To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself | Hacker News Reader

To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself

vincentsanders.blogspot.com

60 pointsedward28 comments

Slightly misleading headline, but after reading the article I have to admit I have been in the same position myself. After years or pilling on HDDs, I now have a small collection that would be better used as a side storage. Sadly I haven't been able to find any decent solutions (i.e. good price/quality ratio). You either go with expensive NAS solutions, or find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure. Has anyone found something good to house 3-4+ HDDs that can be accessed via USB?

>expensive NAS solutions

A cheap case, motherboard, CPU and a little RAM can be had for well under $200. Doesn't strike me as that bad, aside from the effort required to set it up.

Synology nas. I have a ds2411 here that I'm pretty happy with.

And as for whether or not it is expensive: the data is expensive, the nas is dirt cheap.

I just put a bunch of external 4TB USB drives on a Mac Mini which is also connected to home theater. I was going to go with a Synology or QNAP but 1) drives were expensive when I was buying (no longer true) 2) this is incremental 3) none of the lower end devices support decent full-disk crypto -- you need to go up to an i3-based system, which is kind of pricey.

I looked for the same thing (a multi-drive USB enclosure), but a good Pluggable hub and a bunch of discrete drives seems to work better.

ZFS seems like the right solution now, so if I move to a place with an equipment closet, I'll probably do that. (current solution is also pretty quiet)

So out of curiosity, what file system format are you using? HFS+?

Yes :( I realize this is suboptimal, but it's easy.

"find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure."

How about NAS trays? Not a $2500 NAS, but just the trays/mounts for a stereotypical desktop. I've done that for about 15 years now, insert the drive for freebsd / linux / windows / whatever and when you're done, remove the drive, maybe insert a different one. It solves a lot of double/tripe boot OS problems to only have one OS per drive and as many drives as you want to buy trays for.

I've had excellent result with both the old PATA drives/trays and SATA. No serious problems in 15 years.

Superficially its "giant tower case only" however you could mount a receptacle in a tiny desktop case with mini-itx and homemade NAS and just insert data drives not OS drives.

This is usually categorized as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"):

http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod

From there it's time to start reading reviews!

My collection would be better used as paperweights. I think the one on the bottom of the stack might be a 4 GB drive. At one point, I actually got rid of everything smaller than that.

My solution was to just get a cheap and prone to failure external enclosure, and copy the old drives to the largest one I had at the time. Whatever I might spend on an enclosure for multiple older drives could probably get me one new external drive big enough to hold everything on those drives.

This may be why there are few commercial solutions to this particular problem. By the time an internal drive is old enough to be swapped out, it's usually more worthwhile to copy it to a cheap new external drive than to try to reuse it anywhere else.

As a child I recall using imagination to superimpose the glorious boxart of Atari 2600 cartridges onto the crude sprites of the actual games.

http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/em... http://babysoftmurderhands.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ha... http://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/at... http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/9/93770/2367...

Makespace mentioned in the article is this one:

http://makespace.org/

"a community workshop in Cambridge for making and fixing things, meeting people, working on projects and sharing skills."

Here's a list of places similar to that: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

Unfortunately, only the larger hackerspaces have laser cutters, so your milage may vary. Fablabs are also places you can look into, however they usually cost quite a bit (techshop for example costs 100$ per month) compared to hackerspaces.

Yes, this has nothing to do with the article, but the title of the article has almost nothing to do with the article either.

One of the things my kids (6 and 4 now) love more than anything: 1. Go to home depot, buy 20-30 packing boxes of various sizes ($50-$100). 2. Buy a bunch of packing tape and one of the tape rollers ($10-$20) 3. Buy two good box cutters ($10)

Now, when the kids are asleep, stay up all night and build something. I've done haunted houses, Christmas castles, and more. It's really fun and helps work some creative juices that normally don't get worked by just programming. Kids love it and will play with it daily. And when they've finally destroyed it, it can just be recycled. We had this year's Halloween creation up for two months until we took it down for Christmas.

I’m finding the bizarre phenomena of people commenting before having read the article just as interesting as the article itself

The article itself is actually pretty boring.

As a child incredibly into LEGOs, Tinker Toys, Linkin Logs, K-nex, etc., I can say this was never the case.

I think the saying is more a commentary on all the useless crap we buy kids for their birthdays, holidays, etc that are played with for 10 minutes and then thrown in a corner. For many of these "filler" gifts the box literally is more fun than the gift.

Like you said though, there are some gifts that stick with a child... My Commodore 64 that I received in 1982 and my 300 baud modem I received in 1985 for instance changed the entire path of my life.

To a cat too.

And the box the refrigerator came in is the best toy of all.

I think we've all seen this first hand. Christmas, young kids, ripping out the shiny wrapping, the box, and then having this look 'is that it ? that was cool' while leaving the toy on the floor.

Isn't it the same for adults though ?

Also for cats.

Did you read the article?

Obviously..

Ironically, I am in the exact same situation, having collected many ThinkPads parts, I have a dozen of drives sitting here and am just finishing pushing everything onto a ZFS NAS. Still I'd like to repurpose all these drives (web cache/proxy, DMZ, tiny cloud)

Best toys ever: box, ball, stick

This only happens when the toy is badly chosen.

I volunteered to teach very young children to use 3d printers basically for making toys, and it is incredible how much they have inside when the toy is open. The only problem with 3d printers is time.

Children want open toys, a helicopter that can dive and then transform into a car.

A box and two wires could become a car that girls could use to add passengers. The passengers could be a piece of cardboard and a boam ball, made in 15 seconds.

Passengers could talk, and be daddy, or mom, or grandma.

It is sad so many times the box(and paper) is the most open thing children could have access to.

Legos that could only make one thing is not what children wants, it is what manufacturers want. Fragile dolls. Dumb toys so kids do not harm themselves(which makes them not learn basic responsibility).

Read the article before commenting please.

Frankly I think the discussion about children and toys is a bit more interesting than some storage thing, but to each his own.

Haha,sorry I had read the article before I commented, but I could not resist the temptation of talking about kids, specially with a statement like this that I strongly disagree with(the "often" part, if the statement were true we will be talking about miserable kids that I personally don't know about, and I have been living in Angola and Brazil with very poor kids).

Had the title said "it could happen that" or "some times" I would had not written anything at all, because I don't care about Lenovos.

I also believe that Lenovos are way less important that kids education.

IMHO the headline is totally misleading as most of the comments prove, because before stating to read the article you had to think about kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com