This month, I am deciding to make bigger and heavier pots, but still keeping with the monolithic shapes. I was spurred into creative action by a cardboard tube I saw in a trash pile at work. I noticed it and a lightbulb flashed in my head; I immediately grabbed it, knowing exactly what I was going to do with it. The world is full of gifts indeed and I love the process of finding sudden and unexpected inspiration at random time. All you have to do is remain open, hone your discernment skills, and channel whatever comes your way. Also, I’m experimenting with black cement coloring and black river rocks on my old 6 inch round model.
Broken things are solutions looking for problems. They hold magic undiscovered potential. I hate throwing away broken things because I’m never sure I won’t be able to later re-purpose some part of them into something else. On a seemingly unrelated note, I’m often in need of plugging some random computer or video device in to a screen for testing and, up until now, I have had to swap cables on my desktop monitors or pull out some bulky crappy old monitor from the garage and find some temporary place for it while I use it. What I really want is a small lightweight monitor I can easily access and occasionally plug a Raspberry Pi or my linux server into, something that’s closer in size to a laptop screen than a big bulky desktop monitor and that will not take up desk space.
Cue in broken hardware
As luck would have it, my stupid cat likes to sleep on laptops. They provide a nice warm place and a soothing fan sound. Usually, the only repercussion of this fact is that I sometimes wake up in the morning with hair on the keyboard and the Google helpfully informing me that
In one particular instance however, I was using a hackintoshed Asus 1201N that was clearly not designed to support the weight of a house cat; I know because it never woke up from its night of feline suffocation. I took it apart to see what I could find but never did find the needle in that haystack; probably a shorted motherboard… In the closet of broken stuff it went.
A killer and his victim
Displays
I’m always thinking about creating different displays. I’m pretty bored with the standard monitor design and I’m always interested in challenges to the rectangle-in-a-sleek-shiny-enclosure status-quo which led me to learn that I could probably find hardware compatible with my broken laptop’s LCD panel. I took the laptop apart, got the part number of the LCD panel and eventually found the right board on ebay for about $30 (I searched for “HSD121PHW1 controller”, HSD121PHW1 being the panel’s model number). Two weeks later, the padded envelope with the telltale Chinese characters on it showed up in my mail mailbox and I immediately plugged it in to test it. Lo and behold, it worked!
From parts to a thing
Okay, so now, I actually have the parts I need to make that small monitor I’ve been wanting: a small LCD panel and a driver board I can plug any HDMI or DVI display into. The next step is putting it together in a cool, cheap and convenient way. I had been peripherally interested by Plexiglas for another project so I decided to try it as a mounting surface for this. I measured the width of the screen and driver board, as well as the height of the screen with and without the adjustment buttons, and got a couple pieces cut at my local plastic store (Santa Monica Plastics). I drilled some holes, mounted the various parts on the back using standoffs, and sandwiched them by screwing in the smaller piece of plexi in the front using longer standoffs.
If you have a teenager, you will no doubt be familiar with the dilemma of letting them listen to music at night while keeping them somewhat sheltered from the irresistible pull of the bright rectangle of light that seem to so efficiently hijack their attention. In my day, it was simple: the tape deck played music and that’s all it did. These days, with smart phones, it feels like it’s all or nothing. The tape deck comes with a movie theater, a video game arcade, and a place to hang out with friends, and they’re all open and available 24 hours a day. So, like any concerned parent, we take the phone away at night but since now days, it’s the place they get their music, it means they can’t listen to music anymore which is kind of sad.
Something annoying:
You know what I hate? The fact that our consumer culture dictates that when something is broken, we throw it away and buy something new rather than fixing it. I had a smartphone and after two years, the internal phone speaker broke, which meant I had to have it on speaker or plugged into an earpiece to hear people talking to me. I actually attempted to fix the problem: I ordered the part on ebay and spend 30 minutes opening the phone but I failed. Mind you, the smartphone was still a computer with over 1000 times the speed and memory of my first computer, a nice bright and sharp touch screen, wifi, etc… Other than the speaker problem, it worked perfectly. In the end, though, since I couldn’t fix the problem, I reluctantly gave in and bought a new phone. Grrrrr!
Ready for the trash? Not so fast!
Ready for the trash? Not so fast!
So, I made this:
It’s actually really simple. I tried to restrict the functionality of the phone and create an object designed with the single purpose of enjoying spotify without the potential distraction of the rest of the internet getting in the way. First off, with the zip card out, your smartphone becomes a small tablet.
I removed all the video games and Netflix and Youtubes and Hulus and Snapchats and Facebooks and Vines and Instagrams and circles and Pinterests and Ellos and MySpace. I kept only Spotify and installed a program called Autostart which automatically launches an app after the phone boots and prevents a user from quitting the app.
I then built a frame into which I could mount the phone and poured a trademark Hollier polished cement base. I used autostart to automatically launch Spotify to whenever the phone turns on and thus transformed a crappy old orphaned phone into a custom one-of-a-kind Spotify appliance. Being mounted in a frame and set into a solid base transforms it into something you set and walk away like a radio rather than something you interact and fiddle with like a phone.
Repurposing an old smartphone into a custom spotify outlet
