25 Years of Mac: Repurposing Your Dead Mac

4:51 am, January 26th, 2009, Nicole Martinelli

When a computer gives up the ghost, there are a lot of things you can do to keep it around the house.

Here are a few ways we’ve found, if you’ve found a new way to give new life to your dead Mac, let us know.

Macquarium: when your mac is swimming with the fishes.

There are a ton of these — flickr counts nearly 700 — but this slick black version was made by Dave D’aranjo who rescued a Mac from a Singapore sidewalk and turned it into an aquarium. He spent a couple of months fashioning the fish bowl, following the how-to in low end Mac, then adding his own touches and getting a custom logo to give it a screen-saver look.

Macplanter: Out of the Dead, Things Grow
Got a bunch of dead computers? One Mac aficionado in Pennsylvania has turned them into living containers for plants. Nice idea, though the neighbors may complain of the high-tech junkyard feel.

iWipe toilet paper holder

Here’s one way to repurpose your Mac when it’s gone down the tubes.
As we reported awhile back, DIYer Shawn Morton converted a classic Mac into a toilet roll dispenser, or Apple iWipe. Instructions here.

Mac Art
Another way to give life to your old Mac is to turn it into art, as we wrote about a few months back in the iPaint my Mac project by Satta Van Dahl.

Mac lover Mike Tuohy has also turned his old machines into wood-look pieces of art, proving that even a non-working Mac can be a thing of beauty.

Posted by Nicole Martinelli in 25 Years of Mac, Cult of Mac, Vintage Tech | Comment on this article

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About the author

Nicole Martinelli was born in San Francisco and has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. Cultish tendencies and love for DIY increased while living on the Old Continent, where tech came late and cost more in Big Mac index terms. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. Since 1999, she's been tapping away at zoomata. You can also find her on Facebook, Linked in and Twitter.

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