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New Business Card Rescue CDs
Linuxcare has introduced version 1.2 of their business card-sized rescue disks, which now contain 140 MB of recovery tools, Debian install capabilities, the X Window System, PCMCIA support, and ssh. From the picture they look pretty cool, too. I remember seeing the business card CDs at a COMDEX a couple of years ago, but this is easily the best use I've seen for them, and is a needed improvement over the previous version.
I'm getting an uncanny image in my head of linux partisans handing these out to people who've just called customer service because their windoze machines BSODed:
"Have the data on your computers ever been hurt because of the negligent actions of an operating-system vendor? Linux could help you receive the relief that you deserve." Of course, the notion of a contingency fee would have to be revamped: "We don't make make money unless you decide to give us money instead of downloading the software separately on your own."
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm wondering how useful this would be. The main benefit of having it in this format is that you can put it in your wallet, right? Hopefully, you wouldn't need it *that* often, but you would need it at a moment's notice, so you'd probably have it in there for a while (possibly alongside other items with similar attributes, natch).
So, if this is the case, how long would it hold up? It is still a CD, after all; would it need similar handling as a normal CD? How likely is it that when you actually need it, it will still be useable?
Despite these reservations... where can I actually get one? *grin*
http://www.octave.com/551519/en/cdrmedia/businessc ard.html
I'd rather have the linuxcare version with the debian, but had a good ride through there site trying to find one. Anyhow, google shows up some vendors of these business card cd's and cdr's:
:)
http://www.bizcard-cd.com/
http://store.yahoo.com/c itiscape-retail/buscarcdr.html
http://thiscardrocks.com/
http://www.nimz.com/mbc.htm
http://www.cds.com/shapes/default.htm
http://www.mcmnewmedia.com/
and many more places selling them. If linuxcare is selling their custom version, I'd sure like to know! And pass a few around!
As long as they're rotationally symmetrical, they should spin without any judder.
The data track is a spiral running from the centre outwards. Since the centre portion of the "disc" is the same as a normal CD, the CD reader will be happy.
Obviously the "square" ends of the "disc" can't contain any data because any spiral tracks would include portions of the "disc" which don't exist.
I think this is a really cool idea, don't get me wrong, but:
:)
These things don't work in mail-slot style ROM readers and they are precarious at best in caddy-readers... that is the only probelm I see.
I have a couple of old Plextor and NEC ROM drives that use caddys that live in my Linux box, and a spankin new mail-slot DVD drive in my new computer, so I would not be able to use these. Maybe I should have thought of that!
And of course the same goes for a a ton of Japanese market j-pop CD-singles that come on heart, star, and other shape (but balanced) CDs...
A
Yeah, but carrying a computer and CD-ROM drive around with you could be a pain.
Which gives me a (somewhat offtopic) idea... You know what we really need? Business card size disposable computers, with a nice little color LCD, and enough power to run a little kiosk-type browser. The technology probably isn't too far off...
MSK
There has got to be a HUGE market for that.... I know most CD-ROMs can read the lil' discs, but can CD-R's write them?
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They're mini-CDs, not full-sized CDs. CD media reads from the inner tracks outwards, so as long as the "disc" is balanced you could use any shape.
(Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Ask and ye shall be linked. Look here for your very own business card CD-R blanks. Pricy compared to regular blanks ($2-$4 depending on quantity), but I never put a price on cool.
No affiliation. I just know how to use Google.
What do you use as a cd-drive to read these things? Is it something specific to laptops, or what?
Open your cupholder...err.. CD drive. See how there are two rings in it, the outer super-jumbo-slurpee sized ring is for normal CDs. The inner, coke-can sized ring is where these things go.
0 1 - just my two bits
From the looks of the picture, I have to wonder what sort of business card is being used for comparison. Because, assuming that the hole in the center is the same size as that of a normal disk (and it would have to be, wouldn't it?), these cd's are much bigger than normal business cards. Or perhaps I jsut have a non-standard sized implimentation of BusinessCard?
Subject: [7-15] Where can I find CD-ROM business cards? (1999/07/18)
You can find CD-ROMs in interesting shapes, including business cards. These are functional CD-ROMs that are, for example, the same size and shape as a traditional business card (well, a really thick business card). They can have your name and contact information printed on the front, and can hold a modest amount of data, typically about 40MB.
As with 80mm CDs (see section (7-14)), you may have trouble playing these "discs" on CD-ROM drives that use caddies or have a "slot-in" design.
Some net.vendors:
http://www.cdshapes.com/
http://www.pocketcd.com/
Check out the second one, you can actually buy them online, though at the time of this posting, the link for pricing info is broken.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
how do they fit 140 MB of data onto this card? I believe those cards are itself trimmed from 8cm media cards, which hold 140 mb of data or 21 minutes. With the top and bottom trimmed, isn't the largest available data on the CD bounded by the shortest diameter? (in other words, much less than 140mb?)
I got one of these in the mail on time, and it turned out it was a home-brewed cd, because it was a CD-R, and it still had a little room left on it, so I deleted the crap of it, and was able to fit a good 50megs on there of shareware games to give to a friend who doesn't have the internet
Hmm... now that is pretty neat. bizcard-cd has blanks for $4 each. Now where's my credit card...
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These miniature CDs have been around for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, I have one with a "New Kids on the Block" single on it. :b
I think I saw an ISP using this media to distribute their software.
Anyways, the little CDs took off elsewhere (Japan, I believe), while they were mostly shunned here.
But, to be honest with you, unless you really dig "cool", they're a big fat waste of money. CD-Rs cost $1 a piece and these Mini CD-Rs run $2 - $5.
`course, a Linux distro on one of these is just cool as hell. I wonder if I could pick up a couple of hundred of these and pass them out at out next LUG meeting.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Nope. Just pop it in a standard CD-ROM drive. Most have a little ridge in hem that will allow them to hold mini-CD's quite comfortably. Which is basically what this is -- a mini-CD, with the edges chopped off.
Of course, if you have a caddy drive, you're outta luck...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I seriously doubt that the little ridge holds it in place while it's spinning at god-knows-what RPM. I think the spindle clamps it down while it's spinning... but the ridge DOES make sure that the spindle is aligned correctly when the disc is inserted.
So, I'd guess that either rounded edges or a rectangle with rounded corners would work - as long as the resulting disc is perfectly inscribed in the correct diameter circle... some of the links in comments here show some wicked looking shapes (gears, fish, etc - just gotta balance it right)
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Or could I just go to shop class and cut my own? :)
One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.
I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a .deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.
As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.
With this business card sized media, you could put literally any data on the cdrom, up to 52MB (on the true business card sized ones).
Programs such as ssh, gpg, and other crypto sensitive stuff could be placed on here. To hide their contents, make a par-point presentation in staroffice and put that on there. That way, when you meet anyone, just give them one of these rediculously overpriced CDRs with your info on it, and they'll also get a copy of all the non-exportables.
Actually, the export business is getting easier now, but it doesn't hurt to put something important on them. Just think, if you were Kevin Mitnick and you wanted your data back from the feds, you could've just burned a stack of these things and mailed them to your friends. When you got out of jail, just call one of them up and have them send you your card back. With a stack of 50, the sheer volume would assure you access to your data.
Actually that brings up another idea for these, put copies of data you need to keep and mail them to people. Or how about a distributed collection of data, each person has to provide the business card to complete the library and access the data. You could make a high-tech easter egg hunt out of this.
Even better yet, you put the secret key to get at your fortune, spread across a bunch of these. You then mail them out to all your willed partiticpants. When you die, they ALL have to cooperate to get at your money!
How about putting a unique key on each one of these and having people use them as access cards, you could block out specific access cards and institute your own access policy.
This would be great for a website. You send each member a card that they have to use each time they access your website, as a password substitute. This would bypass user chosen passwords and provide the ultimate security for accessing a service. If one of the cards is compromised, cancel access for it.
Make up your own use for these!
Mabye I'm missing something here, but I can't find anything about them on Linuxcare's website. In there a URL where you can buy these things? :o
While they were giving a few of these guys out at the '99 Atlanta Linux Showcase my cohorts and I managed to sneak away with some. We tried them out when we got back and sure enough they worked great, had a cute LinuxCare bootlogo, most cd drives read them (except for the slot-load pionners...), but I thought I remember them only having 30MB (must have been version 1.1, b/c it also lacked the penguin on the left). I started carrying mine around in my wallet and got some great reactions when I used it good effect in BSOD-like situations.
Anyway, the lesson is, dont carry the damn things in your wallet, b/c it eventually got cracked and is now useless decoration.
~tide
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
Sadly, the CD's from most of the distros are useless for rescue, since they only have the bare minimum to install the OS. Has LinuxCare made ISO images available?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
I was just looking at the shape CDs at bizcard-cd.com. Hmmmm. How long until we see a rescue disk shaped like a penguin? P.S. - Don't even think about it, I've already patented it. And anyway, I think Amazon just patented free thought....
Well not two weeks later I downloaded and compiled a new kernel and misconfigured it to the point where I couldnt boot. I popped that LinuxCare disk in, booted and recompiled another kernel in no time.
I think it's much nicer and easier to use then using the rescue mode in RedHat's boot disks. Also, they good to use when someone wants a quick Linux demo too...
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
I do tech support for a company who sent a large amount of these disks out as a promotion for a new product. Well, as you could guess we got plenty of calls where people had put them in the cdroms that don't have a tray that comes in and out. The ones that just suck the disc in. I even talked to one guy who put one in his regular cd-rom drive and when he opend the tray to take it out it had "eaten it" in his words. And now it was "lost somewhere in his cdrom drive."
I don't know how many people they had to send reimbursement checks out for their cdrom drives to be fixed but we got quite a number of calls about it.
Imagine if AOL sent out 20million disks like these. There goes 10million cdrom drives to the repair shop. Haha!
CD-R OUTLET they've got the 3" mini-cd and the business cards, both writable.
-jwb
No, you'll shatter them. I grabbed a few from LinuxCare at the August 1999 LinuxWorld Expo show, and stuck one in my checkbook (internal "pressure" is lower than the wallet). I took it out two months later, to use it, and it had shattered into twenty or so small wedges of CD.
Maybe my mistake was to use the checkbook (which is more flexible, but has more room to move around). Perhaps the less flexible wallet would have been better.
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Dosn't the size and shape determine how well the material can be read from an optical standpoint? I assume that cd readers are using a circular method of retrieving the data so how do they read it when large gaps (as seen from the bottoms being sheared off in the pic)? Just a thought.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/{sda,hda}
which will wipe out the entire disk including the partition table (don't do this on a disc which contains anything useful!). It makes it possible to install NT4 on a disk larger than 8GB without hassle, and Redhat installers will partition the disc without any nasty questions when the disc is blank. It is also useful when you want to erase a disc "beyond any recognition", ie. when someone else is going to use it.
I have used tomsrtbt to format a disc with fat, copy a win95 cd into it, booted the machine in dos and started the installation. Why? I didn't have a dos driver for the f*ing CD drive connected to a Sound Blaster controller.
http://www.toms.net/rb/
YES !! I want tomsrtbt ++ on a credit card size cd now !!!!
Don't leave home without it.
RFC1925
Propellers are not circular, and they are balanced. When you think about it that way, suddenly it's not counter-intuitive at all.
(BTW, this isn't quite on the point, look up how they load centrifuges: If they have seven identical things to go in a centrifuge, they put in three things, spaced 120 degrees apart. It's balanced, and you can forget about those three things completely. Then they put in the other four things, 90 degrees apart. They're balanced too, so the whole thing is still balanced. What's cool is they don't have to worry at all about where the four things are relative to the first three: They simply don't care, because the two groups don't affect each other due to the fact that they're balanced among themselvess. If you look at it, it looks wrong as all hell, but it's balanced right and it won't freak out at high speed.)
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Utter nonsense, Signal 11. The inertial vector of the system (and by extension the angular momentum vector and any associated torque effects that airflow may cause) is directed outward normal to the plane of the CD, just like any other CD. Please try to learn something about a topic before posting.
Yes.
As long as they are balanced.
Remember, CD's can be of arbitrary size, and read from the inside out. These usually store about 50MB of data on them.
http://www.sculptedcd.com
No. They do not work in slot load drives.
They will work in any drive that can take a standard 3 inch cd.
Okay. I know that shaped CDs are not new.. and we hard about these CDs from linuxcare at te last show... but where can we get them?
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
When 3" CD-Audio singles came out, many of them came with a small adapter which was basically a hollow 5" cd with some sort of micro clip mechanism to hold the mini in the middle.
I've never used one, and I think they might have required the mini to have a shaped edge, so that the clip wouldn't be thicker than the CD. So they might not be compatible with the mini CD-Rs and rectangular minis we're seeing now.
If anyone has one of these things, I'd like to hear about whether it works.
The ones that actually fit in business card holders are 50MB. The slightly larger ones, which you can still wedge into your wallet, are 140. A plain round 3" is 200 or so, I think. 250 perhaps? Then vanilla 5"ers are 650 and you can get overburn-ready discs that go to 700 and if your drive is capable of it, some of these can go to about 708. Check www.ahead.de and look at Nero, everybody's favorite Win9x-based CD authoring software, which includes overburn support.
You notice when you burn a disc that when you look at the data side you can see where the data was written? Like if you only write 100 mb, only the first centimeter from the center is used. Well I would guess that if you cut the corners but leave the written portion alone it would work. You'd have to make sure not to bend the CD up, too.
But like I said, this is a complete guess and I have no reason to think this would work other than it seems logical.
_________________
rooooar
I'm guessing this is because the first edge of oxidation around the cut stops any further oxygen from creeping in.
I might be wrong though, and just have been lucky, but some cracked CD's are still usable after four years. So I suppose it's ok to cut your own cd's. The absence of a protective coating around any edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut cd doubles as an effective murder weapon.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I've been screaming from the rooftops for a long time now that little 3" CD-RW disks are a perfect replacement for damnable floppies. Think of it, CD-R of that size could be used in 90% of the cd-rom drives in existence. If computer companies would start standardizing on new DVD/CD-RW drives and drop 1.44MB floppies, superdisks, and zips, then these sized disks would solve the tranportability problem of normal CDs. You eliminate a drive from the computer, maintain compatibility with CD's and DVD's, you still have access to larger CD's for backup purposes, I could go on an on! Best of all 3" CD-R/CD-RW disks can be used in almost all CD-RW drives already out there. Why don't they start selling these things everywhere?! Doesn't anybody have any "vision"?
-Frustrated Geek
"Life is a series of mistakes and success depends on how well we learn from them." - Isaac Church
If a credit-card sized CD holds 40MB, then maybe an unfoldable one that comes out double the size (less a bit for the fold) should be able to do a couple of hundred megs. With "bzip2 -9" you could fit a useable distribution on that (especially if you replace monsters like Netscape with something lighter). Q: "What do you know about Linux?" A: Reaches into wallet... "Here, install this!" You might need some reversible brackety bits that slid across the fold, flick-knife style, to make it rigid enough, but I'm sure there are ways. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm pretty sure we put the SVGA server on there at least.
Rusty.
innominate have them, too. It's a debian 20MB rescue disk. I think it looks cooler than the one from linuxcare, because it's orange and really creditcard size...
"Is it friday yet?"
10 PRINT "LINUX RULEZ!!@@!!"
20 GOTO 10
Then we'll be really cool.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.