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Hardware

Computer Hardware That Can Pull Double-Duty? 64

Posted by Cliff from the wonder-if-those-product-stress-tests-took-this-into-account dept.
MicklePickle asks: "It's been raining very heavily here in Sydney Oz, and as usual when we, (the SysAdmins), come in to work we take off our very wet shoes and socks and place them on one of the two hefty UPSs to dry out. They dry out very quickly on the hot fan. We even have a couple of 'toast racks', (a metal frame for housing an HP web console), to lay the shoes and socks out on. Does anyone else make use of computer hardware in a manner for which it was not intended?"
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Computer Hardware That Can Pull Double-Duty? More

Computer Hardware That Can Pull Double-Duty?

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  • best site (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Satai ( 111172 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @03:09AM (#2965990)
    TechQuarium [techquarium.com] is a great site for Mac Aquariums and so on.

  • Sun E450. (Score:3, Funny)

    by AntipodesTroll ( 552543 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @03:49AM (#2966037) Homepage
    The one I used as a seat, anyway.

    Pretty bad ergonomics for the price, but it atleast had castors.

  • Easybake Oven (Score:4, Funny)

    by mr. phantastik ( 202943 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @04:15AM (#2966108) Homepage
    I've always wanted to use my computer as an easybake oven:
    1. Build a metal box to fit in your 5 1/2" drive bay, much like the metal case for a CD-ROM.
    2. Cut an intake hole on the bottom and install a thin fan.
    3. Run a piece of that bendy clothes dryer vent stuff from the hole to directly over the cpu.
    4. Change the CPU fan to suck air away from CPU instead of blowing.
    5. Place treat in bay.
    6. Play Quake 3 for about an hour.
    7. Remove treat, and eat. Careful, its probably not cooked at all, and will most likely kill you.

  • Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

    by briansmith ( 316996 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @04:28AM (#2966132) Homepage
    I'm sure that when all our bosses bought us these computers, they weren't intending for us to post comments to Slashdot all day long, but that is exactly what a lot of us are using them for.

  • 300 or 400 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @04:45AM (#2966171) Homepage Journal
    300w ATX is all the computer needs... But I needed 400 for my cigarette lighter mod.

    Then again, do any of us use computers for what their original purpose was? I do not think Alan Turing had surfing for pr0n in mind when he thought of logic gates.

    And buying Alpha EV67's just to bust seti work units is pretty weird. 3.5 years worth of seti work has been done by EV67s, and they were all done by the same person over the last 2.5 years, so someone bought 2 EV67s @ $22,000 a piece minimum primarily to crunch Seti. Could it have been Compaq themselves? Perhaps - But I expect they could hardly afford it.

    Are computers for games? Sure. Games are an 8 billion dollar a year industry. They drive users to seek greater performance machines. Moores law would probably have failed years ago if all we ever needed was a good office suite.

    Do I use my 12 by p166 cluster to heat my house? yes. Is there any other reason to have 12 p166s? I never run it in the summer so the primary reason to run it must be for heat. If I was actually using it for production, I would certainly have faster/more machines.

    Do I leave the machine in my room while I'm sleeping? No, but I like the white noise it's fans generate to keep me from waking up for every bump in the night.

    Do I really need a PC based PBX? no, but it is nice to have a convoluted voicemail script that includes "If you are a telemarketer or if you are placing an unsolicited telephone call, you MUST press 4"

    Has anyone else taken apart an old ps2 mouse and hung a piece of paper from one of the rollers to create a clap on monitor (the slightest breeze or moderately loud sound turns my monitor on... I use a usb mouse for actual work).

    Can you all reboot your stupid dsl router through power over Ethernet/DC relay?

    Anyone else buy 100' of that thick orange cable at home depot with the 2 fibers, 4 CAT5e and a Cable TV coax then use the fiber with a cheap roto rooter sewer pipe inspection camera to spy on other rooms?...

    OK, I'm a little weird... but at least I have dead man switched degaussing rings under all my boxes so when the black helicopters come for me, all the incriminating evidence will be erased.
    • Care to go into a bit more detail for your cigarette lighter mod?
      Plans would be ideal..

      Is this in an all-metal case, and if not, how do you keep the plastic face from getting melty?
      I think I'll refrain from turning the unused 3.5" external-accessable bay into an ashtray though.. ;)

      • I think I'll refrain from turning the unused 3.5" external-accessable bay into an ashtray though.. ;)

        That's the coolest Idea! Wonder what make/model of car has a flush, flat ashtray?
        • The reason I didn't want to is because of the ashes.. all my PCs have been outfitted with a inward-blowing front case fan. I can well imagine the mess that would make inside the case, let alone gumming up the processor fan (ack!!). If you took proper care while smoking, and sealed the 3.5" bay from the rest of the machine, it could work though.

          As to finding an ashtray that would work, write down the measurements (HxWxD) and go to your local junkyard. If you want it to be springloaded, alter the measurements to provide for some rails, or even small 'wheels'.

          Or, you could take those measurements and dig out an old Compaq 386 or an old IBM PS/2 and hack the case to bits of the sizes you need. The metal in those things would work well. If you go for that idea, you can even re-use the plastic 'blank' so nobody would guess it's even there.. until you open it and their jaws drop. :) For added effect, take the processor out of the machine as well. If it's got J-leads just glue it to the bottom of the ashtray.. if it's got pins cut the suckers off first, then glue.

          An old single-speed CD-ROM (you know, the kind that hooked intoyour oringinal Soundblaster? ;) could be modified as well.. hack the tray a bit, and make an area at the back roughly the size of a pack of cigs.. set it up so the tray works like those straw dispensers do. All you'd need is a 5 or 12 volt motor, a switch on the tray itself (to reverse) and a button to go behind the.. well, button. The cig dispenser would be harder to do, and even more pointless.. but it would be funny as hell.

          • Forget the straw dispencers! Hack a tray to hold cigarettes and one to be an ashtray!! Power them normaly but do not attach an ATA cable... voila powered ciggarette holder and ashtray!
            • That's actually what I intended. :) But to get one cig into the tray before you 'eject' it, it'd have to pop one in somehow, and that's the only way that comes to mind.

              Any ideas for uses of old tape backup drives? I've got 2, one internal and one external.. they're useless to me.

      • Basicly got a cigarette lighter fixture from napa auto parts and crimped a standard 4 pin molex to the leads on the red/black pair. Drill a hole in the case the right size and mount it. Plug your molex connector into the ATX hard drive leads. Could have put a resister inline to let it heat up slower (draw less amperage) on a 300w Power supply but opted for a Sparkle 400w ($26) instead. There used to be a site that talked about the mod. But it is offline. The guy basicly used a 250w AT powersupply for his fans and cigarette lighter and peltier. ATs are better for that sort of power because 400w+ ATXs used to be super expencive and AT can be turned on/off with a switch instead of relying on the motherboard for signaling.
    • And thats never a good thing.
    • I do not think Alan Turing had surfing for pr0n in mind when he thought of logic gates.

      He might have. Did you ever read Cryptonomicon?
    • Nope.. 300w is not enough for everyone.

      I had in my computer the following: cd-rw, dvd, sb live platinum, ati radeon dual display, 2x 7200rpm 40gig with athlon xp 1600 and lot of stability problems with a 300w ps.

      Sometimes dvd-drive would not spin up in the beginning and computer would have to be turned on and off a couple of times before all the components would power up. Sometimes one or another hd did not get recognized, etc..

      All these problems disappeared when i got a 400w ps.
  • I use my Sinclair ZX 81 as a wedge to keep my library door open.

    Dirk

    • I had a 40Mb hard disk that I ran with it's lid off for about 3 days before it crashed beyond use...

      Then that became my door stop - just jam it in the hinge end of the door... ahh student days ;)

  • A few I can think of... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Colitis ( 8283 ) <jj...walker@@@outlook...co...nz> on Thursday February 07, 2002 @07:01AM (#2966490)
    I have a Mac SE holding open my office door at work.

    At the cafeteria they sell chelsea buns and give you free butter, but the butter comes in little tubs and its rock hard. I sit the tub on the back of my monitor for ten minutes and it's nice and soft.

    I also have a friend who reckons the back of a monitor is great for drying weed.

  • Table legs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tkrabec ( 84267 )
    I didn't have enough money for a good computer table. But having enough "spare" machines I stacked them on their sides, leveled them out with a phone book and put an old door on top. Now my cluster is also my desk. If I could just move my legs with out causing the the power to go out in the neighborhood.

    -- Tim
    • I think I've got that beat, actually :-)

      I have *one* machine holding up a table - I wish I had a picture of the actual table, but the machine is one of these [reputable.com] beasties. The problem is that there's an 8-node beowulf (4xdual PII/333, + 2gbit myrinet) on top of the table, along with an Indigo2, 2 21" SGI monitors and a 15" Compaq p.o.s. for the KVM switch, and the table was designed to hold... say... a plate of deli meats, a salad bar, and some napkins. Maybe.

      So, long story short - some genius snaps off one corner of the table by standing on it. The rest of the table bows downward a little bit, resting itself on top of the SGI 4d/310 beast. Whee, computer furniture!

  • A.K.A. CD-ROM drive. Yet another innovative use of technology by clueless users.

  • Lower Heating Bill... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by iamjim ( 313916 )
    Before buying my house, I lived in several small apartments. I (and when I would have them) and my roommates usually left the computers on 24/7. This also included usage of several large monitors (21") SO - as long as the windows were kept closed and the drafts from opening and closing outside doors were kept to a minimum - we could heat the room w/ no need for another heat source. It worked rather well and kept expenses down during the cold massachusetts months.

    It is just the opposite in a server room though - you end up paying more for venting and air conditioning in order to keep things cool.
  • works great

    also as an excuse to stay home :
    "the server's gone down at work and I'm on call"

    I also use a few mylar splitters and run a 12v lights from the PSU!
  • I had a friend who used to threaten to use his overclocked CPU without the fan to boil his coffee in the morning.

    I had another friend who bought a VAX at one of the MIT Flea Markets and used it as a coffee table.

    I had a third friend what used to drop monitors from a second story window and record the sound of impact and use it in techno songs. When the monitor hits the ground it makes this funky metallic implosion sound.

    Back when I was in college, our computer science lab had these DEC monitors that used to get super hot--hot enough to lightly toast Pop Tarts from the vending machine down the hall.
    I'm sure there are other instances--but can't think of them off the top of my head. Most of these (except the monitor dropping one) involve the immense heat generated by some hardware and the rest involve the shape of the hardware. I'd be interested to see any alternate uses that don't involve heat/shape.
  • We had an old Mac running a clock program (full screen) as our wall clock.
    We had removed (and subsequently lost) the keyboard and mouse, and it ran quite happily doing nothing else for about 6 month when it mysteriously crashed. Without the keyboard there wasn`t much we could do about it.

    CJC
  • I don't like my bagels toasted. But set em on the back of a monitor for 10 minutes and they get nice n warm. =)

  • "Server - Australian for..." (Score:4, Funny)

    by BRO_HAM ( 543601 ) <brah777 AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday February 07, 2002 @11:18AM (#2967448) Homepage
    "Server - Australian for sock dryer"

    I'm sorry, I had to.
  • I mean, when I think 'double duty', I think of it doing two things at once. And well, in the case of a computer, it's heavy, it generates heat, and it may be strong enough to prop something up.

    So in that case, I'd have to say that I've used a Wang before to keep pizza warm in the machine room (it was just the right size on top for a large pizza, and conveniently table height).

    I've seen towers used as stools, older generation systems (Honeywell, Wang, etc), used as tables, but in those cases, they're normally not still running, or they're running next to nothing, so they might as well not be doing their primary job.

    Then we get to what I think of as 'recycling' more than 'double duty', which normally involves keeping the system from being able to do its primary function because it's doing something else. Fishtanks, tables, shelves (IBM 7171 terminal server [annoying.org]; Wang [annoying.org]) and beer fridges all seem to be fairly common.

    (Please note -- there's more than one set of pictures, and they're still a year old...the house may be messy, but it's no where near where it used to be, now that my brother took most of his stuff to college, and isn't using my place for storage. I don't have any recent pictures, so the Honeywell's not there yet, and the reel-to-reel tape drive's buried in crap in the pictures I have)
    • I've used a Wang before to keep pizza warm in the machine room (it was just the right size on top for a large pizza, and conveniently table height).

      Speaking for Leon Phelps, the Ladies' Man [tripod.com] (warning - tripod popups), I have to say you're right about the height, but you should see a doctor about that shape problem.


  • My laptop PS is nice and warm and will warm my feet when it's cold in the house. Plug in and enjoy!
  • My cat just loves it when I keep my laptop connected to the grid (and closed) so that she can sleep on it...seems to be perfectly warm.

    When the battery is loaded, she just invades
    the briefcase if it is not perfectly closed !

    Hair haven't provoked any malfunction yet
    (there was a story recently about how much
    abuse a laptop could stand, don't know if cat hair
    were mentioned).

  • Always mount a scratch monkey... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tshoppa ( 513863 ) on Thursday February 07, 2002 @01:40PM (#2968518)
    From the classic Always Mount a Scratch Monkey [mv.com] thread:
    11 February 1987

    This morning, I spoke for an hour with Laura Creighton, who wrote the device driver for the equipment between the monkeys and the computer.

    This incident happened at the University of Toronto in late November of 1979 or 1980. The zoology department had used digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters in a large number of experiments, including attempting to synthesize pheromones to reduce breeding of beetles that fed on tobacco crops, some rat neurological experiments, and some cricket behavior/population studies. The rat experiments involved implanting electrodes in the rats' brains, and the rats experienced some pain. The Humane Society learned of this and raised complaints, resulting in the shutting down of the zoology department for a day while the experiment was stopped. The University of Toronto has the third or fourth most respected zoology department in the world and wanted to maintain that prestige, so there was lots of screaming to avoid having such a thing happening again.

    The various data from the experiments was collected by PDP-11/05 front ends and sent to an 11/44. Laura Creighton had written the software for this, fixing a problem they had previously with the 11/44 not being fast enough to collect the data by itself. This was being done for 16 to 18 experiments.

    The folks in the physiology section of the Department of Medicine (separate from Science, which contained the zoology department) had bought their first VAX, an 11/780, and wanted a similar set-up. So Laura Creighton and the zoology department agreed to set up their software for this. The physiology people decided not to use 11/05s in between, since the VAX was fast enough to handle the data. So five monkeys were fitted with caps intended to sense brain waves, and the caps were attached to various A-to-D and D-to-A converters (which were US Army surplus from 1956) which were in turn connected to the VAX. This connection was piggybacked on a disk drive (pre-RL02), which contained a disk and was mounted read-only - the read-only button was pressed and taped over with a warning not to remove it. In normal operation, software would read data from that drive and write it to a regular disk. The room containing the monkeys was several stories removed from the computer room.

    After some time, the VAX crashed. It was on a service contract, and Digital was called. Laura Creighton was not called although she was on the short list of people who were supposed to be called in case of problem. The Digital Field Service engineer came in, removed the disk from the drive, figured it was then okay to remove the tape and make the drive writeable, and proceeded to put a scratch disk into the drive and run diagnostics which wrote to that drive.

    Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so "Always mount a scratch monkey."

    Laura Creighton points out that although this is told as a gruesomely amusing story, three monkeys did lose their lives, and there are lessons to be learned in treatment of animals and risk management. Particularly, the sign on the disk drive should have explained why the drive should never have been enabled for write access.

  • IBM RS/6000 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hublan ( 197388 )
    I used to work at a company that made extensive use of ye olde RS/6000 boxes (AIX! Yay! Not). Now these things were pretty big (in recent terms) and allowed for almost infinite expansion in terms of storage. IBM, being a helpful lot, made sure that they came with all the fans you needed, for full expansion, pre-installed.

    So each Friday we bought some six-packs of beer and put it in the (empty) drive bays. Came out wonderfully chilled at the end of the workday.

    No refrigerator modding [planet.nl] required.
  • I'd love to use computing power to heat my home, like run a rack of servers offering webservices and charge just enough to cover hardware and connection charges, then my profit would be free heat.

    I have no idea how much computing power it would take to heat a 2100 squarefoot home though.

    any idea how many BTU's (heat energy is put out by an average processor?

  • I've found that, miracle of miracles, the retractable coffee-cup holder can read CD's. I'm amazed at this innovative use of computer hardware.

  • ...I've found that the cupholder that came with my PC did a good job of playing CDs too. Brilliant!
    • Hah!

      I have TWO cupholders on mine.

      Bottom one pops out faster, to think that was the cheaper one. Ya don't get what you pay for nowadays...
  • I've found my computer monitor great for drying a wet bike helmet, or even "pre-heating" it for cold early morning commutes. There's nothing like putting on a slightly toasty helmet and then heading out when it's still dark. I've also used my monitor to dry out gloves, but there you have to be careful that they're not too wet and don't block too many of the vents of the monitor!

    Other people I know have used their monitors for drying fruit (for ornamental purposes). It's amazing how different an orange will look after sitting on top of a monitor for several months!
  • I actually use a pair of old rackmount eight inch disk drives instead of sandbags to give my rear wheel drive car traction in the winter. That is how you upgrade a 1983 RX-7.
  • Back when Cryix had 6x86 200 Mhz ceramic type processors. I had a random thought of mounting it to the top of the cover (underside). So I would have a spot to keep my coffie warm. Extending the socket would have been a minor problem tho.

  • ZAP! (Score:3, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @04:18PM (#2976151)
    ...we take off our very wet shoes and socks and place them on one of the two hefty UPSs to dry out.

    "Excuse Calendar" *flip-flip*: Ah, yes. The UPSes seem to have suffered from electro-chemical ionisation of a dihydrogen-monoxide current pulse across the positive-negative poles. Please hold this cable in your teeth, so we can test humistatic differential levels between black and red.
    • Actually, they're not _that_ wet. Besides, the fans are very strong and I doubt there is any humidity leaking into the casing. :-)

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