Slashdot Mirror
Last Year's Gadgets Get New Life As... Jewelry
Will Sherman writes "Liz McLean Knight, a Chicago native, has applied her interest in electronics, computers, and music to a line of jewelry created under the name, Zelle. The catch? She almost exclusively uses spare computer and electronics parts in her work. Many of her pieces would be a perfect gift for your LAN admin, that cute girl in the IT department, or your favorite DJ. Among other things, she sells a belt made from IDE cable, necklaces made from capacitors, and a cuff bracelet made of midi cables. But can she turn my broken iPod into something wearable?"
I ran across a link involving the same jewelry not long ago. In case (read: when) the main site gets slashdotted, or if one just wants to see all products without pagination, you can view them all here:
http://www.zellestyle.com/catalog/index.htm
had cat5 bracelets before, not sure if they still do. Bought one, had a zelle style label in it (it was packaged in a petre dish). Oddly I bought my gf both the necklace and the bracelet you mention. They are of good quality and 'zelle' is fantastically kind, she responds to emails personally. I would highly recomend any of this for a geek! (some of it is relatively gender neutral).
dc
It is slashdotted, but I think we can assume the caps are in series or not connected to eachother. A large series of caps isn't going to be dangerous. Neither are individual ones.
A large number of caps in parallel might be bad if someone intentionally charged them, but I can't see how that could happen accidentally.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I have an Intel SIMM that I use for a keychain (yes, Virginia, Intel used to make low margin memory chips, too), but I'd caution against this.
First, many of these components have sharp edges. If that's not dangerous enough for you (after all, edges can be sanded down), many electronic components contain toxic waste (you know, the usual litany of heavy metals and so on). I'm not sure you want to give a gift that might cause cancer, mmkay?
Keychain made out of old RAM - easy to do, just get a key ring and any old SIMM, DIMM, or SODIMM (I advise against a SODIMM, though. The EDO SODIMMs are worth their weight in gold due to inflation, the SDR SODIMMs are still kinda useful, and the DDR SODIMMs are really useful. If it's dead, OTOH...)
;-)
Keychain made out of an old/dead CPU - if it's ceramic, don't bother. If it's organic (like a P3, some socketed K7s, P4, P-M, or K8) or plastic (like some Pentiums (Classic and MMX), socketed Mendocino Celerons), it's fairly easy.
Now, I just want to meet the girl that would wear the capacitor necklace... I've got dibs on her
Actually, the capacitor necklace is like one of those costume jewelry necklaces with a black (plastic?) hoop to go around your neck, and semicircular rings hanging from the front with other semicircular rings hanging from them. This is sort of like a short netting with the capacitors hanging down. So it appears that some of the capacitors would be in parallel, but I don't think they are actually attached electrically. Also there are only six of them, and they are probably in the 50-100uF range, so they wouldn't pack much of a punch.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Old news... I first learned about her by downloading some of her tracks off of music.download.com
You should listen to "late Blazing Kinch Theme"
Crazy talented this girl is.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Yep, when she gets sick from the heavy metals in capacitors.
Seriously- someone needs to tell this woman that a fair bit of the stuff in electronic components is TOXIC, and very much so.
Please help metamoderate.
wow first time i've seen a gnaa post thats actually +