For those that don’t know, I live in Texas. Been here all my life. There are two main things north Texans worry about from mother nature: Tornados & Hail.
Hail has damaged quite a bit throughout my life. Mainly just cars and roofs but lawn furniture and windows are in there too. With that said, we had our roof replaced last week and I watched the recklessness of the roofers tossing shingles down. Needless to say, a shingle fell in the pool. They managed to fish it out; but, yesterday I saw some nails at the bottom in the deep end.
I tried to get them out with the pool net but they just scraped along the bottom. The water was really cold from recent rains and I didn’t want to dive down to the bottom to get it. So now what?
I’ve bought plenty of hard drives over the years and taken many of them apart. Fun fact: The platters make good wind chimes and the magnets are unforgiving if you accidentally get a finger caught between it and the fridge.
The problem is that pool equipment is made of non-magnetic metal so a magnet won’t stick to it, leaving you with the option of sticking a magnet in the net or doing what I came up with.
That’s right! Those are hard drive magnets. LOL. Old tech has many purposes.
This gave me pinpoint accuracy and I was able to pickup the nails quickly without much effort.
Summary
Just because the tech is old doesn’t mean it’s worthless. There are many programs out there to recycle old tech, many of which send it to poor areas to help young ones grow up with STEM where they may not have before.
There are also a lot of fun ideas for old tech such as the RAM Christmas wreath.
*http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/christmas-wreath-ram-network-nerd-YOSPOS-1355942479v.jpg
My 6 year old uses hard disk platters as “ninja disks”.
Apparently you can also use them like a scare crow. http://www.instructables.com/id/Garden-rabbit-deterrent-wind-chimes/. This looks more like a pellet gun target to me; but, it goes to show that there are in fact hundreds or even thousands of uses for your old technology.
