From SJ comes this badass piece of upcycling. Or recycling. Or awesomeness.
I used to have an old Mac that was turned into a fishtank, but I have never retrofitted any piece of technology with that level of awesome. Wowser.
Hope you have a creative and (re)purposeful weekend!
That is great! But now when I hear the imperial theme, I think of the little boy in the Darth Vader costume from the Volkswagen commercials!
I love this!
I still have a floppy drive (although I haven’t used it in years, so maybe it doesn’t work anymore), and I’ve still got a few floppies. One of them even has my thesis and related materials on it. I don’t miss the days of horror upon finding a magnet attached to one of my floppies or realizing that the reason the stupid thing won’t come out of the drive is because the metal is very slightly bent.
Best use of a floopy disk drive ever. Wish I could have recycled/upcycled my last two Dell laptops into something like that (both models had bad power connectors in the back).
How clever!
Filled with awesome!
That made my nerdy heart so happy! Thanks for posting that Sarah.
I’d really like to see the fish tank!
I want to see the fish tank, too!
One great thing about living in the US now is that I can watch your Friday videos without the annoying L-O-N-G buffering time (Ha – I almost typed that “buggering”!)
Love this – and since I just found a box of old floppy disks, I am now wondering what marvelous use I can put them to?
Well, that made me smile for the first time today. I watched it twice!
OH so cool! Gotta send this to my best friend Eileen – it’s good to have friends who are computer geeks too.
And floppy drives have always been an especially delightful mix of electronics and mechanical linkages. Though I don’t miss them as part of everyday computing, just the concept of them.
I’ll show my age here, but I can remember when floppy disks were actually floppy. I’m talking about ones that came before and were bigger than the ones in the video. They were softer and “floppy”, and could be bent if you weren’t careful.
Oh yes, so can I. The 5¼” discs. At one period in the late 1980s I was using 3” discs in my home computer (an Amstrad, which had an idiosyncratic operating system, CPM+, sufficiently similar to, but also different from, MS-DOS to bend the brain…), and both 5¼” and 3½” floppies in different machines at work. Backing up and transferring files was sometimes a nightmare. So much harder than the trusty old typewriter. But we all survived, and even managed to publish stuff.
Well, I remember the old floppy discs but I also remember keypunch cards and computers that were less powerful than the one on my desk, or my lap top that took up entire city blocks.
Yes, I am older than dirt.
As part of the older than dirt crowd, I remember when our word processor came on about 10 of those 5 1/4” discs and to use different features of the program, you would have to slide different discs in and out (because, no, it wasn’t possible to just have the processor on the computer as a permanent feature). And people today complain about layers of menus! . . . Jeez, kids these days. (kidding kidding kidding)
Stephanie – I’m also older than dirt and have less than fond memories of those 5 1/4” disks!
In my required programming class for business majors in college, we had to do a program in COBOL (!) via keypunch (!!). Sucked in a truly major and awful way, but I did it and made an A- in the class.
Count your blessings, kids!
@Terrie: the little Amstrads came without a hard drive at all: you had to load programmes (sorry, programs) from your 3” discs every session. And the maximum capacity of each 3” disc was 256 kb. An 80,000-word book occupied a fair number of those discs, as you can imagine. Later there were models that had a second drive that could use 512 kb discs. Wow! The capacity limitations encouraged succinct writing, though.
What I remember is cassette tapes which took twenty minutes to upload the programme (while making all kinds of screechy noises) only to be told at the end there had been an error. In those days you had to REALLY want to play computer games!
@Ros:
Been there, done that. Used to spend hours typing in code from the back of Commodore 64 magazines, loading it on a tape drive (until I upgraded to a 8.5” floppy… whoa!), then debugging, just to play a simple little game. I still have it all, packed away in boxes in a closet.
I’m glad everyone liked my geeky finding! 🙂
I remember actually floppy disks and having to type C://RUN to play a game on a computer screen and the only color was green. It was so exciting when we got a “color” monitor and the game Ernie’s Big Splash (google it for some awesome screen shots!)