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've had a keychain of a 4MB DIMM stick for years, and my wife has 8088 earrings =)
Which IT department is that?
This gets better every time it is posted.
But seriously, anyone who would actually wear this stuff has enough old parts lying around to make his own SCSI cable, RAM-encrusted thong.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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
I really don't see this stuff catching on, diodes aren't a girls best friend.
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
I'm not quite sure who this line of goods is targetting, I mean anyone geeky enough to wear a necklace of capacitors is probably going to have the materials and the interest to build/have built one already and be enjoying its uniquity, rather than being off-the-peg 'geek fashion'. Still, its an option for those who wish to carry their array of spare cables and components with them at all times.
Business Voyeur
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.
The way the capacitors are arranged in the picture would seem to indicate that all the leads are shorted together, and thus the danger of things getting zapped from accumulated charge is nil.
Intel has been doing for years (probably other chip makers too). Back in the late 80s, Intel produced a marketing tidbit key ring that had a 286 die on one side and a 386 die on the other embedded in a flat hexagon of resin. The dies were mounted on something printed with some bubbly marketing speak about power for today/ power for tomorrow yada yada yada...
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
thank god i don't have any kids
if sign.nil? Sig.new
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!
I wonder what kind of jewelry she'll make from her newly smoking webserver...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Discrete components often have leads that have been tinned with lead-based solder. I'd be very cautious about wearing anything next to my skin long-term that was coated in lead.
On the other hand, the stuff looks really cool and a lot the items don't have that problem.
Hell, I'm holding in my hand a keyring made out of a pentium cpu die sealed in plastic. It's so old it's not even cool to carry around any more.
so I'm asking, what exactly does it take to make a front page story on Slashdot? I submitted a report on Dotster.com compromising customer PII data and trying to cover it up, but that didn't even warrant a "go F*ck yourself".
I'll bet if I skid marked my underwear and it looked like Steve Jobs hugging Larry Ellison it'd be the story of the day.
Oh wait, it isn't. Sorry, I just got so used to it :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"This food is problematic."
Don't forget the perfect pick-up lines when giving your "cute IT girl" her jewelry:
"I want to give you a RAM."
"Can I discharge on you...with my big capacitor?"
"IDE like to get into that belt. Get it? IDE?"
"I'll help you flux that capacitor."
"Here's some RAM so you can always remember me. Yup, all 2 megs of it."
"Hey baby, wanna create some ESD and ruin a few chips? (wink wink)"
"I like it when you talk SCSI."
"I wanna C my P on U."
Ok, I'll stop....
"This food is problematic."
true. a few years ago the new telco replaced all the lines in my country. there was a LOT and i mean a FUCKING LOT of CAT3 of all sorts of colors, and all kids were wearing them!
Yes. My IT department has at least 300GB of them.
Seriously, I can't be the only one who does this: http://www.deviantart.com/view/18247115/
Dirty Pirate Hooker
...than most of you thought... Indeed, even longer than a few of y'all have been alive.
In 1982, Khan wore a pretty cool necklace. [0]
Definitely in the same vein as capacitors and IDE cables...
-F
[0] Geez, I need to get decent picture hosting...
Back in the early 90s I remember the Computer Museum in Boston having a bunch of stuff like this for sale in their gift shop. I still have a 3 ring binder that was constructed out of discarded PCBs(chips removed).
Unfortunately Boston's Computer Museum closed in 1999, but apparently the computing artifacts it contained are now at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If it's anything as nice as Boston's old Computer Museum, it's definately worth a trip for anyone in that area. I thought the room-filling exhibit of just a piece of ENIAC was worth the price of admission alone.
True story:
About a decade ago, I worked for a midwestern school district. We went around doing general IT work ("everything but pulling cable through the walls") in the schools. Every so often, we'd need to put in Ethernet hubs, and we'd need to hook them together with coax cable.
We all carried a small supply of those little T-connectors and terminators. I chained some together and clipped them to my jacket. It made a nice little dangly. The "fashion" caught on.
One day, my boss called me into her office at the end of the day, laughing. She told me I'd have to stop wearing the connectors on my jacket, because she'd gotten a complaint from the high school that I was walking around...wait for it...with a CRACK PIPE dangling from my chest.
With CRT's that would just bring on neck injury lawsuits.
LCDs however, imagine getting a 15" LCD with a wallpaper of Flavor Flav wearing his clock, all of that hanging from your neck!
Can you tell me what time it is? YEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHH BOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIII!
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.
Some years ago, while installing hardware for a lan-party, my belt broke... Hand-holding my pants for three days wasn't an option, so I took a spare CAT-5 cable and used it as a belt. To make it a little more fashionable, I made some eight-shaped knots as a belt buckle. This added the benefit of having a way to actually close the belt.
With two RJ-45 connectors hanging from both of my sides, I really wanted to plug myself on the router...
It was the fastest belt I ever had: 100 Mbit (and full-duplex)!
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++