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How to Build a Hard Drive Wind Chime For Spring
tyrani writes "Spring is just around the corner and the front of the house isn't going to decorate itself. Build a Hard Drive Wind Chime and show your neighbors what a cool geek you really are." He's honest, too. From the article: "Many people linking this page on their blogs claim that this is a secure way of destroying your hard drive and its sensitive data. It is not completely true! The platters are never used in this HOWTO and could potentially be stolen by ninjas while you're making a wind chime and the data recovered by ninja-hackers."
I built a shank out of my hard drive, with the head sensor assembly. It's hard to smuggle into jail.
This story is mis-titled... it should be how to keep your g/f occuppied... by letting her make windchimes... all the while, you go out and buy new hardware for yourself... ;)
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
...to say that this is probably the lamest "hack" ever.
It doesn't have anything to do with harddrives, might as well have been an engine, mix master, or VCR. All he did was to string up a couple of shiny parts.
Not really, but they should be banned. No one wants to hear your windchime at 2am, least of all me. I have actually gone to a few nearby windchimes in the middle of the night and tied them together with fishing line to shut them the hell up.
Note that the magnet is extremely strong. Keep it away from other electronics and metal. Don't hurt yourself. Seriously, do not understand these magnets!
sure....
would doing this void the warranty of my HD?
Ninja power!
http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
My neighbor had a wind chime. It got to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore, so I waited until they were gone, stole it, and threw it in the garbage. Wind chimes are loud, annoying, repetitive, and no, I'm not a grumpy old man.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Oh yeah? Mine started making those noises already while *still* in the PC!......oh shit
Table-ized A.I.
Goddamn ninjas
The so-called hack does not really use anything that is unique to a hard drive. He just cannibalized one to get some metal rings and some shiny metal thingies to hang them from.
Could have used a VCR, a CD player or even a bike!
A little lame.
I've found that cutting the string that supports the ball or disk in the center is the best method for dealing with them. The neighbor generally doesn't notice anything different for quite some time and when they do, they are usually stymied as to how to fix it.
this sig deleted by another sig
The ULTIMATE hack would be to build a hard drive from a wind chime.
Now, finally... We've truely learned what the ninja's Real Ultimate Power is!
Banky: Alright, now see this? This is a four-way road, OK? And dead in the center is a crisp, new, hundred dollar bill. Now, at the end of each of these streets are four people, OK? Are you following?
Holden: Yeah.
Banky: Good. Over here, we have a male-affectionate, easy to get along with, non-political agenda lesbian. Down here, we have a man-hating, angry as fark, agenda of rage, bitter dyke. Over here, we got Santa Claus, and up here the Cool Geek. Which one is going to get to the hundred dollar bill first?
Just think what you could do with some mini HDs A couple of 40 G iPods? - think of the music then!
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
I imagine I could make a pretty impressive windchime from my Deathstars. Now if I can find a use for my Jaz Drives...
Make Scrabble out of your old keyboard!
1's and 0's should be free.
You know you need to upgrade when...
This is why I loved slashdot. Thank you Zonk and tyrani for showing the spirit of what geekdom is all about. A story with no political bullshit, no anti-corporate rhetoric, no M$ bashing. Just good-clean fun with IT stuff. BTW OT - Has anyone else seen the drives on TG?
I hope the site isn't hosted using one of those hard drives.
I'm not sure why, but wind-chimes and ninja hackers reminds me of No One Lives Forever 2. -"Do you wanna go shopping this weekend?" -"Can't. I have an assassination."
when you lock someone in a cubicle for hours and give him a hard drive to play with... i wonder if this would catch on if it was marketed...quick someone get msft on the phone!
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!
http://halogen.note.amherst.edu.nyud.net:8090/~win g/wingie/tech/hdchime/hdchime.php
if you owned a mac, this might be a viable art endeavor.... artists they are.
Howto Build a Hard Drive Wind Chime For Spring
How to
How to
How to
How to
How to
if you made it into a windchime...and it still ran...that would be /. worthy. someone do that hack and you shall be my new modgod!
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!
Go to www.boingboing.net or www.gizmodo.com, find something half-way interesting, and submit to Slashdot. Wait a few days, and it'll show up herre! :)
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
See here. /. rejected my submission. :P I posted about it from my site.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I thought to myself, what a dumb story. Maybe I'll post a story on Pentium earrings. On a whim I did a search. The moral is: no matter how dumb you think your idea is, someone has actually done it before you.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
how to be a two day delay for boing boing.. linky: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/23/howto_turn_a_ hard_dr.html
A little project to do when the MPAA and RIAA contracted DOJ and FBI goons are about raid your house for widescale copyright infingement they will probaly walk right past your creative little windchimes full of copyrighted material.
My landlady's got this huge assembly of useless amounts of windchimes, from metal to glass to wood. I'm sure she'll love a windchime like this, only if I can sacrifice my coasters (They make GREAT coasters and pocket mirrors).
Great idea. Now if only I can figure out if there's any more use for dead drives.
I wish ninjas would steal them more often.
that's right, because there's nothing cooler than having a lot of rings on the wind-chime that you made out of a hard drive. except maybe your gold-plated babylon five pocket protector.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
One of the computer labs at the school I was going to had the ceiling covered with old harddrive platters. There were also a bunch hanging down...it looked pretty sweet. I was wondering how hard it would be to tile a whole room in them...I think it would look awsome...all shiny n' stuff.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
... in comparison to hard drive speakers.
"...and the data recovered by ninja-hackers."
Exactly how does one hack a ninja? Is it like hacking an Aibo, only more silent and deadly? Sounds fun, anyway...
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What a lame hack. Here's a real one
s pe akers.htm
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hd
We used them as plaques for retiring individuals. It was truely unique and folks loved them.
We used larger 12" platters from some real old disk packs we found. But, you can do the same with smaller platters.
They engrave nicely. And local engraving shop can handle them with ease.
I've been collecting hard drive platters for around 15 years now, with the specific intent to make wind chimes. The few times i've tried have been pretty bad. At last my prayers answered...and my neighbors annoyed.
Turn Your Old Hard Drive into a Windchime. Wednesday February 23, @10:39AM
Rejected
And I even included a link to another page on the subject
WTF?
Insert witty sig here.
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Surely he'd make Martha Stewart proud.
Martha before prison: It's a good thing.
Martha after prison: Son, it's all~ good, you dig?
Martha after hd wind chime: Shizo, eezo, w00t! Aigh~t?
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Those platters are great as mirrors. At work we use some of them to peek into the machines in the server room to look for failures or for IDing chipsets.
The magnets that are part of the head control mechanism are great for securing things to metal surfaces (they are really strong).
Also, one of the admins used the rings to tighten a ceiling fan or something like that.
GPG 0x1B479C78
You could always go to a OSH and buy one for $20 rather than spending half a day assembling this hideous piece of crap!
It looks like a shop project for the folks on the short bus...
Many HD platters these days are not metal, but glass. Found out the hard way when I tried to bend a busted DeskStar platter and it shattered into a billion tiny pieces, and cut up my hand.
A buck says this shows up as a Slashdot story within the next 72 hrs:
l e_ chair.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/25/stance_ang
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Slashdot, one of the more leftward leaning news sites, "yank propaganda"?!? I hope this particular AC doesn't watch Fox news feeds, it could cause a brain haemorrage.
On second thought, I hope this particular AC does watch Fox news feeds...
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The platters are the nicest sounding bit of the drive!
I've taken apart a few, and hang the platters from wires.
The disk is so perfectly round and flat that they have quite a pure tone, with some interesting harmonics. I use a softish glockenspiel beater with them.
So now slashdot isn't stuff that matters it's stuff that is matter. Sheesh.
"I built a shank out of my hard drive, with the head sensor assembly. It's hard to smuggle into jail."
Heh I would have laughed harder at this if your nickname was Beecher instead of Davis.
"Derp de derp."
But do the windchimes run linux?
They make a very very nice true bell like ringing sound. The more modern drive disks sound tinny. I would take the modern disks and cut them into segments. This also makes sure that the data is not easily recoverable. That and the liberal use of sand paper.
seriously - look through grandma's closet. There might be something useful there.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My brother built one of these several years ago. He even bent the hard drives so they played the Big Ben chime.
...Martha fucking Stewart is posting stories to slashdot!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
- AC
How to build a hard disk out of a wind chime...
Intel Earings on ebay - $19.99
These are guaranteed not to be DOA. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. Honey, I'm just going to plug this in while you're wearing them to make sure they work...
Interestingly, these will make the perfect duo for your ultra-g33k
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Seriously, and I don't mean to flame anyone here, but I can't believe that this story made it on to Slashdot. To me, this seems to be a craft project that any pre-schooler would be capeable of.
This is something that should not be compared to constucting a desk or computer case out of Lego.
As far as the platters go, I think if you'd give a few good swipes with one of those magnets, there really wouldn't be anything left.
What does this button do...
Here is my quick method for doing the same thing:
1. Drill hole in hard drive
2. Attach string
Of course, these don't make the nice ringing sound of a wind chime, they tend to clunk together.
Here's another method:
1. Duct tape hard drive to tree.
If you do enough of these, is it a RAID wind chime?
... and the problem is that since it's the same rings, there's no variety in the noise made, which is a necessity in a wind chime. You can use the platters too, but then things tend to get tangled, if you hang from the spindle.
I wanted to see if the discarded platters could be tuned to specific musical tones and build a sort of hard drive platter version of the 'Glass Harmonica' or xylophone.
The old 5 1/4" platters (and the old old giant platters) produce a very sweet tone when struck!
I mean, lets say I theoretically have an old harddrive with information on it that I absolutely want permanently destroyed. Whats the best way to do it on the cheap for a college student? I don't have access to acid or anything else like that.
I don't want to just throw it out because god knows who could find it, so I've wondered about turning it into art that nobody would find suspicious.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It's Slashdot's secret fluff ratio. Much like the iPod Shuffle which has a secret chip to play certain songs by certain artists more often than others, Slashdot enjoys a secret fluff to good story ratio invented by Dr Taco. Professor Taco has a patent on this unique technology that permits lame ass stories about hard drive wind chimes, cats fed with Python, and something equally stupid which I can't remember as I type.
The elaborate justification for this controversial technology is that some find it 'charming' and 'fun'.
I, however am with you buddy; I think they sock cock and have no business being on a tech news site.
There are too many of these already. Cheap, silly, girly assortments of noisy crap strung up and left to clank in the breeze, 24/7. Aerial collections of trash, junk-bins of lowbrow middle-lower class humanity. The WORST ones are the ones that have idiot ceramic cutesy plates, that have NO mussical qualities whatsoever. But of course, Mrs Knucklewalker bought it because Golly it looks so CUTE, doesn't it??? [snort] And it makes noise ALL THE TIME! ....The only salvation for piss-poor chimes is a pair of scissors in the dark of night. ....For Christ's sake, a GOOD windchime is one that strikes real notes, and the notes are tuned to harmonize. You get brass tubes, and cut them to different lengths, making sure that they all harmonize with each other. If you can't handle that, you're too fucking stupid to make a windchime.
This reminds me of a lamp my brother made out of two (System/38?) IBM harddrives. IIRC it had 3 11" platters and some nice aluminium spacers between them with holes in it where the light would shine trough. He glued everything together and put a halogen lamp inside. Very cool, but unfortunately the glue couldn't resist the heat so it took out the VCR on it's way down.. The drive itself was really heavy too, it even had warning signs on it :-)
I made some bracelets and a necklace from CAT-5 cable for some geek friends of mine who were getting married, and then discovered ThinkGeek do ethernet bracelets. But ThinkGeek only use the inner strands, I made mine chunkier and multi-coloured by chopping up three lots of sleeving.
Put in a nice presentation box with an inscription to 'My Favourite Twisted Pair'. Geek joy.
Pics here which I should have made a bit brighter...
Slashdot? Left?
:)
Half the posters on here are so right wing they'll be invading poland any day now...
Fox 'news' is a good laugh (we can get a feed in the UK) but not something I'd recommend spending too much time listening to.. Some of the parodies of it are really funny though
...you insensitive clod.
I heard of a guy once that shot a stack of six HDs with a shotgun. The slug shattered the first five, and came to rest in the center of the sixth. Makes a great conversation peice... but I degress.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Cool! It's always fun to see hardware reuse. I made myself a set of drink coasters from and old NeXT cube hard drive
For god's sakes go out and GET GIRLFRIENDS!
Do me a favour, go out and tell some hot chick u are making windchimes with your old HDDs and see how weird they look at you.
I'm as big of a geek as any but this is crazy talk!
Go out and get some real "box" u dont need windchimes.....*shakes head*
You know we live in a sick society when people are proud that their site was "slashdotted". Of course anyone who makes wind chimes out of computer hardware is clearly screaming for attention.
I mean it's sofucking 'insightful' to
a) not know that disk platters are made of aluminium, and
b) aluminium does not rust.
Insightful my ass!
Go slashdot!
Since when is it a flatbed screwdriver? I do believe it is supposed to be flathead. I did a search on Google, and several other people have used this. It is not a truck, it is a screwdriver.
Anyway, I'd just use a platter to hang from my rearview mirror, instead of a CD like everyone else.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
"Half the posters on here are so right wing they'll be invading poland any day now..."
;). Really, I was thinking about the articles presented, the fact that there is a YRO section, a slight anti-corporation bent*...
.au. I still haven't worked out why, it doesn't seem to contain any information.
But the other half seem to be fairly reasonable. By today's standards, anyway
"Fox 'news' is a good laugh (we can get a feed in the UK)"
So can we in
BTW, why did your post get modded off-topic, but not mine? No fair. Mine's off-topic too. I demand to be modded down! HEAR ME? MOD ME DOWN YOU BASTARDS!!! OFF-TOPIC!!!! Heh, haven't got the ba...hey, where'd my positive Karma go?
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do it on the cheap for a college student? I don't have access to acid or anything else like that.
I thought all college students had access to acid. And alcohol. And lots more means of permanent destruction besides!
For some strange reason, this has been a recurring topic on sci.electronics.design.
Go to http://groups.google.com/ and look for threads with these subject lines:
Hard Drive Zapping
Destroying a hard drive ?
A possible cure for FCC bandwidth woes.
Tag lost or not installed.
From TFA:
Take the drive and remove the cover screws using the T-7 Torx key
This is improper use of a Torx, especially if you don't have one and feel you have to go out and buy one to open a disk drive you're not going to put back together as if it were never opened.
Using a Dremel moto-tool and a cutoff wheel to cut a regular slot takes only a few seconds per screw, and is much more in the spirit of destructive disassembly. Then you can use a regular flatblade screwdriver for slotted screws to remove the newly modified "security" (cough, hack) screws.
Tag lost or not installed.
pics.w00ttech.com/wc I used an older scsi hard drive for all the parts.
My first hard drive instrument was in 1994 -- the "Diskklang". A pix at the bottom of this page: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/instruments. html
The platters were bigger then, and the sound was very nice.
Dennis
I've been building hard-drive wind chimes since 1996 or so and selling them at hamfests and other gatherings of the geek.
The ones made from larger drives (5" and some even 10") are the most popular as the parts are the most rare.
www.wavefront-av.com
Actually, she gets out of the slammer Real Soon Now.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks