Computer Hardware That Can Pull Double-Duty?

MicklePickle asks: "It's been raining very heavily here in Sydney Oz, and as usual when we, (the SysAdmins), come in to work we take off our very wet shoes and socks and place them on one of the two hefty UPSs to dry out. They dry out very quickly on the hot fan. We even have a couple of 'toast racks', (a metal frame for housing an HP web console), to lay the shoes and socks out on. Does anyone else make use of computer hardware in a manner for which it was not intended?"

Comments

Easybake Oven

[mr. phantastik]

I've always wanted to use my computer as an easybake oven:

1. Build a metal box to fit in your 5 1/2" drive bay, much like the metal case for a CD-ROM.
   
2. Cut an intake hole on the bottom and install a thin fan.
   
3. Run a piece of that bendy clothes dryer vent stuff from the hole to directly over the cpu.
   
4. Change the CPU fan to suck air away from CPU instead of blowing.
   
5. Place treat in bay.
   
6. Play Quake 3 for about an hour.
   
7. Remove treat, and eat. Careful, its probably not cooked at all, and will most likely kill you.

Slashdot

[briansmith]

I'm sure that when all our bosses bought us these computers, they weren't intending for us to post comments to Slashdot all day long, but that is exactly what a lot of us are using them for.

300 or 400

[Perdo]

300w ATX is all the computer needs... But I needed 400 for my cigarette lighter mod.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, I'm a little weird... but at least I have dead man switched degaussing rings under all my boxes so when the black helicopters come for me, all the incriminating evidence will be erased.

"Server - Australian for..."

[BRO_HAM]

"Server - Australian for sock dryer"

I'm sorry, I had to.

Always mount a scratch monkey...

[tshoppa]

From the classic Always Mount a Scratch Monkey thread:

11 February 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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