A few reworkings of bits of metal and plastic

By Britta Gustafson

Here are a few ways that people have misused computer hardware for the purposes of entertainment. I like projects where people play around with boring components, make something new out of them, and show off the results. The following examples consist of pairs of repurposed hard drives, artsy keyboards, and edible circuit boards.

The hard drives are impressive. This Hard Drive Coffee Table is “built from an original 26 inch diameter hard drive platter from an early storage device.” Shiny, and not for sale. (If you want to see a giant hard drive like that in real life, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has some on display in its Visible Storage exhibit.) Then there’s Afrotech’s Hard-disk Sound System, with videos of three hard drives buzzing and clattering to produce odd music — “Why pay 500$ for Klipsch’s latest speaker system? You can make something that looks way cooler for the price of a DIY amplifier and some HDDs out of a dumpster.”

On a more aesthetic and functional level, somebody has obtained a few old Model-M keyboards and thoroughly découpaged them with stamps. I also like “The Great Escape,” a photo of a certain key walking away from its keyboard.

The project called Tortilla-Board™: A New Breadboard Technique makes more sense if you know that “breadboard” is a common name for a type of plastic circuit board that people use to prototype projects. This guy decided to use a wheat tortilla instead of a breadboard! The page documents his successful and tasty-smelling experiment. The people at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories also made edible prototypes, but with a different approach: circuit boards made entirely of candy. These ones don’t work, but they’re cute and the page includes instructions for how to make your own.

I see these projects as part of the long nerdy tradition of the hack, which is difficult to define but often shows up as people entertaining themselves and friends by writing clever, amusing, and/or useful bits of software. These people tend to mess with everything else too. One last link: Idioms, a blog by Dragan Espenschied that “popularize[s] idioms and metaphors that come from the computer to the so called real life.” It’s a further extension of this idea to language itself.