windchime
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Turn that dead HD into something useful
As an entertaining Friday afternoon aside to our discussion earlier this week about how to recover data from a dying hard disk, it turns out there's plenty of uses left for the ones that have finally stopped pining for the fjords. With this tutorial from HacknMod, you can turn your hard disk into a grinder or sander. You can make a windchime and a keychain out of the parts inside the hard disk. Classy! You can turn it into a speaker. Years ago, my dad used to make clocks out of the huge 14-inch disk platters he used in old HP 3000 minicomputers. Turns out you can do this with the smaller drives of today, too. Finally, if you acquire enough expired hard disks, you can make a huge domino set out of them. Practical? Probably not. But hey, it beats throwing them away.
GPS-enabled wind chimes sound off while geo-tracking
If you think the Dandellas were outlandish uses of GPS technology, here's one that comes mighty close to one-upping even those. The GPS-enabled wind chimes have DIY written all over them, and while the chimes themselves where purchased (after a failed attempt at creating his own, notably), basically everything else that makes the system tick was homegrown. Utilizing Mologogo, servos, circuit boards, and a good bit of coding, the GPS chimes emit their music whenever the tracked individual's cellphone moves in a user-selected path, essentially acting as an alert that someone's headed to their domicile. Of course, the actual options here are a tad limited (albeit very intriguing), but the foundation of the project could indeed be used for a much broader geo-tracking scenario. Regardless, we know there are folks out there eager to give this a whirl, and thankfully for you, everything you need to know (including the oh-so-critical code) is just a Read link away.[Via MAKE]
