What exactly is inside a hard drive? Well, I let myself be talked into manually destroying some hard drives, rather than using the simple Derek's Book and Nuke.

So, we pop all the cases off, then do some terrible things to the platters which hopefully prevent most people from being interested in the Word documents we send around here at work.

The one thing I found interesting was that... in addition to the head, platters, and some other gizmos and gadgets, there's not one, but two rather powerful magnets inside. And they're attached to the base of the head, a few millimeters away from the platters.

I had never really known how careful one had to be with magnets around hard drives. Well, I don't think I own a single magnet anywhere near as strong as the ones I pulled out from inside of the drives.

They make great toys though, I have a chain of them now to dangle off various metal objects :-)

So my heat pump / air conditioner decided to continuously run the fan. Even when the heat/air was turned off. Well, I'm lucky enough that my next door neighbor runs a full time business repairing those sorts of things. In the meantime, I figured I'd like to make the fan stop running.

You'd think that would be simple... but no button on the thermostat affected it's desire to keep running... and it even kept going after I turned off all the power on the circuit breaker it was on.

Or, so I thought. I ended up just wondering over to chat with my neighbor, and discovered that heatpumps have their own circuitbreaker, outside. Probably so that they can be turned off, and when someone sticks their head in the unit, they don't have any fear that it'll get turned back on :-)