Here's one really cool way to recycle an old Mac.

Etsy seller pixelthis has turned the panels of retired Macs into clocks. pixelthis has already sold one clock made from the side of a G3. The seller currently has a clock made from the side panel of a G4 for $59USD and from the front cover of a G4 for $57USD. There are other unique clocks including those made from hard drives, circuitboards, bicycle wheels and old records.

[Via Macgasm thanks to Josh for the tip!]

Be sure to check the end of this post for details on your chance to win a free copy of Playlist Alarm Clock!

Playlist Alarm Clock is not necessarily a new or novel idea, but it's well-implemented. It's an iPhone app which allows you to create playlists, one for falling asleep and one for waking up. You can configure the length of time the sleep playlist will play, and how long it will take to fade out, as well as a fade-in time for the wake-up playlist. Setting times and fades comes down to a couple of taps, and adding songs to the playlists is done with a familiar iPod interface with full access to your library and playlists. If you're generally drowsy in the morning, you're covered as well: the snooze time can be configured to five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes and is just a groggy tap away.

Playlist Alarm Clock is $1.99US in the App Store. However, Chilli X is offering TUAW readers a chance at one of 10 free copies. All you have to do is submit (in the comments) your ideal playlists, one for falling asleep, and one for waking up. Be creative, be funny, be brilliant ... Chilli X will choose their favorites winners will be randomly selected next Thursday and promo codes will be sent to the winners.

Here are the rules and a link to the legal statement:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment listing your choices for sleep and wake playlists.
• The comment must be left before Wednesday, July 22, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Ten winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Promo code for one copy of Playlist Alarm Clock (US$1.99 value)
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Good luck!

As an entertaining Friday afternoon aside to our discussion earlier this week about how to recover data from a dying hard disk, it turns out there's plenty of uses left for the ones that have finally stopped pining for the fjords.

• With this tutorial from HacknMod, you can turn your hard disk into a grinder or sander.

• You can make a windchime and a keychain out of the parts inside the hard disk. Classy!

• You can turn it into a speaker.

• Years ago, my dad used to make clocks out of the huge 14-inch disk platters he used in old HP 3000 minicomputers. Turns out you can do this with the smaller drives of today, too.

• Finally, if you acquire enough expired hard disks, you can make a huge domino set out of them.

I use Boot Camp pretty regularly, and one thing that always annoyed me about booting back into the world of the living the Mac was that my clock was always eight hours behind (I live in the Pacific time zone). Windows likes to set the system clock to my local time of GMT –8. Mac OS X, on the other hand, likes to keep the hardware clock at GMT, and set it "softly" using the operating system software. There are some hairy registry fixes for the Windows behavior, but they're unsupported.

While manually setting my clock back for the eleventy billionth time, I noticed that just opening and closing the Date & Time preference pane sets the clock automatically. Of course, I had to be connected to the Internet, and have the "set date & time automatically" checkbox selected.

Sensing an opportunity to make my life easier, I wrote myself an AppleScript that simply opens the Date & Time preference pane, leaves it open for a few seconds, and then closes it. I saved it as an application, and set it to run at startup.

That way, by the time my computer is finished booting, the clock is right, and I didn't have to even think about it.

After the jump, some code and instructions on how to do this yourself.

If you're in the market for a new screen saver, and enjoy things like tha's DropClock, check out Simon Heys' (less processor-intensive) Word Clock. It's a wonderful typographic screen saver that shows the time in a clever way, and is enjoying a meme echo among designers right now.

It's extremely flexible: you can customize the colors, position and typography of the clock. Plus, it's available in 18 languages. There's a Flickr pool showing it in action.

If you're worried about burn-in, you might want to take a pass, but if you love (a) clocks, (b) typography, and (c) screen savers as much as I do, this might be your lucky day.

Word Clock is universal binary, and freeware.

1. Launch System Preferences
2. Click on 'Desktop & Screen Saver' in the 'Personal' row
3. Choose 'Screen Saver'