings his folks out into the garage. They beam at the kid as the robot waves, and smiles (his mouth is made up from what appears to be graphic equalizer slides). Then laser beams shoot out of the robot's eyes and it starts blowing up parts of the garage. It turns, see the family car and blows it up;-)
I think it was on after the game during the postgame frenzy.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Perhaps the submitter of the story should have thought ahead and added a machine translation link aswell...
Silly rabbit
As an outsider (my grandparents emigrated from Germany in 1935), I always wonder why it is that that Germans nowadays not only hate the above-mentioned, but also practically everything German? By which I mean ethnically, culturally, liguistically and historically, amongst others. I don't have a problem with getting rid of the bad, but why should the good go with it?
This is not the case, we still love our culture but about three decades of our history are more or less taboo. But there's still more than two thousand years of history left ;-) You might get this impression because open national pride like seen in other countries is often considered to be a bad thing. Many people fear to get associated with Nazis when they'd say I'm proud to be German. Having the German flag in your front yard like many americans do with their flag is really something that is almost imaginable here.
But this doesn't mean we're not proud of our country and our culture. We are, since we do make the best cars in the world, for example ;-)=) We just don't say that as often and explicit like other countries do.
In Germany one is hard-pressed to find a radio station that plays anything else than the American mass-produced pop crap. Germans nowadays use a lot of English words and grammatical constructs, as if the German language is incapable of expressing these things. Germans in general seem to be racist in a very "politically correct" sort of way. And while on the subject of racism, it seems almost like a fashion statement to have a life/love partner with a dark skin (other merits like personality seem to be distant secondary considerations).
This is not the case either, IMHO. There was indeed a call to play more German songs in radio a few months ago in Germany, but I saw a very enlightening report about this: in this report they listed all German artists that were played by a major radio station on one day. And then I realized that there really are enough German (and German-singing) artists. (BTW, AFAIK there is a law in France to play a certain amount of french songs on radio... could some French confirm this ?)
But of course you hear more english-language songs in radio than german-language. That's because a lot of people really do buy into the american media coporation produced shit, but also because a great many German artists often perform in English. This is quite natural, they like to target a wider audience than just Germany to make more money ;-)
And about the grammatical stuff: you can express way more things in German (especially in rhymes) than in English, the German grammar is very complex and this can be used to play around a lot. The German language is not called die Sprache der Dichter und Denker (the language of poets and thinkers) for nothing.
I recommend reading some stuff from Mark Twain about the German language (e.g. The awful German language). This extremely bright man studied German for more than thirty years and he even managed to enlight me on a few grammatical oddities in the German language :-) His stuff is not only very interesting but also with written with a good deal of humor, nice read :-)
These are just some (admittedly subjective) observations made while travelling Europe. Any Germans willing to discuss this with me in private?
Nah, I'd rather discuss publicly ;-)
So imagine a scenario when globalization collapses and no one has the ability or technology to manufacture complex goods like computers. All we'll have left is the remnants of circuit boards that will either be used to hobble together computing devices or art because of its increasing rarity.
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
In Germany one is hard-pressed to find a radio station that plays anything else than the American mass-produced pop crap. Germans nowadays use a lot of English words and grammatical constructs, as if the German language is incapable of expressing these things.
This is not unique to Germany. France has been the same way for several years. About half the movies in theaters at any given time are English-language, and probably American. I heard Eminem and plenty of other American music all over Italian radio (nobody in France that I talked to had heard of Tool for some reason). Friends, The Simpsons, and Married with Children have all been shown on European TV.
-mkb
AFAIK most people in Germany or Austria never really liked the Nazis or racism. The difference is, now we can say it.
What I don't unterstand is why germans always say "you know Hitler was from Austria". Yeah. So what? If you think about it it doesn't matter and doesn't make Germany better or Austria worse.
b4n
What I don't unterstand is why germans always say "you know Hitler was from Austria". Yeah. So what? If you think about it it doesn't matter and doesn't make Germany better or Austria worse.
Yes, you're right. The reason why I mentioned it was because a great many right-wings and Neo-Nazis don't know history. When you talk to them they tell you "Hitler was great" but when you ask "Do you know where he's from and what he did before he went into politics ?" they just don't know. And this applies to almost every part of the Nazi era history, they only see what they want to see. It's all stuff we learn at school, you'd think that those people payed attention at least in those lessons...
And about the grammatical stuff: you can express way more things in German (especially in rhymes) than in English, the German grammar is very complex and this can be used to play around a lot. The German language is not called die Sprache der Dichter und Denker (the language of poets and thinkers) for nothing.
Which I think goes to prove the point I tried to make :-)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
IF you ever bothered to leave your basement and see the world, you will find there are groups of people in every country that only speaks one language.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
BTW, AFAIK there is a law in France to play a certain amount of french songs on radio... could some French confirm this ?
I have also heard this about France. I know it's true in Canada.