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.