Bill Bumgarner

Hack a Day and Make collect various random, often hardware oriented, hacks from the world over. Very cool stuff.

Every now and then, a particular hack really stands out. The kind of thing that [almost] inspires me to actually clean the damned garage and set up my hackbench. In this case, it is the G5 Clock hack.

Why?

For the quality of it. First, he/she/they used an off the shelf clock and then etched a custom circuit board to hold the LEDs in the exact spacing necessary to mount in the front panel of the G5.

When I first saw the hack, I fully expected to see a big mass o' nasty wires behind the very clean front panel of the G5. Nope. One custom circuit board later, and he/she/they achieved one very clean hack.

Nice! It also reminded me that I need to dig out my board etching stuff. Well, replace it, more likely given that the chemicals are probably pretty funky after about a decade of improper storage.

Quite a while ago, I posted about the horrendously stupid industrial design of a Xerox shredder we owned. In that post, I mentioned that we picked up a Michael Graves shredder from Target for all of $35.

A little over 1 year later, the Graves shredder is still going strong. It has started to not shred quite so much stuff at once as it appears the blades are either dulling or have moved away from each other slightly. No complaints here as we have horribly abused the device over the last year, feeding it all kinds of plastic and types of waste it simply was not designed to consume.

Of coincidental interest, Ron Johnson was responsible for launching the Michael Graves at Target. Ron is now the senior vice president of retail at Apple and was the person in charge of the launch of the Apple stores.

Now, what do you use when you have an industrial sized shredding problem? SSI's industrial shredders, of course. Check out the videos. This thing eats boats, washing machines and tree stumps.

I might have to explore building my own shredder. It appears that high torque, slow speed, is the way to go. Then again, a lawn mower based shredder could be pretty entertaining.