Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack? 210
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter recently asked what kind of things someone can power with an external USB battery. I have a followup along those lines: what kind of modifications have you made to your gadgets to do things that they were never meant to do? Consider old routers, cell phones, monitors, etc. that have absolutely no use or value anymore in their intended form. What can you do with them? Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
External GPU on the notebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Using an expresscard PCIe breakout (and an ATX power supply) I have put a Nvidia GTX-780 GPU onto my 5 year old laptop. As an external accessory.
Works like a charm, and really makes this thing a high-end system again.
Youtube video? (Score:2)
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It isn't too unusual, do a search for "diy vidock" "diy external gpu" or just look here:
http://forum.notebookreview.co... [notebookreview.com]
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2010 configuration example:
Core i7 820QM or even Core i7 940XM, 8 GiB RAM, Radeon HD 5870 with 1GiB GDDR5 RAM. Still a capable system.
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Brilliant!
Do you have any photos?
Camera + lava lamp for true RNG (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably using a simple webcam + multiple lava lamps and a bit of software written in java to create a true random number generator. Using the prng functions that most languages provide is so 1992.
Yes, I could have also used random.org, but I wanted to show my nephew how to code, and figured that would be an easy project for him to understand and us to have fun with.
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Converted old cell phone to uplink transmitter (Score:5, Interesting)
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I modified a Yamaha RGX 110, a fm transmitter for a walkman, and added a 9 volt battery then connect a portable fm radio to my peavy distortion pedal... wireless guitar. I just cut a few slits in the plastic plate cover on the back of the guitar so I could change channels, turn it off and on. Still worked normal if I wanted to plug it in directly so long as the transmitter was off.
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I made a walkman (well I don't remember the brand, but it was quite a fancy one with track skipping and it hardly ever chewed up D120s. Wasn't a sony. Panasonic?) radio with one of these:
http://www.talkingelectronics.... [talkingelectronics.com]
That's the 1 transistor FM transmitter which has been doing the rounds since forever. I ran a mobile pirate radio station while I was at school, which had a range of probably half a mile.
Re:Converted old cell phone to uplink transmitter (Score:4, Insightful)
You're my hero.
Something I won't put on my resume (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Something I won't put on my resume (Score:4, Insightful)
I think I'd have been tempted to tell him that he knows how to fix it if he knows how to whistle [youtu.be]. Of course, a lot depends on his personality; if he's an arrogant stuffed shirt, you'll be looking for your next job before you know what's happened.
If he's at all human, you'll end up being indispensable. A bos who fires you for pulling his ass out of a hot frying pan is no person to work for.
I was known for some wild seat of the pants fixes. My suits appreciated it - a lot. It's startling when a room of 7 figure folks applaud you after you bring a computer system back to life. And the weirder the fix the better the stories later. Versatility is a plus.
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Re: Something I won't put on my resume (Score:2, Insightful)
Every time I did a management fix it went the same way.
1. Red alert! Serious problem!
2. You! Fix it.
3. Me: we're screwed, for reason x
4. Management: fix it!!!!!
5. I come up with a hare brained rules busting policy dismembering moral event horizon surpassing fix
6. Fix goes in. Problem solved. This time.
7. People cheer. Or start pointing fingers.
8. Time passes.
9. Management or similar want to talk to me. I get ripped a new one.
10. Actual root causes never corrected. We jump on the merry go round again
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I got fan errors on my old Thinkpad if I left it off for a couple days. The trick was to press Escape while powering on... The fan won't start but it will let the computer boot, and is suitable for light duty work. After letting it warm up (sometimes 1 hour, sometimes took a couple days), I would try to reboot. Eventually the fan will catch and start spinning. Then it's good as new as long as I don't shutdown overnight. I did try both duster and vacuum, to no avail.
The laptop ran 3 years like that. And I av
A DIY Expansion Cartridge for a C-64 (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the 90s I still had a Commodore 64 with a MIDI controller that plugged into the joystick port. I made a homebrew cartridge with an analog sampler chip that plugged into the Commodore's expansion slot. All the parts came from Radio Shack, including the chip. I wrote a program that allowed me to record samples and control playback from a keyboard plugged into the MIDI controller. Eventually I intended to add options to save and load MIDI sequences.
Unfortunately, I was a little too cavalier while tinkering with the cartridge. After making a few tweaks to the circuitry in an attempt to reduce noise, I powered on the Commodore and immediately fried the motherboard.
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Don't be too hard on yourself. At least the noise was no longer a problem, so I'd call it a success!
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I thoroughly hacked my C64. The main thing I did was add a static memory chip of 16k IIRC, half of which could be made to replace the portion of memory that stored the font, at the flick of a switch. The othre half could be similarly mapped on a different part of memory. A rechargeable battery kept the contents of t
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I do miss those days, literally spent in my parents basement, or at my friends place in the attic, listening to late night radio while hacking away.
Hell yeah! I've always thought the metric for a person thinking about getting into computers was exactly this sort of thing. Under represented groups should know that you have to have that sort of passion for it. The pays not so good, the hours suck, there's almost zero respect, so you gotta have that passion, when digging into to something for fun - is fun.
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Says the person so obsessed with the gender wars that he takes a statement that not once mentions gender, and turns it into a sex based profaity rant.
Oh my mistake. I must have confused you with the OTHER Ol Olsoc who blithers exactly the same things all over the gender relates threads that sprout up from time to time on slashdot. Now, are you going to maintin the fiction that you have no continuity between threads or shall we cut the crap?
Perhaps some of us are immune to "societies" approval or disapproval
Thrift store videophone to video game hack (Score:2, Interesting)
This one was kind of fun:
http://cassettepunk.com/large-projects/phonetendo/ [cassettepunk.com]
It's a crappy video phone that was "given away" with a contract, and I got it from a thrift store for $8 or so. Turns out it's got a Linux SBC in it, so between some of my own hacking and others who had reverse-engineered it, I turned it into a video game of sorts.
External eSataP SSD on company computer (Score:3, Funny)
My company gave us notebooks without SSDs, but they are pretty lax on external devices (you can bring your own mouse, pen drives and such). So I brought a SSD and bought an esatap cable (esata-powered, those cables are a pain in the ass to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) and installed linux mint in it. I boot straight to linux (they don't lock the bios) and do not even use the HD inside the notebook. Since the company also seems to think that RAM is a non-renawable resource they also saw fit to give us only 4gbs of it, so my swap partition is also on the SSD.
This setup helps my work a lot, before I started doing this my workflow was frustratingly slow, now everything runs just fine. It helped a lot when the RAM runs out and it starts doing swap, it still gets slow but not anywhere near as much as before.
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Ah it also helps that when I want to work from home I just take the SSD not the whole computer.
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Yeah, I did this for years. So much better than struggling with a Windows build that's devoted almost entirely to running software designed to stop it being useful.
I also took the liberty of installing 4GB of extra RAM because the IT department wouldn't spring for it - why would they, when they only allowed us a 32-bit version of Windows.. alas, you had to boot the thing once a week to get it onto the network (tied to Active Directory login). During one of those boots some kind of hardware audit ran and ne
Monkey Island on a satnav (Score:2)
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A friend of mine at work traded in his minivan, and somehow in the process ended up with a Toyota GPS unit that he didn't need for his new ride. This was way back around 1994/5— the olden days when GPS was still fairly new, expensive and exotic and hadn't been unlocked to its current precision.
I managed to hook up the Toyota GPS unit to the cigarette lighter in my Probe for power, and used a bunch of cable adapters to interface it to the serial port of the cradle for a 512K U.S. Robotics Palm III for
Not really unusual, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really unusual, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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In the early 90's, I was tasked with looking at a 286 in a warehouse that wouldn't run for more than a few minutes before crashing angrily.
I turned it on, observed that the PSU fan was caked with dust and not spinning, unplugged the hard drive, and gave the PSU some brisk percussive maintenance. It belched a thick cloud of brown crud, and the fan worked again.
Reassembled, and it worked for years.
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That might have been stiction. Seagate had the worst problems with stiction, but Maxtor also had significant problems, and no doubt every manufacturer until they changed lubricants. Moving from larger to smaller platters and running at higher temps were the factors leading to lubricant breakdown and essentially gluing the heads to the platters.
I also had some Seagate drives that wouldn't start, or would stop seeking reliably, and cooling them would prevent the failure mode at higher temps. I had some wic
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I've done my share of freezer-tricks, oven-tricks, and spin-on-the-table tricks. I've even done a trick involving a hard drive that was immersed in 6 feet of river water for a few days. It came around just fine after being opened up (!) and left on a shelf (!!) for a day: There were visible traces of silt on the platters, but I got the information off of it just fine with standard copying tools.
I've done controller-board swaps, too, but I've never had to go as far as swapping the controller board and kee
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There were visible traces of silt on the platters, but I got the information off of it just fine with standard copying tools.
In other news: modern error correcting codes are a marvel of science/engineering/mathematics.
If you're interested, David Mackay has a free PDF of his book on machine learning/probability/error correction and a complete video series of the accompanying course online. If that story doesn't inspire you to at least take a peek, then I don't know what will!
Ask someone to give it to you for
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I was speaking more of the head/debris/platter interaction, Bernouli effect, et al: I was raised to understand that a single speck of dust would destroy a hard disk within seconds, that after removing the top cover of a hard drive in other than a clean room environment I might as well toss the entire contraption into the scrap heap because it is surely ruined, forever.
Apparently, it doesn't always work that way.
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High pressure air from a compressor works great for cleaning out power supplies and systems but beware of spinning the fans too fast with the air stream . . . the blade assemblies will explode if they spin too fast.
The simple "hacks" are the best. (Score:3)
I once had to take an X-Acto knife to the backplane of something (VAX or PDP-11 or vice-versa to get a card for the "wrong" one to work).
Another time, I needed 240V, but the office only had 110V, so I made a "two headed" extension cord - two normal plugs, and one 240V twist-lock socket.
Then All I had to do was find two outlets on opposite phases and I was in business. This item would probably NOT get UL approval.
Not really a
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Actually, my first Android phone, a G1, is my TV remote. Keeping it plugged in all the time except when I'm watching TV is a pain, and the battery now lasts about long enough for an evening of TV.
It's running Cyanogen and a lameass remote app that can learn my wacko RCA TV, the Centurylink set top, H-K receiver, and CD player.
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I used a similar buzzer to add a "hey id10t you left your lights on" for my '65 Porsche 356. Really not much of a hack, more just figuring it out where to attach it on the fuse block - you want it buzzing if the headlights have power (and each side was on a different fuse) and the ignition switch does not have power thru it.
USB cooling fan (Score:2)
Converted wifi hub into network bridge (Score:4, Interesting)
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A pair of ubiquiti NanoStationMs work well enough you may never have needed to implement the cable, though the NanoStationM is limited to 100 Mbit/s. I use it to get a solid network connection between two houses 400 feet apart and it works great. I actually get the full 100 Mbit/s out of it which is pretty impressive. The low-end units can work up to a kilometer away. I had been planning to trench in fiber optic, but this works so well for me that I've abandoned the idea of running the fiber for now. At
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I converted a fairly old and small ISP box that was intended to do ADSL modem, router and wifi access point. After some protacted flashing through USB and a Windows program, it got a more "vanilla" and unrestricted firmware, then configuration was done with telnet and vi rather than the web interface. It became a 802.11b to wired ethernet bridge, with a "homeplug" type thing hooked to the RJ45 ethernet plug.
On the other side, a PC with a 802.11g thumbkey, whose speed I had to set to 5.5 Mbps instead of 11 f
brute force the unlock code on car stereo (Score:4, Interesting)
Many years ago, a friend asked me to help him figure out how to find the code for his new car stereo (never mind how he obtained it). When it first powered up, you had to wait a few seconds and then press buttons for a 4 digit code. If the correct code was entered, audio would emerge. Rigged up a little board with a 16F84 (I think that was the part#), anyway controlled fets with wires soldered to the buttons for entering the numbers, created a simple opto-coupler with led and photo-transistor laying around and some tape. Used that to sense the audio output. Hooked a little lcd up to the mcu, wrote firmware to enter the code one-by-one and just stop and display the last number tried when the audio emerged. Took 4 days for the system to find the code because of the long wait time required between fet-controlled power ups. Worked like a champ. Wrote the code on top and handed it back to him.
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I heard you could fix that issue by putting the stereo into the freezer for a while. Allegedly this takes the memory chip down below it's minimum operating temperature and erases it so the stereo boots up with factory defaults. Never tried it myself, but it's a trick that car stereo thieves are known to use.
Re:brute force the unlock code on car stereo (Score:4, Interesting)
Because cars stored outside are never known to get cold?
Nintento Light Gun (Score:4, Interesting)
Reverse engineered the Nintendo light gun (with the help of patents, purchased by snail mail, this was 1997). Soldered some wires to the inside of the Nintendo, connected them to the computer parallel port. Two of my friends and I wrote a Duck Hunt type game for DOS, just fitting under 640KB.
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What was so hard about making a Duck Hunt clone fit in that memory footprint?
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I did some programming in DOS, never even came close to that limit. That's why I'm curious. Look up how much working memory the NES had some time, Duck Hunt clones wouldn't even need buffers for scrolling!
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Ah, interesting. When I did programming in the 640k days I used 320x200. I don't even remember being able to hit VGA res @ 256 colors.
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You needed patents to figure that thing out? It was obvious how it worked from the games. When you press the trigger the screen goes black, except for white boxes over the targets. It's a simple light sensitive diode and a lens.
Coat hanger in distributor (Score:2)
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Camera range finder for arc detection (Score:2)
Used an ultrasonic rangfinder part for cheap cameras to echo-locate breakdowns in high gradient accelerator structures.
Converted Shower Into Tub (Score:3)
I had a friend who needed a tub for medical reason, but only had a fiberglass shower stall.
Scrounging, I found some scrap aluminum rails. I cut and mitered them to fit in the stall, and screwed them into the stall with stainless sheet metal screws. I put lexan/polycarbonate over the frame, and fixed it with screws and nuts, also stainless. I sealed it with silicone sealer, and...it held!
From time to time, she would let the water run, but it held with about 2 feet of water in it.
Added a second floppy drive to an IBM PCjr (Score:3)
My first computer was an IBM PCjr. I created a board that fit in the modem slot that allowed me to support a second floppy drive. I also hacked up the DOS boot sector to get rid of the hacks normally needed to support more than 128K. This was back in high school.
One of my favorite hacks was to turn a styrofoam ice chest into a peltier refrigerator for work since they charged a fortune for sodas (at a time when most silicon valley companies offered those for free). It had a temperature sensor and controller and worked quite well.
Meccano to support CPU cooler. (Score:2)
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WTF do you have such a thing???
Paperclip saves fairground ride. (Score:5, Funny)
I was working on one of those gigantic 'motion theatre' fairground rides:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This was back in the era of 286 PC's - running DOS. The software was suffering timing issues and we really needed a hardware timer interrupt - but DOS already stole all but one of them - and we simply didn't have enough.
I needed a *roughly* 1kHz interrupt to monitor some ride function or other (I forget exactly what) - so I came up with the idea of putting a bent paperclip between the RxD and TxD lines of the RS232 port and using the serial port interrupt. I'd send a character out through the serial port - and at 9600 baud, with one stop bit and one start bit the character took ~1/960'th of a second to arrive back in the serial port chip...at which point it triggered an interrupt - and I could send another byte out to make it happen again.
We used paperclips on a couple of machines as an emergency hack - but later versions used a 'dongle' plug that went into the RS232 port with a wire soldered across those two pins)...this plug was named the HPE..."Hardware Paperclip Emulator".
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Microsoft Clippy should be glad he wasn't around back then...
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To be fair, clippy is a damned good source of interruptions.
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Used WD40 to clear the stuck valve and fixed those rods in position with some ducktape.
Never heard anything again
(ungrateful bastards)
Battery hack (Score:3, Interesting)
Lazertag (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day friends were into doing Lazertag with the original retail guns and detectors and they came to me to see what I could do for them. I reverse-engineered a gun, scoped the output to the IR LED in the muzzle and discovered it was a simple short burst of 1kHz, nothing complicated for the target detectors to register.
By the time I had finished they had a couple of hand grenades (push a button, toss it at the Other Guys, three seconds later it fired a burst of 1kHz through a bunch of small IR LEDs peeking through holes of the plastic casing made from laundry detergent globes) and a "knife" (push the handle down against the Other Guy's body close to their target, another short burst of IR from LEDs in the handle shielded from the holder). The best item though was the "bomb on a stick", an omnidirectional radiator on a short pole, just push it round a corner and fire it off. That one emitted for as long as the switch was held down and it had a LOT of IR LEDs. One-shot room clearance FTW.
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You reminded me of my hack!
I discovered that if you put a diffraction grating in front of the gun, it worked as a shotgun, complete with the visible light spreading out into an appealing pattern, so I carried a small one from some optics kit my brother had and for close range shootouts I slipped it in front of the gun.
On that day I was king!
my most unusual hack was.. (Score:2)
when i got sick of my cable modem getting so hot it would shut down i put it, my Ethernet router, inside a mini soda fridge. after that the modem could handle playing warcraft III The frozen throne 12 hours a day and spend the entire night providing a local mirror of files that were important at the time via bit torrent.
Start a hot dog fire with booster cables (Score:2)
My brother and his friend found themselves without any matches recently, but needing to start a fire to roast hot dogs and marsh mellows over. Using a paperclip and jumper cables they got the fire going quite quickly so they didn't have to eat raw hot dogs. They did have to carefully lay the fire though with lots of tinder as the paperclip only lasted a few seconds. But it was enough.
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A 9v battery and steel wool is a winner also. If I had to build a survival kit for long-term use, I would have these items in it. And paperclips. And a solar charger for a USB battery. Among all the other stuff, like a magnesium firestarter as a backup.
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A friend of mine who studied chemistry used to light his BBQ fires with self-made napalm. He stopped doing that whan a) some right-wing terrorists inquired about building a bomb and b) He blew the roof off his lab-room and almost killed himself.
Then went into making drug, but that ended with an raid by the cops armed with heavy weapons who kicked down the door when his mom was there. They had bugged a kettle that she bought over the mail.
circle mouse (Score:3)
I once programmed an arduino to move my mouse cursor in the shape of a square to keep my workstation from auto-locking per company policy. There's a slider control on the Arduino board that I have that I used more-or-less as an on-off switch. For fun I'd hook it up to my supervisor's machine just to hear him try to explain it to somebody.
Back in the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the days of punch cards, I was working as an intern. There were several large trays of cards that were sitting untouched for a long time. I was told that two sets of unrelated data had accidentally been collated together into more-less-random order and no-one had come up with a way to separate them other than manually. As there were perhaps 20,000 cards the other operators were doing their best to ignore them.
While the others were at lunch, I looked them over. The most obvious difference was color, one set buff, and the other set blue. Then I noticed that one set had a corner-cut on the left and the other set on the right. Poking into the card sorter, I found I could loosen one of the metal hole sensing brushes and cock it to one side to sense the cut corner. In just a few minutes I had the two sets cleanly separated and back into separate trays.
When the others returned, I pointed to the result. They asked me how I had done this. I told them I had set up the sorter to sort on color and never did tell them the real story.
Antennas (Score:3)
I also made an antenna ot of a toilet seat for a crazy antenna contest.
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In winter, we sometimes tried to make an antenna out of snow drifts. No, not very good performance, but the tubes sure glowed a pretty color.
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I built a 2 meter gamma match using a piston trimmer capacitor and brass tubing to slide over 1/8" brass rod like a trombone. I used it to load up things like fences and high voltage transmission towers on transmitter hunts.
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I built a 2 meter gamma match using a piston trimmer capacitor and brass tubing to slide over 1/8" brass rod like a trombone. I used it to load up things like fences and high voltage transmission towers on transmitter hunts.
I have a large loop antenna with a four gang trombone cap hanging from the roof of my garage. I really gotta finish that thing one of these days.
Not my hack. (Score:2)
The circuit board from an old IDE drive re-purposed as a networked device for controlling an irrigation system. Seemed obvious when I looked at it - after it'd been done. I/O, CPU, Flash, JTAG header, stepper motor controller - dirt cheap, tiny, low power, and built for harsh conditions.
wire wrap serial interface (Score:3)
The Commodore 64 had a nonstandard serial port, meaning that I couldn't connect my standard RS-232 modem directly to it. Being just a kid, I couldn't afford the $50 or so that an adapter would cost.
My solution: I borrowed a family friend's RS-232 adapter, opened it up, examined the components and circuit board traces, bought the parts from a local electronics shop, and built the same circuit with perfboard and wire wrap. I cut a slot in the back of my C64, mounted a DB-25 connector in it, wired it to my frankenboard, and stuffed the whole thing into the free space inside the computer.
It worked like a charm. I was the only kid I ever met whose C64 had a standard serial port on the back.
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As an adult, I don't know that I'd exactly call this a hardware hack, but teenage me definitely thought it was unusual. :P
Small HTPC out of WD external HDD enclosure (Score:2)
Today, there is no shortage of SBCs out there, and intel has released some pretty powerful x86 based ones, like the minnowboard max 2.
On the market at this very moment, Western Digital is offering an external hard drive that has an interesting enclosure. (See Western Digital MyBook 3TB and 4TB models) This is basically just a little triangle shaped USB to SATA adapter attached to a standard 3.5 inch SATA HDD, which is itself mounted on 4 little rubberized pegs, held into the enclosure via some little recept
I miss 1970s tech. (Score:3)
I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.
Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.
Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.
I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.
300 bucks (Score:2)
I once used an Atari palmtop to rip off an ATM machine. Oh wait, maybe that didn't really happen.
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John, is that you?
Magnavox pong (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought an old Magnavox tv with built in Pong, but it was missing the controllers. To play games, my brother and I would shove speaker wires into the ports and hold the bare wires with our hands.
By staying very still and very carefully pinching one wire in each hand, tips of fingers touching, we could control the resistance in the range needed to start and control the game. So much as a twitch or turning your head would cause the pong paddle to go off the screen.
Holding that still and staring at the tv, it looked like we were controlling it with our minds.
After a couple days, the TV died. But $18 well spent.
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Suhweet. Definitely. I one used a Nintendo Powerglove with wire cut to interface with a joystick port and used to to play a Tci Tac Toe game we wrote. Back in 92 or so. That impressed some chicks...
Save the "Enterprise" tape carousel (Score:2)
Remote fireworks detonator from an old RC car. (Score:2)
When I was a teenager back in the 80's, I was into computers, electronics, and blowin' shit up. In the summers my cousin and I would sit at his mom's kitchen table and cut up packs of firecrackers for the powder. We'd then "supercharge" weaksauce firecrackers and large bottle rockets. Long story short, we eventually started making ones powerful enough that we were afraid to get close enough to light them because of the potential for shrapnel (We were also doing stuff like seeing how high we could make a buc
Change stations on someone else's radio (Score:3)
This goes back to the early 1980's. I used to hang out until the wee hours with some folks at a local 24 hour donut shop. The owner had rigged-up a stereo inside a locked box, in the back room. It was set to a local "Elevator Music" station, and everyone (even the employees) hated it... but there was nothing anyone could do... until I came along. :)
I used an "FM Converter" (remember those? You could listen to FM thru an AM-only car radio) which I modified for direct audio output from the detector. This fed into a basic amplifier system, and into a home made FM transmitter. I would be sitting in a booth with my friends, and could not only change the station to almost anything we wanted, but also adjust the volume, bass, and treble. They were suitably impressed.
So, each time I'd come in with my device, they'd say, "Here comes OVERRIDE!" (their new nickname for me). I would then proceed to knock out the elevator music, and tune in to the local rock station. Everyone loved it.
I also made a smaller version that I could connect to a Walkman cassette player, and play my music over any other FM radio in range. All it took was a few milliwatts of power. Fun times.
Now I am a Broadcast Engineer... and I get to play with real transmitters and control systems, etc.
Laptop mount (Score:2)
Not very unusual, but plentiful (Score:2)
"Projector isn't working" means you need a rubber band to hold the classroom's shitty VGA cable into the shitty faceplate (feeding into the ceiling).
"Remote isn't working" means you broke part of the battery seat, and I have to use tin foil from my lunch with a coiled paper clip "spring" to close the circuit.
"Printer isn't working" because someone probably bumped that 20kg laserjet right off th
Re: (Score:2)
My sister is a veterinarian in nowhere, Africa and she has a PhD in Veterinary science. She does it because she likes it!
IBM freezer adjunct (Score:2)
I bought my ex-employer's IBM AS/400 E35 for $10, including the following:
rack
processor board (now hanging on my office wall)
memory boards
various I/O boards, e.g. ethernet, 5250, DASD controller, etc
hard drives
cooling fans
power supplies
service processor
After taking it all apart, I used two of the cooling fans connected in series with my 24 volt refrigerator power supply. Directed the fans at the 'fridge's fins and cut the compressor run time by about 40%
Broken RAID Card (Score:2)
Once a RAID card on a machine with a critical database croaked. I EBayed for a replacement, did a buy now and phoned the seller and offered him 100$ Cash if he sent the damn card by courier RIGHT NOW at . Next morning it was waiting for me.
Problem was that the yokel who configured the card did not write down the config and I could not boot it. So I looked at the chip numbers and figure that one of them was a NVRAM chip. Took the NVRAM chip from the broken card with the hope that it had the config and plugge
Changed an engine (Score:2)
1. I changed an engine to the reverse rotation direction. OK, it was a 2-stroke engine but anyway. It allowed for a more reliable transmission changing from belt drive to cog drive.
2. Transplanted the electronic board from a hard-crashed ST402 drive to another that had dead electronics to get one working drive.
Re: (Score:2)
Should be ST412/ST506.
Motorola flip phone with a REAL battery (Score:2)
I had gotten a couple of small 6-volt jell cells from work (a UPS that had been in a plane crash), then I got a dead cell phone battery from the repair shop. I ripped the battery pack apart and put in a small voltage controller
Re: (Score:2)
Well...it *might* be that your radio used an IF (intermediate frequency) to decode the AM or FM encoding...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This signal is sufficiently high in frequency that it actually 'leaks' outside the radio - and, I suppose, might be picked up by a radio in a nearby car. But the IF's frequency isn't close to where you're tuning...so I'm not sure this completely explains the story.
(In Britain, there is a television licence you're supposed to pay to operate a TV receiver - and at one t
Re: (Score:3)
Most FM Radios uses a 10.7MHz IF, so 10.7 MHz up or down on the tuning dial you had a chance of interfering with a station. Both radios would have to be virtually unshielded.
AM radios typically used 455kHz. Just as much fun.
Re: (Score:2)
and now outdated now that the internet is here.
Yeah - outdated: http://www.flexradio.com/amate... [flexradio.com]
Hook one of these gems to your computer, and it's a wonderland of RF.