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Hillbilly How-to: Practical uses for your old computer pieces

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Computers are good for many things -- I use mine mostly for listening to compact discs, playing that awesome pinball game, and checking the finishing times at NASCAR.com -- but did you know they can be just as useful when they're broken? In all, I think I've burned through eight computers over the last three years -- one got crushed when my prized moose head fell off the wall, and I spilled various liquids on the other seven. Typically when I bust up one of my PCs, I just toss it on the burn pile with everything else, but then I got to thinking, "I bet I could tear this sucker apart and use the various pieces in all sorts of different ways."

For instance, discarded keyboards make great dog toys, and you can use those little gray mouse balls to build a sweet miniature billiard set. Now, I bet you're thinking to yourself, "surely you can't do much else with a broken computer!" Au contraire, mon amie. Check out these other ingenious uses for discarded computer pieces:


There's nothing that I love more than a summer sausage hot dog, but after two of three of those tasty monstrosities, I must admit, I'm usually feeling pretty full. Enter the compact-disc-player-summer-sausage-slicer! This handy little mod will allow you to slice up anything that's roughly the diameter and toughness of a summer sausage. Now you can share your sausagey goodness all over the land!

Not much to this one. Just break off the clickers from your old mouse, apply gorilla glue, and stick it anywhere that might benefit from having a little storage bucket glued to the wall. The shower is an obvious choice, as you can use it to store your toothbrush and/or nose hair clippers. I have a bunch of mice glued up in my workshop, which I use to store various nuts and bolts and nails and stuff.

When my fifth oldest boy brought home a baby squirrel last week, I thought to myself, "dang! Where are we gonna store that critter until it gets big enough to eat?" And that's when the wheels started to twist in my brain. I ran out to the woods, picked up one of my old monitors, busted out the insides, gorilla glued some chicken wire to the front, and VOILA! A fully functional squirrel cage!

My wife loves birds. Why? I'm not sure, but being the supportive and caring husband that I am, I thought I'd feed her unnatural appetite by building a custom birdhouse for her out of one of my old PCs. Not too much to this project -- just tear out all the wires and whatnot, and then use a hammer to knock out everything else. The keyboard on top was my own special touch. I put it up there in hopes of attracting some Blue "J"s. Get it?! GET IT?!

This one here is both the easiest to make and the one I use the most: the beer-bottle-spill-preventer. It's not really a "computer piece," per se, as much as it's just a compact disc jammed over the top of a beer bottle. As an added bonus, the disc also acts as a barrier between your nose and fingers, so if they stink, which mine often do, you won't have to smell them while you drink your brew.

And that about does it for my nifty computer inventions. You got any that are better? If so, let me know, because I got three more ruined PCs sitting in my backyard just begging to be used for something.

Tags: cd, cd-rom, compact disc, CompactDisc, computer, mouse, summer sausage, SummerSausage, toothbrush

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