Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Reuse, Rotors, Prairie Dogs
No sir, we can't keep sending you more. guido_sst writes: "The winners of the Great AOL CD Invention Contest sponsored by UltimateChaos have been announced at http://www.ultimatechaos.com/contest/. Winners include two lamps, a clock, and a 'scaled' car."
Also, the DVD-grabber style cases that AOL is spreading right now make a nice way to give your relatives pictures on CD-ROM, once you slip in your own insert sheet.
Now you can read all your letters from Mom again. Remember the Enigma machine cleverly stolen and cleverly returned from Bletchley Park? You may recall that though the apparatus itself was returned, the all-important Enigma rotors were not recovered at that time. Now you can stop holding your breath, because evilandi writes: "ThisIsGloucestershire, the website of the local newspaper covering UK spy centre GCHQ's home town of Cheltenham, have this story telling how the police have finally recovered all the missing rotors for the stolen Enigma historic wartime encryption device. Without the rotors, the Enigma device returned to the BBC would have been useless. This brings the stolen Enigma story to a close; a man was arrested and the entire Enigma device is now complete and back in safe hands. The working Enigma device should be back on display at Bletchley Park soon."
Yes, I'd like one copy of "Gopher Hunt," please? emanuel writes: "After reading the gopher:// manifesto, it got me to do something that I had been considering for some time: move my internet presence into gopherspace and out of the Web. The problem: few people have a gopher browser, and most Web browsers have poor (Internet Explorer) to non-existent (Netscape 6) gopher support. The solution: write a gopher-to-Web gateway which will allow anyone with a web browser to navigate gopherspace. And while I'm at it, why not add WML support to let mobile phone users into gopherspace as well (after all, gopher is well suited for wireless devices)? So after a few evenings of mad coding, I have something that works fairly well (but is far from complete). See the webgopher project at gopher://gopher.heatdeath.org/. It's Free, and I'd love some involvement from other gopherheads." Greetings to my 7th Grade English teacher Note that the next installment of Hellmouth Revisited is now online.
I like to line up five AOL or other useless CD in a row of five, fifty yards away, hit the timer and pretend I'm in the Olympics shooting the Biathlon...- --------------------
------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
-------------------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
"I think someone who takes the time to cut AOL CD's into tile-able shapes, and then proceed to cover their entire auto is pretty impressive. "
If by "pretty impressive" you mean "a few eggs short of an omelette", then you indeed have a very good point.
I must confess to putting an AOL CD in a microwave - it looks great, with with sparks going through the metal interior. It'll all be over in less than a second - so either have a number of CDs, or look very closely...
Anyone for long-exposure photography of such an event?
And as for destroying the microwave? AFAIK, it didn't do the microwave any harm; I think the microwave died some time later in a completely unrelated incident involving microwave popcorn being left in for about half an hour. It wasn't me...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
A friend of mine hangs AOL CDs from the mast and boom of his sailboat to scare away birds (and keep away the attendant birdcrap.) A scarecrow for modern times.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The data pits are actually inside the CD, a few layers down from the surface. The reason you screw up a cd if you scratch off the label is because the back of label is the silvering the laser reflects off.
If you want cool things to do with a cd, try spraying it with freezer spray (God's gift to service engineers) until it's semi-flexible (I never understood that: heat them, they bend. Freeze them, they bend) and stick it in that other god-sent toy, a microwave.
Ben^3The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Sorry this might be a tad off topic but...
So I don't have a cool use for AOL cd's (aside from the standard frisbee/weapon uses), but we did find a cool use for one of their mailings.
I was going through the mail one day and as I was flipping through things, I started hearing the familiar "You've got mail" voice... it was really strange... eventually I found a laregish card board box from AOL from which it was coming.
So brought it back from the lab and was fiddling around with it for a while to figure out what was triggering it (yeah I'm slow sometimes) and eventually one of my lab mates pointed out that it was light sensative, so whenever it was exposed to light (then dark again to reset it) it would go off.
So we cut the the speaker and the bit of electronics out (it had a battery attached to the board). Speakers are magnetic, so at first we thought, gee... cool fridge magnet, but then we had a better idea... we stuck the speaker to the inside of the fridge. So now whenever anyone in the lab opens the fridge... "You've got mail!". Its pretty funny, especially when new people rotate in.
Surprisingly enough the battery has held up pretty well for over 3 months....
-- Point? None! Cob.
Unfortunately, it was never found.
(so)
-
After the microwaving is over, you can place strips of tape across the top of the former CD and actually pull off the metal layer that held the data.
--
After being tricked once to view that god-awful picture I was cured of clicking on links without a looksee at the link itself.
Sick people out there!
(No, the parent's link is not such a trick).
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I think you missed the point, he wasn't trying to make the AOL CD unreadable, he was trying to make his friend think he had destroyed a CD that the friend let him borrow.
I guess the birds are just as afraid of AOL as us humans. Maybe we should elevate them to "sentient" status along with (arguably) the dolphins and whales.
Just what the subject says. Collect enough and practice your shooting skills all afternoon long. They really look much better than a clay pigeon when shot. The reflective surface just kinda shimmers on the the way down.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
The whole freakin' system is out of order!
Why did a simple lamp that *anyone* could have done get 1st while a clock, a clock with AOL CDs as the gears, gets 2nd, and a car gets third?
Move the freakin' lamp to third place, incrementing the clock and the car, and you'll have a better judging.
Making a clock takes real skill that not just anybody can do.
The ascii girl #3 in his pr0n directory at gopher://gopher.heatdeath.org/00/pr0n/pr0n003.txt% 09%09%2B looks underage! Damn ascii kiddie pr0n! Damn ascii child pr0nographers, exploiting our underage letters and numbers like that...
[Note: joke, not troll. Now, put the moderation point *on the floor* and back up, slowly...]
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Well, I am a little bit too young to have melancholies about the Gopher protocol (at least, I didn't have Internet access at the time when it was popular). But that makes me even more curious. So now I'm browsing around a little through these gopher:// links.
At one moment, I wanted to check something out on Slashdot again. Slashdot on Netscape. Slashdot in HTML. HTML with tables and pictures. Tables and pictures with Netscape. Pictures through my dialup connection...
Please, can't we have a Gopher interface to Slashdot?
Well, at least, the guy from the article said Gopher "can do". And I already discovered that Gopher can show HTML (but only where necessary please, otherwise it would just be re-inventing HTTP) and do forms stuff. Some thinking has to be done, however, in how to represent the user comments. Any ideas?
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Without the rotors, the Enigma device returned to the BBC would have been useless.
As if anybody is really using it these days for encryption purposes. Shesh!
Too bad we don't advertise and site hits don't make a bit of difference, eh?
We pay for everything out of pocket and are obligated to do nothing...any other "complaints"?
We actually got a four-character Enigma machine as one of our contest entries. I'll try and post it later on today.
To Canadians it does. We get a bit miffy when we go to Europe and you call us Americans. You may be technically correct, but I think most persons in the Americas think of American as "citizen of the Democratic Republic of America", ie the allegedly United States thereof.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
This is the direct link to the gopher browser.
It's the load average, basically the average number of processes that want to use the CPU at any given time. The three numbers are the load average for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. 0.5 (the current value) is actually pretty good. Unfortunately Tomcat (Apache's implementation of JSPs and Servlets) is dieing and I'm not sure why.
A few of these AOL CDs under a leg should make my end table steadier than the AOL floppies did.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Enigma rotors turn up
Why was the guy arrested? Didn't he return (albeit in a roundabout way) the machine in the first place? As quoted from the Sunday Times?
... I mean S-M-A-R-T.
I am so smart. S-M-R-T
idm owns me
or, better yet, instead of a big pot of water to spin some turbines, how 'bout a big tub of water with a jaccuzi system... ahhh... so nice...
AOL cd's also make for a bizarre game of psycho frisbee, as they do not fly all that great.
I also plan on building a big-ass AOL icosahedron to hand from my ceiling like a freakish looking disco ball.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
As my friend and cow-orker Chelsea has kindly pointed out, "dieing" was spelled incorrectly. It should be spelled "dying". I hope. If I got the second spelling wrong she will certainly kill me.
Your microwave oven is just a 600 watt transmitter at 2.3 GHz. Normally, the water in food adsorbs the microwave energy, and heats up. (This, by the way, is why the 2.6 GHz ISM band wireless networks are very susceptible to rain fade). Now, if there is nothing in the oven, the energy has no where to go. The technical term for this is "high VSWR", high voltage standing wave ratio (pronouced vis-war like "his car"). The electrical field will build up to a very high level, enough to possibly arc over in the oven. Once that happens, the power will flow along the arc, and most likely damage something. Also, any leaks in the oven will become much worse, and you might get an RF burn if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finally, even if none of the above happen, the magnetron (the device that makes the RF) will heat up inside, and may burn out or explode.
That said, the odds of this happening if you run your oven for short periods of time (tens of seconds or less) are pretty small.
If you want to help prevent this, place a small quantity of water in the oven. That way, the energy has a place to go (until the water boils away.)
Other "stupid microwave tricks" that I am in no way responsible for you hurting yourself with: Microwave an old florescent tube. Or an incandescent lamp. Light a birthday candle, and microwave it.
Remember, you are on your own if you do this. I didn't tell you to do it. If you get hurt, try to kill yourself so you don't breed.
And lastly, "Short, controlled bursts".
www.eFax.com are spammers
Myself, I go for the 70's motif pop art "gogo" motif contact paper (with the big orange flowers). Cool.
It's marked as being really 'Aussie' with lots of Australian slang and orange shirts in the ads.
Those ads call up all those homocidal tendencies that doctors struggled for years to supress.
I haven't been sent a CD yet.
Gev.
So damn witty, they only let me use half.
err... isn't deja news a usenet to web interface... I don't quite get the connection.
-- Point? None! Cob.
But then, I did just wake up. :-)
I can just see it now:
enigma1>sho ver
(they would, after all, be pretty enigmatic).None of your business.
enigma1>sho interfaces
None of your business. (etc.)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
haven't you ever heard of a little thing called super villians?
007 can't crack those coded messages in his head without Q now can he?
Yeah, when I pointed this out to an AOL Canada guy at a computer show when they were just starting to promote AOL Canada, he said "Yeah, well, we're not really calling ourselves America Online anymore. Just AOL."
Kinda like ESSO (S.O. or Standard Oil)
gopherd can be configed to spew out HTML if the browser connects via port 80 instead of port 70.
//iacovou
Jets of blue flame shoot up out of the grape halves!
--
This
I entered this contest - I doubt I will even be mentioned in the "other entries" catagory (ie, all those who _didn't win), when they put it up (have they? Haven't checked in a while). My entry was a laser lissajous pattern maker, using the AOL CDs as the mirrors on a LEGO frame...
Anyhow - what I should've done, had I known that lamps were going to be the popular thing (and this was actually an idea I was going to do, but I thought that the laser maker was a more "geek" thing - stupid me):
The light-up AOL CD coaster - take an AOL CD, nuke it properly (to get the crackle effect), laminate the label side (to prevent future flaking?), and on the silver side, glue some EL thin-film backlighting material. Maybe make a half-inch stack, cored out, and house the step-up system and 9 volt battery to power it. Mount a switch somewhere else.
The light would shine/glow out through the top crackled surface, surrounding your can... Would look pretty neat...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
But Q is dead now... oh hell, now what'll he do?
Somebody should have built replacement Enigma rotors out of AOL CDs.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The idea of a coworker getting up from a newspaper break to the sound of "You've got mail!" plop-plop, is just fall-down-fuuny to me.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I've only burnt one microwave doing it, since I have found a good balance. What happens is the sparks from the metal will ignite the alcohol and you get a nice little blue flame from it mixed with sparks. Very pretty.
If you use to high of proof alcohol the flame will be mostly invisible though, which I learn with some 151 (waste of a shot if ya ask me).
Another cool trick is to get a bowl with about a shot in it and break the CD (multiple CD's work best) into little pieces (careful with this part.. they shatter very easily, best to mix with a plastic bag) and dump the pieces into the bowl.
Microwave for about 10 seconds, looks even cooler. I think ths is slightly more risky however, I've had pieces shoot out of the bowl a few times.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I find the non-US versions of AOL rather amusing - For example, you have America On Line Europe. Huh?
I love these advertisements they send out for "540 hours free", when you have to use them all in the first month, and your average month only has about 700 hours in it.
I suppose if you were really addicted to the stuff, you could use AOL full time, all day and night, and manage to eek out 540 hours. But I have a hard time envisioning that, especially given how hard it is to stay connected to AOL for any extended period of time.
Dont sue me for trying it and setting your house on fire, it's not my fault. It just looks rather cool.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Take CD Instert into Microwave, turn the lights out! Set microwave on High for 15 seconds It looks like an object that just traveled through time... Blue sparks starting from the center working outward. Warning.. this pisses my wife off every time I do this. Milage with your microwave may vary... keep a charged fire extinguisher beside you at all times, just in case this gets out of hand. Don't go over 15 seconds... or you could reflect enough energy to start a fire or destroy your microwave. Have Fun!
it is like a bad recurring dream :( History doesn't need to repeat itself *this* much ;)
Does anyone remember the disc guns you could/can get? that shot those floresent discs? I wanted to build a cannon one of those that fired AOL disks. It should be pretty easy, the firing mechanism would be a big spring, the barrel could just be a wooden box/trough [__]. The hardest part would be getting the large spring and not killing your self with it.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
just turn it upside down so the cool shiney side shows and put a candle on it... or you can use it as a wax gard if holding tapered candles, just slide it through the hole. Great for all the techno pagens outthere.
Is good an example on how to create you gopher to web interface.
The link for "this story" from ThisIsGloucestershire doesn't seem to work. This link should work a little better. Here's hoping it doesn't break again.
Would have been useless? Like 60+ year old encryption technology isn't useless already?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
What to do with your collection of AOL CDs, an antique drill and a flourescent bulb? Anxious to know what happened to the missing Enigma rotors? Want to go digging with gopher, but with your Web browser?
No.
great coasters,
...
nice candle holders for an outside table,
good poke balls: get flourescent red spray paint, flourescent white spray paint, 1 inch thick masking tape, lots of newspaper - lay two layers of newspaper under the paint area, with extra two feet for overspray - tape on newsprint over a top row of CDs (so upper half covered) - tape on newsprint over a bottom row of CDs (so bottom half covered) - spray paint white - now reverse the CDs after drying for 2-6 hours - spray paint red - dry for 12 hours - for best results, spray paint on the SHINY side, unless you want to do two coats.
Used the above for a poke ball tunic for Pokegaard, the Forgotton Demigod of Pokemon, in his avatar of a 9 year old boy, along with some belt pokemon and standard issue poke balls, at the 2000 Burning Man. Attach to a mesh shirt with plastic coat wires (Electroluminescent Wire is best) and try dancing with this at a rave in the desert, with strong strobe UV lights, for best effects.
they also make cool bead curtains
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
You mean scratch the polycarbonate side?
The data layer on the cd is just under the label. CDs are rather resistant to scratches in their plastic because those scratches don't actually destroy data an the laser beam can focus around them. Scratch the label though and you will wipe out the pits.
Take a dry erase marker (or permanent if you don't like the cd) and make a line (on the plastic side) from the center of the cd to the edge. Put it in your CD player and the player will probably be able to play the CD just fine because of focusing, and error correction. Better (usually older) cd players will be able to play CDs with up to four or five such lines. (Newer cd players are cheaper partly because they aren't made so well anymore.)
Too bad the ones I get are all plastered over with stickers hawking AOL, and it's impossible to get them off w/o ruining the plasting that keeps the insert on.
Take your AOL CD and place it in your microwave
Time it for 3 seconds and hit start.
Just as the time is about to run out, you'll see sparkling fun, and your CD will be left with lightning burn marks with which to decorate your room!
That ultimatechaos.com site thrives on slashdot hits. I had to use my own extreme counter code to find the correct URL, but I finally put together the correct URL for their stats. As you can see, today (Tues Dec 05) is well on its way to being the highest day in unique hits (1245 unique hits for today when I checked). Oh, those 10,000 hits back in week 39? That corresponds to this.
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Pictures of Toasted AOL CDs... Wow. :)
Toasties!
"Darn, my winmodem won't work with Linux? I'll have to recompile it... with my blowtorch."
They'll have to start using COMPUTERS! Ick! Quick, find the rotors! Find the rotors! Why didn't they just contact the owners of the one of the other two enigma machines and machine new rotors? Or scan them and use stereo lithography or any other 3d xerography thang?
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
A couple years ago I found out that my company (a largish VAR) would pay be more if I had an MSCE so I trucked down to Costco and got myself some books. No, it wasn't very hard.
Well they did pay me more, and my friends made fun of me, but I also ended up with a free one year Technet subscription. Technet is basically MS's knowledge base, patches and beta software sent to you every month (10 - 25 cds).
I now have a foot and a half high stack of useless crap, even more offensive than AOL cds. Anyone have any ideas what I should do with them?
I am looking for funny stuff and no I don't think I could fit them up my ass.
My company make some high speed imaging equipment and we figured out the right use for them. Sorry, cann't find bigger picture now.
"Short, controlled bursts"
That's what the girlfriend always says...
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Pass this software with the registration number and password printed below on to your friends for their FREE trial offer! 6P-4010-2805
WARES-POORLY
Does anyone else find that pretty ironic? ;-)
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Anyone got any ideas on how to amass great amounts of AOL cds?
Anyone?
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
carldrawings.dk3.com
Maybe they could have gotten the guy that build clockwork gears from AOL CDs to help them build replacement rotors for the Enigma box...
IRC, the older CD players have their lenses made of glass. As the error correction circuits (that controls the laser beam) became better, they could replace the glass lense with a plastic one (IC:s are cheaper than glass...)
Another good one: get a grape. Slice it almost in half -- the two hemispheres should be connected by just a bit of skin. Place the grape in the microwave for a few seconds. Watch the pretty arc between the grape halves.
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
Pack about 20 CDs together (a MSDN set is as good for this as an AOL collection) to make a fat cyclinder, tape them so they don't wriggle, then take your hacksaw and chop 6 or 8 notches, evenly spaced about the perimeter and about 1cm deep, along the axis of the cylinder. Untape the CDs, which you can now ``plug 'n' play'' at right angles to make the most bizarre house-of-cards type structures. We also have a mobile made from CDs hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Our baby boy finds it fascinating, almost as entrancing as clocks.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is isn't ment as an insult, rather an honest question :
What do you have on gopher that's so great, but can't be simply put on a web-page?
-Andy
I can't believe the car came in 3rd after the lamp and clock! I think someone who takes the time to cut AOL CD's into tile-able shapes, and then proceed to cover their entire auto is pretty impressive.
And all along I thought I was cool for making AOL floor- and placemats.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
nt!
The WebGopher thing is cool, but if you go to the webpage for heatdeath ( here ) you can try the Java gopher to web gateway. It's a hell of a lot cooler than the gopher support for, say, IE.
Not only do AOL disks make good coasters, they also make a good frisbie. Makes you think, doesn't it? But either way, you can't stop a train being driven by a gorrila (:0. Oh, by the way, give this one to OOG! [[:0
Don't assassinate me!
I just happen to prefer running a gopher server. I think gopher is superior for my particular purpose, and in fact superior to the web for many things that the web is used for (though not in all ways). It's a good, efficient, easy to use way of providing information.
Ingredients,
friend
1 AOL cd.
Borrow your friend's favourite/most expensive CD.
Scrape up your AOL CD very badly on the data-side.
Put the AOL CD in the jewel case backwards.
When you return the CD say something like "oh.. check to make sure it's in there" so you can see the look on his/her face.
-... ---
Big ups to Emmanuel, for a bitchin' good gopher program in the West side. Man, I'm all up in all over that like a motherf*cker. Soon I'll be back home, illin' with a fat spliff and a massive dose of Manny's gophermania. Serious mad props to that crazy dutchman homeslice word! Did I mention that I still have some melons for sale?
doesn't a www->gopher interface kinda defeat the purpose of gopher?
oh, like... a stable client, lightweight protocol, etc, etc...
--
I would like to take a look at it..
-gerbik
A former co-worker of mine had many... interesting hobbies, one of which was experimentation with extremely high voltage. One of his favorite pasttimes was placing AOL CDs on a piece of plywood, firing up his homebuilt 75,000V generator, flipping down his welding mask, and touching the contacts from the generator to opposing points on the CDs. The end result (after massive flashing, arcing, and a generally putrid stench) were fascinating lightning-like patterns etched through the data layer of the CD where the metal foil had vaporized in its attempt to conduct the electrical currents.
Curiouser and curiouser...
Deja News is an example of using one protocol (WWW, or HTML over HTTP) as a front end to another (NNTP). OP is asking for something similar with a WWW front end to Gopher.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I took the idea of using the AOL CDs as coasters a bit further. I nuked them in the microwave to get that nice pattern in them. I then got some corkboard and cut out a CD sized chunk. Drilled a couple of drain holes into the CD and then using a all-purpose epoxy attached the CD to the cork. Works great and the holes help keep condensation from running off the CD onto the table.
B2
The opinions expressed by B2 are not necessarily the opinions of the rest of the staff from Ultimate Chaos and probably differ widely from the general "excepted" moral foundational regurgitated drival of the common "in a dream world" person.
After reading the gopher:// manifesto, it got me to do something that I had been considering for some time: move my internet presence into gopherspace and out of the Web.
So, is this considered going underground?
[
Hah, I have no clue is this is off topic or not...mainly because my eyes are shooting hooks between the eyelids in order to shut themsevles, and it is only 7:30...but you want something to do with AOL CDs?! Try, creating a full setup of hub caps for a car, along with an antenna decor an hood ornament...and then the next night...take the other 1/1000th of your stash of millions(that you took from the stupid aol/walmart cd campaign) and create a birthday gift-wrapped door on the apartment door (well, i actually didn't know this person at all, but i knew it was their birthday, so of course I had to help out)... AolCar AolDoor