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101 Uses for an AOL CD?
Richard C asks: "I've just seen, for the first time, the newest AOL advert on UK television. One section depicts a man phoning AOL to ask for a free CD. As he speaks, he picks up his coffee mug, to which an AOL CD is stuck - he's been using it as a coaster. "Oh, don't worry - I've already got one" he adds. The irony of this amused me, to say the least, thought probably not in the way AOL intended. In any case, and in the true '101 uses for a dead cat' style, I thought it would be amusing (if not productive) to ask the Slashdot readership for their '101 uses for an AOL CD'. Be imaginative!"
You could throw the CD at idiots who make a big deal out of getting the first post.
Send them to Alan Ralsky !
Most interesting one I've ever heard of...get a blowtorch and melt an even ring in the middle so it droops down, let it cool, and you have a flower pot. It even has a hole in the middle for drainage. :)
I'm sure it takes a while to perfect the art of flower-pot-making, but hey...we all have plenty to practice on, right?
What? You want a sig?
I'm sure this hasn't been covered by people who want to make fun of AOL's CD spamming policies. In fact, I'm sure using a major search engine would fail to produce any results
but I just throw them away...
After releasing all my years of pent up anger on them with a heavy, blunt object.
"When all else fails, there's always delusion." -Conan O'Brien
Here are a few uses:
--Suit of Armor, Shield, Sword, and Helmet
--Scare Grackles from your bird feeder for cardinals
--Robot wheels
--Microwaveable dish
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
1. Coasters ...Or make a really strange hat.
2. Microwave for a few seconds to create new and interesting abstract art pieces.
3. Eclipse viewer
4. Signal mirror when you are lost in the woods
5. Y'know when you're driving and some creep right behind you has their brights on? Use the shiny side to send their light right back at them
6. Take some string, some cork, some glue, and an even number of CDs : Yo-Yo
7. String up a bunch of them together and give them to a small child to keep them entertained.
8. Glue as many as you can to a black body suit and go to the next holloween party as a disco ball.
9. Bookmark for any hardbound book.
10. Frisbees for children or expert frisbee throwers.
11. With two of them you can make Elton John sized mirror shades.
12. Balance a table with uneven legs
13. Give your parakeet a friend
14. Practice throwing stars for young ninjas.
15. Throwing small pieces of pottery
16. At work, keep the bathroom key in an easy to find location by attaching it to a CD.
17. Astonomy: Glue two halves of a sphere to both sides of a tennis ball and model Saturn.
18. Practice skipping stones indoors.
19. Glue it to your pet mouse so it doesn't chew on an injured leg
20. Wind chimes
21. Christmas tree ornaments.
22. Make your own platinum album
23. Shields for your GI Joes
24. The AOL Mini-CD would also work as part of a lance for him
25.
26. Vanity mirror for Barbie
27. Make your Gi Joe's stand up properly
28. Glue them to the outside of your house and bounce all of the sunlight off. Cut your cooling costs
29. They say that there is no intelligent life out there. Glue them to a 4x8 board, grab a xylophone, and start signaling.
30. Tape a few strategically to the walls of your house so that no matter where you are you can us the remote control.
31. Glue one to your computer monitor so you can see whose behind you.
32. Give them to your kid when they have to make a diarama of the final scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (Think of the rotating knives)
33. At your next party, give every guest their own personal tray of oe'deuvres.
34. Get four of them and jack up your hot wheels.
35. Diarama idea #2 : The Pit and the Pendulum
36. Kill time by working out the Towers of Hanoi problem
37. Nueveau wall paper.
38. Snow shoes for dogs.
39. Bicycle reflectors.
40. Roadside and driveway reflectors.
41. Laser defraction grating material for experiments.
42. Toaster demonstrations.
43. Put one behind each christmas light on your outdoors string of lights.
44. Large fender washers
45. Edward CD hands
46. Replace those old playing cards on the bike as noise makers against the spokes.
47. Furniture coasters
48. Solar mirror for concentrating heat into a fresnel lens solar oven
49. Glue several together into a parabolic shape for spy listening device
50. Same as above for satellite dishes
51. Make a house for the fish in your aquarium.
52. Collect thousands and make an artifical reef.
53. Use two for your snow boarding chicken
54. Fishing lures for marlin
55. Jack up your roller skates
56. Tie some to strings and attach them in front ot the air conditioner vent. Watch them dance.
57. Experts estimate that it would take about 10 to 12 of them to make a skeet pidgeon.
58. Make a grinding wheel for your pocket knife.
59. Add some straw between two of them and your pets can work out with you.
60. New For Christmas:The CD ROM Christmas Tree
61. This is for Windows 98 CD's, but we can do the same with AOL CDs: Launch Win98
62. Use a hot knife to carefully fold them into various shapes. I'd like to see the platonic solids, myself.
63. A reader named Kevin pointed out that they make great candle holders. Why didn't I think of that? (6-10-02)
64. Another reader suggests taking six of them and glueing them together to form a box. Might be tricky, this one.
65. They also suggest cutting them in half to form the legs of a rocking chair for dolls or stuffed animals.
66. And the very obvious Disco Ball, which I only have alluded to as a halloween costume.
67. New on 10-12-02: Get an old satellite dish (big one) line the dish with them point it at the sun and you have one hell of a cigarette lighter. This would probably do a lot of damage to my pipe.
68. Or have the focused energy hit a metal tube to heat water. Boy, that would save on the electric bill, wouldn't it? Great ideas.
69. Another suggestion for the upcomming holiday parties. Dan wrote in:"If you have helium balloons but you don't want them to be sideways on your ceiling during aparty, simply attach a CD to the end of them. Take some rope and tie it around the end of the balloon. Then attach the other end of the rope to the CD. Make sure the rope is long enough to go all the way down to the ground. Not only will the CD's act as weights but will create a nicerainbow effect on your ceiling to make the party even more spectacular."
70. New on 12-2-02: Replacement "patty stacker" dividers!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Seriously... I remember watching a made for TV movie, an adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk, and the giant's vest/armor was made of CDs. They had been painted brown, so it wasn't obvious, and it wasn't possible to recognise any text printed on the CDs, but it wasn't a flat brown, so it probably was actual printed CDs (as opposed to plain white blanks)
When you can microwave them for a fireworks show
Break them up, use the glittery foil parts to make a nice fine glittry dust that your female friends can use in their hair (don't ask.)
:).
You can make an array of them, put them inside a reflecting telescope, and adjust them each at the optimal angle and create a self correcting mirror for the ultimate telescope.
Spin them like coins, or mount them to some rotary motor, and bounce lasers off of them for an interesting show.
Weave them through the spokes in your bike tires for extra saftey at night (think reflectors.)
Cover your walls with these. No more pesky problems with the IR remote not working in THAT corner of the room (don't we all have this problem somewhere in our home?)
While the wall is covered with these things, a little wattage lightbulb will go along way for illumination.
With all that reflecting going on you can open up a photo studio.
Throw them, and if someone asks you what you're up to, tell'm you've found a way to get AOL to launch with 100% reliability.
Line the inside of a paraobilic dish with these and run a dark water carrying pipe through the focus. Solar water heater. (Maybe use the steam to drive a turbine, and get some power as well as hot H2O.)
If you're being tailgated, use them to blind the drivers behind you, he'll never notice the breaklights. Start thinking about what color you would like the tailgater to paint your car
Throw them out the sunroof if your car is already the right color. 65MPH CD-ROM Shiruken will work wonders on their paintjob and windshield.
Use the 800 number on the package and demand a copy of the AOL client that works with your non-M$ operating system. (C-64s didn't have CDRoms..too bad.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
One of my favorite things to do with CD's after I don't need them any more is to make the lovely soup in the following recipe (it's a kind of minestrone).
CD Soup
Ingredients:
4cupsvegetable soup stock
2 clean, discardable CDs, preferably newish (unused AOL CD's are perfect!)
2(14.5 ounce) cansstewed tomatoes
1largepotato, cubed
1onion, chopped
2stalkscelery, chopped
2carrots, chopped
1large headcabbage, finely chopped
2tablespoonsItalian seasoning
1(15 ounce) cankidney beans
3cupsfresh corn kernals
1largezucchini, sliced
1cupuncooked orzo pasta
salt and pepper to taste
Preparation:
1. In a large soup pot combine the vegetable stock, the undrained tomatoes, potato, onion, celery, carrot, cabbage and Italian seasoning. Bring to a boil and reduce heat. Simmer for about 15 minutes.
2. Stir in the beans, corn, zucchini and pasta; simmer for 10 to 15 more minutes until the vegetables are tender. Kill heat, add CDs and stir vigorously for about three minutes.
Allow to set for five minutes.
Season with salt and pepper.
Note: The CD's are not edible.
Simply attach an AOL cd to the neck of your boring old pet lizard, and voila! you have a perfectly good frilled-neck lizard. (For all you non-australians out there, a frilled neck lizard is a native australian reptile, and a tasty treat for aboriginals in the aussie outback). mmmmmmmmmm frills.
Here in Berkeley there's an Art car running around plated in CDs, shiny side out, so the car looks like it's got fish-scale skin. Of course you can't tell what kind of CDs they are since the labels are on the other side, but you gotta believe AOL provided a lot of the material.
Is it just me, or is that the most annoying malapropism around? Constantly see it though.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Were when AOL came on floppies (and I still used floppies). I'd just place a new label on top of the AOL label, erase its contents, and voila! An empty disk! I think I had at least half a dozen of them. They must have been worth at least a dollar combined. I felt like I was really ripping them off.
Andy
Yes, I collect AOL CD, as do a lot of other people. It's truly amazing how many different styles and variations there are of these things (it's in the thousands). I feel like they've become icons of a generation.
~GP
(you need to be mr aol to do this one)
1/ dont have the next millions of cds made.
2/ dont send them to anyone.
3/ give the saved money to a charity
4/ make some kind of announcement where you say that in one shot you (1)reduced pollution, (2)realized you were bothering people with useless marketing, (3)did something usefull with that otherwise wasted money.
5/ have a merry christmas once in your lifetime.
Use a slightly different spelling of your name (or insert a random letter as a middle initial) whenever you sugn up for things like game company loyalty cards etc. ensure that you tick the "do not spam me" box on the form. Keep a record of which spelling you used where.
Wait for the obligatory AOL CD to come through the door with the misspelling, look up who supplied it, then sue them under the UK Data Protection Act 1984 law for disclosing your information.
One of my friends built a cd rack out of them by
gluing a bunch of them together. it lookes kinda like this
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You can stack the CD's in it vretically it holds
about 50 jewl cases! I will post a pic if I can get one.
http://www.csl.mtu.edu/~jadevree/aol.html
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Hey, now THATs a use, but do we really want to be giving those trolls free internet access?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
The Cleansing Ritual for AOL CDs
From the earliest days of people recieving AOL CDs in the mail, there has been a need to cleanse these foul devices of their evil, and this is the only true way of excorcising the beast from the essentially innocent soul of the acryllic disk.
What you will need for this ritual:
1 (or more) AOL CD
1 Holy Urn of Isanël Umâhar of the proper diameter to fit a CD (suficiently sized and pre-blessed mixing bowl may be substituted)
1 (or more, proportionat to the number of CDs) bottle of holy water (religion of blessing entirely by choice of the person perfoming the cleansing)
1 Unholy Priestess (may be substituted by a suficiently versed hooker, or the pink ranger)
1 wooden alter (may be substituted by cheap IKEA knockoff microwave shelf)
1 2.4ghz radio frequency cooking device (microwave oven)
making sure the microwave is sitting on the altar, first place the CD into the Urn, fill the Urn with the holy water, while having the Unholy Priestess dance around the chanting the words "pa limat wi vuim irumo uv tajelac" five times, while the Unholy Priestess is chanting, place the Urn within the microwave, and with the chant "Ë lamacha dra drui sucud vuim uv taisuk", set the microwave for 1 minute and press "Start".
Afterwards do as you will with the Unholy Priestess.
My quasi-father-in-law hangs CDs from trees in his garden. They scare away some birds.
--- Nukes don't kill people psychopathic megalomaniacs do.
WIth a drill press and forstner bits I opened up the center hole to about 1-1/2", then epoxied the stack of CDs together. I put the lamp's ballast inside the CD-ROM case and mounted the light tube atop the case in a nicely machined piece of aluminum that I had pulled from a betamax machine.
So the flourescent tube sits vertically in a stack of CDs and its light refracts radially out of the CDs through the plastic and between the foil layers - a very cool effect.
I don't have a picture of the CD lamp online but there is a picture of a lamp made from a halogen bulb and four old sound cards here . Just don't take anything said in the article seriously.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
Get a few million of them and create a companion for the Great Wall - Spell out "AOL SUCKS!" large enough to be seen from space.
If you want to build something with them, but don't have enough, just call AOL. I'm not sure if they still will, but not too long ago I was able to get a large box full of a few hundred aol CD's.
Send them to GreenDisk for recycling.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A CD hanging from the rear view mirror (instead of or in addition to a cardboard pine tree air freshener or dice) seemed all the rage while I was in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico in the summer of 2001. Of course, I saw the decorations on more cumbis than cars :-). (A cumbi in Taxco is a VW van with the side door and seats removed, benches installed, shoe polish proclaiming the destinations on the windshield, and a $0.30 fare to ride wherever it happens to go.)
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
Stuff them into body bags and dump them on Phillip Morris's front step.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
I've personally used them as coasters (who hasn't..), to make ninja stars (cut them to make thme spikey, they hurt! Be sure to reinforce with some tape as they break easily.), and I have such a vast collection I managed to cover the ceiling in my room with them, shiney side down. I stuck them all up there with that sticky tack stuff...it looks cool.