If it wasn’t painfully obvious from the giant, obnoxious watermarks, this floppy-disk iPad case was made by none other than RabbitRampage – who has in the past brought us such goodies as the game console iPhone cases and some tiny felt game controllers.

While this felt case is modeled after the old 3.5 inch floppy disk, it actually measures in at 8.5 inches by 10.25 inches in order to accommodate your tablet. That makes it even bigger than one of those gigantic, antiquated 8 inch floppies, but rectangular instead of square. That gets me thinking – how would the disc turn inside of a rectangular enclosure anyhow?

If you’re ready to turn your iPad into a giant floppy disk, head on over to Etsy and pony up your $35(USD) now.

This floppy disk light is made from sturdy 1/4″ thick PVC, and uses LED backlighting to help it pop from your wall. While they’re very bright for LEDs, I wouldn’t expect this to provide sufficient illumination to read a book by. It’s really just an accent light. Also, don’t expect it to be 5-1/4″ square. It’s actually much bigger, at 12″x 12″. I suppose that’s good, but I wouldn’t have ever wanted to use a floppy that huge. Those heinous 8″ floppies were my limit.

If amber isn’t your color of choice, you can also order one with white, green, blue or red LEDs instead. The 5-1/4″ floppy wall lamp is available over on LuxChroma’s Etsy shop for $75(USD). Maybe someday we’ll look back and laugh at how much SD cards can hold too.

The SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator can replace just about any old 34-pin floppy drive, allowing older computers and electronic gear to read data from a modern SD card. Designed by Jean-François DEL NERO, the HxC Floppy Emulator has been tested to work with PC, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Thomson, MSX, ZX Spectrum series computers among others, and they continue to add support for more devices like synthesizers and samplers. It just plugs in where the device’s old floppy drive once sat, allowing you to read up to 2GB from and SD or 32GB from an SDHC card. The drive can even emulate two drives at once too.

It even emulates the head stepper motor sound of a 3.5″ floppy drive, as you can hear in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The HxC SD Floppy Emulator sells for $109.99 (USD) over on eBay.

The strange contraption you see above is Eli’s LEGO Mindstorms 3.5″ Floppy Disk Archiving Machine, and together with a laptop running Fedora, an Android phone and a Python script it has made the archiving process fully automatic. The machine grabs a disk, aligns it above the phone to have its picture taken, feeds it into a USB floppy drive to back up the data and finally plops the backed up disk down to a waiting box:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Hacks like this make me feel unworthy of playing with LEGO. Eli also has another LEGO project on his website, one that’s less functional and more for fun – a LEGO Rubik’s Cube.

By connecting a pair of 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch floppies to a PIC18f14k50 microcontroller, and then interfacing that with MIDI over USB, the modder was able to program the drives to crank out four-tone polyphony.

So crank up the volume, sit back for the next 3 minutes and enjoy a brief musical interlude…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[YouTube via The Awesomer]

In order to pull off this hack, Charles had to stack components of two old 3.5″ floppies so there would be enough height to accommodate the storage of the USB connector.  Inside the drive are the guts of one of those business card style USB drives.

Charles managed to precisely align the drive’s activity light with the old floppy’s write-protect switch, so there’s a little blinking red LED in there now. It looks like the disk is an old IBM PS/2 reference disk, but I doubt that he bothered copying those files to his flash drive.

Best thing about hacks like this one is that it looks like it really wouldn’t be that hard to make one for yourself – now that Charles has paved the way with his creativity.

Check out more pics over at Charles’ USB Floppy flickr album.

Our friends over at SUCK UK have gone through the trouble of making these sticky notes which look just like the original 3.5″ floppy, each set into a pad of 50 sheets for taking all your notes. They’re perfect for any computer geek’s workstation, and they come in a three pack with pink, yellow and white diskettes.

You can order a pack over at SUCK UK’s online shop for £7.50 (appx. $12 USD) each. I’m thinking that in 10 years or so, they’ll be making flash drive sticky notes while we’re storing all of our data in holographic cubes.

Still, it’s not like you’re still using a computer with a 3.5″ floppy drive anymore. Right? Right?!?

You can grab a set of 5 floppy magnets for $16 (USD) or single disk magnets for $4 each over at FloppyDiskCreations’ Etsy shop. Just don’t plan on saving any files on these.

You can get a Mini Floppy Disk Pillow at ShanaLogic for $18 (USD). Actually no you can’t, because the little bugger is sold out right now, but if you check back next week it should be in stock.

[via holycool]

For some geeks, it’s hard to throw out old technology-related stuff, kind of like how some fashionistas have trouble throwing out old clothes. Heck, I probably have 4-6 old computers in storage at home. I don’t know why, but I still do.

Well Nick Gentry decided to use those good old floppy disks for a purpose, other than just taking up space. Nick’s art portfolio includes some really cool mixed media paintings, most incorporating old floppy disks.

You can check out many more of Nick’s amazing floppy disk creations over on his website, where you’ll also find that he has a fondness for VHS tapes.

[via Design You Trust]

These handmade 3.5-inch floppy coin purses by BraveMoonman (she also makes some awesome felt calculator watches) are perfect for keeping your spare change from rattling around your bag. All the while, they say in no uncertain terms that you had your first computer before the snot-nosed punk clerk behind the counter was an embryo.

Each one is handsewn from colorful felt, and is the same size as a real floppy. They’re available in a variety of fruity colors that I don’t recall ever having graced the slot of my old Mac IIci’s 3.5-inch drive.

You can get your hands on one over at BraveMoonman’s Etsy shop for $18 (USD). Ah, remember when computers were beige? Take that young whippersnappers!

Created by artist ZacharyBear, this Jacob’s Ladder is made from a bunch of old 3.5-inch floppy disks, woven together to create this perplexing, noisy plaything. Check out the video clip below to see this thing in action…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You can grab a set of these over on ZacharyBear’s Etsy shop for just $15 bucks. What’s the last time you really needed that set of Aldus Pagemaker 6.0 installer floppies anyhow?

In very simple terms, a set of physical disks can be linked using RAID technology for the purpose of having backups and/or increased disk performance. Which gets us to our dear Mr. Olson, who happens to work for Y-E DATA, a USB floppy drive company. He tried setting up his “very important scientific feat” in WIndows XP, but the OS had more common sense than he had, and would not allow the FDD RAID. (Un)Fortunately, OS X 10.2.4 was more accommodating. The rest was a simple matter of plugging everything in and using Disk Utility to create the array.

So what can his army of floppy disks do? Store 4.22 MB of data, that’s what. It can also transfer a 3.6 MB file in 32 seconds. “Turbo lightning speed” indeed. For his next project – I swear this is still all true – Olson has totally left the boundaries of sanity and wants to create a 125 USB floppy disk drive array. My god. The drives will probably fill up his room, and will most likely have a total capacity less than 256 MB.

[via Every Joe]

Got 256 old 3.5-inch floppy disks lying around the house? I can’t think of a better use for a bunch of floppies but to make a giant 16×16 pixel art Pinky ghost mosaic out of them. Can you?

[via GamOvr]

I had to do a double-take when I first saw it, but Adobe Photoshop CS4 would take up 358 floppies, and that’s not the full CS4 suite.

And your little lightweight browser, Firefox, all of a sudden wouldn’t seem particularly compact if it shipped on 36 disks.

And while iTunes 8 is no slouch on 46 floppies, the true heavyweight champion in this poster series has to be EA’s SIMS 3, which would take up an unbelievable 1,760 3.5-inch floppies. Or in other words, a stack of floppies that would be over 19-feet tall when piled one on top of another.

My arm hurts just thinking about having to swap disks that many times. If software companies really wanted to prevent piracy, I suppose they could always go back to distributing their programs on floppies. The number of disks you’d have to copy would be more than enough of a deterrent.

If you’re looking for some great art for your computer room, you can grab a set of 4 limited edition, hand-signed digital prints (each one measuring in at a substantial 18.9″ x 26.8″) over at the AntrepoShop for $120 (USD).

I wonder how many floppies it would take to install Metal Gear Solid 4 on my PS3.

[via Behance]

I can’t even remember the last time I saw a 5¼ floppy. To make it even more retro, Adam printed the track list using a typewriter-like font:

Nice. I guess we know who “won” that year for best compilation. All we need’s some Ice-T and we are breakin’.

Pair this sleeve with the floppy CD-R and you’ll open a warp hole to the 80′s. Let’s not do that.

[via Likecool]

These CD-R discs may be square, but they’ll work in a standard CD or DVD drive despite their non-round shape. Of course, cutting corners on the discs means that they don’t store as much as a standard CD-R. These ones only hold 200MB, but that’s still over than 138 times more than an original 3.5″ floppy.

At $10 (USD) a disc, these novelties aren’t cheap, but they’ll definitely draw stares the next time you jam one into your DVD drive. To save a little, you can buy a 4-pack for $28. you can find them over at the designboom shop.

Sure, I suppose rewriteable optical drives are still standard with all PCs these days, but solid state storage is where it’s at. Me, I really want a USB flash drive that looks like an 8″ floppy – or maybe a punchcard.

Modeled after the truly retro 5-1/4″ floppy disk, these soft coasters are handmade from colorful felt, and just like their real-life cousins, are guaranteed not to store any of your data reliably. But they should keep your coffee table free of stains.

San Jose crafter TheGeekery handsews these coaster floppies from EcoSpun felt, which ironically happens to be recycled from the plastic bottles that your drink probably just came out of.

Each set sells for $28 (USD) and comes with four brightly colored floppies, packed in one of those old school floppy disk cases that used to clutter my closets back in the day. And if you prefer to go with classic black floppies, you can even specify your own custom colors.

So who really needs flash drives, hard disks and optical storage? I proclaim ‘let’s bring floppies back!’ Show your pro-floppy support by picking up a set over at TheGeekery’s Etsy shop.

Now you can bring back those fond floppy memories with these clever floppy disk gift tags. Edinburgh, Scotland crafter feelfuzzy makes these gift tags from leftover retro 3.5-inch floppy disk labels, adhered to heavy card stock, and hung from a string.

They’re available over on Etsy for $5.50 a pack of 5. Of course, if you happen to have box of floppies lying around, just grab a drill, punch a hole through the corner of the disk itself, and you’ll be just that much cooler when you hand out the presents.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you just might like this fun vinyl and foam soft sector coaster set from the clever folks over at supermandolini.

You can’t write protect anything to these disks, but you don’t need to worry about spilling a drink on them either (bonus).

Purchase a set of six for €27.00 (about US $40) at supermandolini.