Neatest odd pieces of hardware?

[fracturedmind]

Curious as to what some of you have that you consider out of the ordinary for a computer desktop?

Mine's pretty plain, desktop, laptop, speaker system, but I've been looking into a remote control or something like that to use with winamp

So, what neat little devices have you found to be useful or fun? (Hardware only)

[JStrider]

i have a 4x20 character lcd on my front door of the case...

[ShadowWraith]

Ya i have a remote control thing, its so awsome. You should definitely look into it if you're a lazy bum ;p

[Sno]

i got switches controling my fans, thats about it

[ChipX86]

I have an X10 remote control that used to be setup for my computer, but the computer interface fried. :/

Hmm, I can't think of anything else I have that's hooked up, besides a combo CF/memstick reader, but that's nothing too special. I do have a 3.25" (not 3.5") prototype disk, but that's a bit useless, since nobody ever made a non-prototype drive

[diergray]

I don't have it yet but I would love a powermate.

[saberyo]

I have a SCSI Network device...

it has a SCSI-1 interface on one side and a RJ-45 ethernet interface on the other. It's like a very bizarre dongle.

[fracturedmind]

Whats it do Diergray?

[cheerios]

it's a little volume widget type thingy. scrollwheel, gaming thingy, whatever you want it to be.

[happymaan]

Yeah, powermates are the best. I have a MAME arcade machine I built and the powermate was the perfect volume control for it.

You can program it to do most anything, very useful. and a nice brushed metal with a heavy weight to it. and it glows blue, or can pulse blue if you want.

[diergray]

Damn you happyman now I must buy it!

[heyal256]

I don't know if this should be mentione in this thread but I do know that you can find some of the most interesting things in japan.

here is the product...

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba...ge/tooth1.html

And a little discussion about the product
http://mixedasian.blogspot.com/2003_....html#89803805

[MSD]

That USB toothbrush is a joke, but a good one.

[cheese]

thire is always the classic fu-fume http://www.fu-fme.com/ daddy wants one

[yotta]

I have a dongle to hook up a playstation controller, a homebrew PARPORT <=> SNES controller adaptor, the 20x4 Char LCD.,I have a magstripe reader (reads credit cards), and a programming interface for my universal remote.

[yotta]

Oh, and I forgot... I have a cuecat modded to output plaintext.

[pepper]

A buddy of mine who is a programming wiz., took a gamepad and programmed a plugin for winamp letting him control his winamp with the gamepad. Have a wireless one, and you have a cool remote/gamepad. I haved't got his code/plugin, but it is cool.

[TwoToTango]

It's not really all that odd, but when people
see my 'puter the thing that always makes
them point and say "what's that?" is my
Contour AV Shuttle.

[fhqwhgads]

I want a George Foreman USB igrill.

believe it or not

[Realizm]

My lights.. that connect through USb.. those are weird..

[madsenj37]

I have an old Apple Performa with a tv tuner and remote. Its cool cause the computer itself is really old and worthless otherwise. I got the tv tuner and remote for $20 bucks off of ebay a couple years ago. It also has an mpeg decoder card cause it doesnt have enough power to process mpgs otherwise. Its a fun little toy when I go home over the summer.

[rubicon]

Nothing too unusual on my system. 6-in-1 media reader, Palm, scanner, webcam, etc.

I just bought a Sony T68i cell phone with BLuetooth so I suppose a USB-Bluetooth adapter will be next to sync the phone.

A USB storage key would be fun - put a small footprint OS on it and boot from it.

[demon]

i have like 4 computers running on one crammed desk and a soon to be working laptop lcd suspended from my ceiling

[hilbert25]

It's all about the ol' school modem, which you had to physically plug the phone into.

Another thing that I wish I had was a minidisc drive, it's only on japanese vaio's I think.

How about stereo equipment controlled by rs-232.

Or how about the robotic arm I've been using.

Of course the coolest ever was a guy who used a gps card, compass, and accelerometer with his laptop to figure out the direction it was facing and it's position, he wrote a program to show the stars and landscape features visible in the direction the laptop was facing.

[Empty_One]

I have an adapter that turns a 5 1/4 drive bay into 2 pcmcia slots. That and my compactflash pcmcia adapter, and it's really easy to dump the camera images to pc. It's not the newest gadget, but hey, most people don't have them

[munchini]

i have this parellel burner 1x speed... hAha took forever to burn one cd, and hoped to jebus that it wouldn't skip while burnin..

[platypus]

Removable Hard Drive Rack

Labelled 'Not Pron 01', 'Not Pron 02', etc.

[poof]

<i>Curious as to what some of you have that you consider out of the ordinary for a computer desktop?</i>

I have dos disks that go back to when Gates stole it!

I have OS2 beta disks after Gates stole it, including warp. (don't know why I save that stuff)

I have a simple camera Popular Mechanics sent me that read watermarks. (another beta)

This is out of the ordinary for a desktop, logons for my grandkids. They can screw up their own stuff, not mine. Highly unusual.

[poof]

Damn, Guess that was software.

Hardware wise? I have a wooden case modem. Not running it, of course, nice finish on the wood though. Used 5.25 floppys to run Prodigy back in '89.

[The dave]

i will soon get this
hubzilla