You're standing there staring at the ruins of your hard drive. What used to be a fully-functional piece of technological goodness is now, thanks to that bowl of applesauce your toddler just dumped in there, a very expensive paperweight.

You can take it in to some data-retrieval experts, of course, but if you find that the thing is truly irretrievable, all is not lost! Apartment Therapy's tech site, Unpluggd, has a simple way to put your old friend to new use.

Remove the hard drive, scoop out its guts, pop off the casing. Attach a couple of hinges on one side, and you now have a storage compartment... the secret book for the 21st Century!

You can buy secret compartment books, usually with a velveteen lining, in plenty of stores. However, they tend to be made from books which were expected to be best-sellers. These books are often connected to politics or current events (for a long time, they were all by the prosecutor in the original O.J. Simpson criminal trial).

I don't know about you, but that's not the kind of book I ever buy: a "secret compartment book" made from one of them would probably stick out like a sore thumb, even in my extensive personal library. It looks like I'm just going to have to make one of my own. This Secret Compartment Book video from MAKE could help... and I can help you make it even better, with the addition of a few more tools.

I don't have a sacrificial Haruki Murakami novel to use for this project -- you know, to really blend in with my collection -- but if you're a certain kind of reader, one who doesn't read best-sellers, this seems like the sort of thing for which the cheap hardcover classics sold by every chain book store would be great. Find a good, thick Tolstoy or Dickens (lots of room in those!) and go to town, or choose something long and boring that's already taking up space on your own shelves.

This would make a great gift... or an amazingly sneaky gift box. If you'd like to know more, please join me after the break.

[suggested via BoingBoing. Thanks, Ryan! I'm not saying Tolstoy and Dickens are boring, but rather that their books aren't in short supply.]

We all like making things out of miniature electronics (don't we), but I've just found a use for the world's smallest camcorder. Yes, this thing is battery powered and the size of a pack of gum, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in covert usage.

In the past few months, I've heard from many people that gas tanks of parked cars are being invaded by siphoning gas thieves. It's no wonder -- gas is not exactly cheap these days. It's hard to imagine that different thieves hit different cars all the time in the same area, so wouldn't it be cool to use one of these inside the wheel well of a parked car or truck and make a video of a thief stealing gas from your precious vehicle?

The camcorder in question records at 15 frames per second (not the best, but passable) in the 3GP format, which is most commonly used in newer multimedia cellphones. I can't begin to imagine the uses for a highly covert miniature camcorder like this, but busting gas thieves and providing evidence to the police sounds like a good starter use to me. The unit stores video on a standard microSD card and has a wide angle 3.6mm lens. While not the best specs for video recording (far from it), the size alone makes this gadget exceptionally useful.

If there's two things I know about us as humans, it's this: we all have valuables, and we all have a surplus of wall outlets. "But what about homeless people," you counter. "They have neither valuables NOR wall outlets." Well my argumentative friend, that's a good point, and to that I say, "how many homeless people do you think will read this post?" The answer, of course, is one, but luckily she's never been a fan of my writing, so we can safely continue with the assumption that no homeless people will ever see this incredibly important article.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah: how to hide your tiny stash inside a fake wall outlet. If you find yourself with an over-abundance of small valuables, as I often do when I happen across a handful of Dr. Pepper-flavored jelly beans, the best place to store them is somewhere close-by and out of sight (duh!).

This instructable suggests using a non-wired electrical outlet for your hidden mini-vault, but I think it work even better with a cable outlet for two main reasons: 1) the coax plug would double as a little handle, making it easer to open and close your secret chamber, and 2) the guts of a coax cable outlet take up a lot less room than an electrical box.

So, next time you have a filthy, sweaty wad of Benjamins that you need to hide, give this little project a try... or, if you're looking for something a bit more secure, send me an e-mail and I'll gladly spend hold on to it for you.

Recently, a lot of media attention has been given to various ways to increase storage space in a house. Wendy A. Jordan's book Making Room posits many possible examples, though most of them seem to come down to "knock out some drywall between beams and build shelving there" or "make the area under your stairs into a cabinet/closet/office/etc." This definitely won't work at my house, where the area under the stairs is the upper half of the stairwell that leads to the basement! No, we have to line the walls with shelving and hope for the best.

One of the coolest "increased storage" areas I've seen is in the family home of one of my friends, where there are two secret rooms. One isn't so much secret as "easy to miss" (it's a tiny room accessed from inside the garage), but the other is behind a bookcase. To get to it, you have to unload and move the entire bookcase, and he's always claimed it's "not that cool," but still: secret rooooooooom!

Now you, too, can have a secret room, by following this tutorial at WikiHow for a Hidden Door Bookshelf. You'll have a wall of useful shelving, and one of the units will hide a door! You're probably only going to keep all your valuables in your new hidden room, but it's so completely awesome that it's worth building anyway. (And that's a good thing: because you have to build a steel frame, it's a relatively complex project, definitely not for novices.)

Bonus: unlike my friend's hidden-room-bookshelf, it's built on a pivot, so you won't have to take everything off of it to get into the room itself.

[via Shelterrific.]