What can I do with twenty floppy disk drives?

Especially if most of them are probably broken, and that my own boxes don’t have floppy disk drives for more than five years by now.

I’ve been trying to clean stuff up yesterday and today (this means March 12th, I’m writing this in advance), after doing my job for the day. Basically I’ve been looking at the crap I accumulated in the past years, in term of computer components. I tend to get all the garbage that some companies I have contacts in tend to trash away, this sometimes give me decent stuff I can reuse, most of the time it just gives me more garbage I have to take care of after a few years left “to think about it”.

The count of the demolished hardware, between yesterday and today was three AT boxes and one ATX. The AT boxes were mostly broken already, or very very much useless. The only thing I’ve done with them was scavenge the screws (they always come useful), the jumpers (who knows) and some of the cables (I used one of those for the gender swap if you remember about it, it was more than an year ago – by the way the photos were lost from the original server when I had the disk failure on Farragut, luckily I still had the original and had them uploaded on Flickr for better handling; if Google told me about broken links inside my own pages it would be nice :P). Now that I’ve finished I wonder if I should have taken a few pictures of the chassis and the garbage.

Some time ago I was more interested in retro-computing so I would have put the AT chassis away, but as it is, I don’t have time to spend (or waste) on that anymore, so the chassis will just be sent to be recycled, it’s quite an heavy amount of metal that can probably be recycled.

I preserved the AT PSUs though, they can get useful as bench supplies for when I’m working with electronics. And in the huge quantity of cardboard boxes I had around there I found something like ten floppy disk drives, add about another ten I still have inside the home (this stuff was in the garage), and I have about twenty floppy disk drives. Unused and most likely useless for me. Does anybody have a suggestion on what I can use (parts of) them for? I tried looking for someone to pick them up but nobody called, unsurprisingly.

All in all, trying to wear myself physically seems to work better to keep me in a good mood than just doing development work. Oh and I start to get hooked on coffee now rather than Coke (cola) or Chinotto, I suppose this is a bit better than before, still allowing for a decent caffeine intake, without which I fail as a programmer…