Cool, odd, or unusual uses for a computer?

July 8, 2005 7:51 AM

What are some of the coolest, oddest, or most unusual uses you've come up with for your personal computer?
posted by gwenzel to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I didn't "come up" with it, nor will I avail myself of the obvious pun, but there's cyberdildonics.
posted by bac at 8:12 AM on July 8, 2005

I've got two pillaged cases in my basement (one the previous container for a 286, the other for a 386/16) supporting a large bookshelf. One of them still functions (the 386) and has an ISA-based really old wireless card in it that allows me to continue to use it as a print and fax server.
posted by thanotopsis at 8:57 AM on July 8, 2005

I got the biggest, clunkiest old pc case I could find from a Goodwill Computer store, spraypainted it black, made some stencils with my band logo on it and spray painted through the stencils with reflective silver. Then doodled some more with paint pens and voila! a horrific masterpiece that looks totally punk-rock on stage.
posted by Espoo2 at 9:22 AM on July 8, 2005

Emulation is amazing. Software that turns your PC into everything from an old video game console (Atari 2600, NES) to a different computer (Apple II, Mac, old mainframes).

There are a ton of other neat PC hacks at Hackaday.
posted by waxpancake at 9:39 AM on July 8, 2005

I didn't come up with it, and it's a old idea, but I have always wanted to do a MacQuarium. I even had a broken iMac I was going to convert, but never got around to it.
posted by Melinika at 10:09 AM on July 8, 2005

Just a note, don't try mixing waxpancake's suggestion with thanotopsis'--emulating on old machines doesn't work too well (emulation is fairly processor intensive, depending on what you're emulating).

Not that I'm saying anyone is suggesting this, but I used to think "oh, hey, I can use this old PI 133MHz to run a SNES emulator!" but was fairly disappointed when SNES9x dragged horribly.

Unfortunately I don't have anything cool to add off the top of my head, aside from the very common and benign "hook the sound card to your stereo and run graphical equalizers full-screen".
posted by cyrusdogstar at 10:13 AM on July 8, 2005

A friend of mine used a gutted old PC case to sneak multiple bottles of homemade mead into a party. It was tasty mead, too.
posted by j3s at 12:00 PM on July 8, 2005

is that unusual because it was party where you had to smuggle alcohol in (rather than out, maybe)?

i guess i've used a computer to ferment violent revolution by the disaffected masses, in that i gave it to my brother-in-law who is a committed marxist revolutionary (a real s american one). luckily, for all god-fearing capitalists (like me), his daughter spilt a drink on it.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:19 PM on July 8, 2005

I put a 6 Gb drive into an old Mac 5300 laptop, loaded it up with mp3s, installed the voice recognition software and some Applescripts, then hooked it up to my stereo. I had divided the mp3s into playlists by genre, so I could simply say, "Computer, play some jazz" and I would get some jazz.

The drawback was that, with music playing, the laptop couldn't hear any more commands so I was pretty much limited to that first command. After that it was back to manual input.

And then there's the Mac II couch.
posted by joaquim at 1:07 PM on July 8, 2005

The thing that boggles me about technology is we're living in a Dick Tracy age but the computer in my pocket tracks my Dentist appointment and my grocery list. I use the cell phone from the grocer to see if we need milk.

To answer specifically: the strangest use for my computer is going on the internet to ask and answer random questions of the world via MeFi.
posted by deanj at 4:33 PM on July 12, 2005