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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
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
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.
Hmm... now that is pretty neat. bizcard-cd has blanks for $4 each. Now where's my credit card...
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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!
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.
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.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
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.
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.
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