I’ve been reading a lot of How-To and DIY sites lately, like Lifehacker and Instructables. I’ve always had a natural tendency toward being organized – approaching OCD levels in some circumstances – and I like finding new tips and tricks and gadgets to help streamline daily life.The economy being the way it is, a lot of these articles involve repurposing things to solve specific problems without having to lay out a lot of cash. The folks at Lifehacker have a real fetish for binder clips, for example, using them for everything from cable management and cell phone holders to cuff links and tripod mounts. Occasionally, they even use them to hold sheets of paper together.
Generally, Instructables articles have titles like “How to turn an antique pipe organ into a Beowulf Cluster for $7” On reading that, I’ll think “Hey! I’d really like a Beowulf Cluster, and I can afford $7. I’ll check it out.” Then I find that the instructions run something like this:
Materials Required
Antique Pipe Organ
17 identical CPUs
Touch-Screen Monitor
3 spools, 12-gague wire (600’ ea)
6 large cooling fans
Uninterruptible Power Supply
2 power strips
Assembly
My uncle is a preacher, and when he renovated his church, he gave me the old pipe organ. I took it to my father’s custom carpentry shop and used his tools to gut it. Some of the burled walnut panels were damaged, but I stumbled across an exact match in my dad’s scrap pile and was able to replace them. Since I work at a Dell assembly plant, I had access to a bunch of CPUs that were going to be trashed. While my brother the professional electrician wired everything together, I asked a friend to write a custom UNIX program to cluster the CPUs. I mounted a small touch-screen monitor I found at the bus stop onto the sheet music shelf and it fit perfectly! My brother made a bunch of switches out of some parts he already had, and wired these into the existing keys and foot pedals so I don’t even need a keyboard! One of the keys was sticking and needed to be replaced. Luckily, my grandfather was a big game hunter and had a ton of trophies in his basement. I used a Dremel to cut down an African elephant tusk into a replacement key. Once everything was wired up, we built a custom bench out of the backseat of a ’57 Plymouth Fury, which I found behind my refrigerator when we moved into our new house. We didn’t have quite enough outlets, so I ran down to my local hardware store and bought 2 new power strips.
Total cost: $7!!!!!!!omg!!!
Asshole.
