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Modding A Paper Shredder
detaks writes "The university of alberta's undergraduate computing science student group modded the office shredder, with duct tape, 110volt case fans, and a athlon fan, to increase the speed of the paper shredder from 12 to 37 pages shredded before overheating. You can also read it in the google cache"
They can now cook their books in half the time!
Can you imagine this in the hands of the corporate people who want to "cover" their paper tracks - I shudder to think this is what is becomming of the world
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Maybe they should have used some of those fans, and the duct tape, and overclocked their server.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
Duct Tape, of course! Ever see the Red Green Show? Now all they need are some blue tarps.
If only Enron and Worldcom had invested in this new type of shredder, they would still be in business!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Speaking of which, that's the last place you think of having cooling problems. Why not put the thing outside a save a few bucks?
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
I was just wondering how and when the corporate scandal news would finally pass from the minds of large corporate investors, and now this.
I wonder if this qualifies as enabling technology for comitting corporate crime, much like watching DVDs on Linux is for copyright violations. I wonder if it would be pursued as stridently.
...I'm scared to think of what these people would do to this poor shreader if they were introduced to liquid nitrogen cooling.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Hey troll, why should I think you were even going to read the article, since you obviously didn't even read the whole post? The second sentence in the post refers to the Google cache that Hemos thoughtfully provided since he knew the server would probably go down.
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html
french bread slicer we made which, when modified to run backwards, could shoot the two halves to hit the ceiling at such speed that if it was days-old, it could shatter the bread :)
;)
But then again, that's what mechanical engineering students should be up to
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
At least in Calgary we know how to spell. Or were they putting med school volunteers through El Shreddoro? All you Edmontonians can give us is a modded shredder and Space Moose.
[/playful troll]
(BTW, those Space Moose comics are not office friendly. You've been warned!)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
This story reminds me of the vid clip I saw on this page. Totally pointless, but very cool - I've never seen anything chop through wood quite so quick - and the sound it makes it almost worth the effort...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Did anyone else see that new Heineken commercial where you see a nice
Christmas party looking into the apartment from outside. Snow is
falling. Then the camera moves up to where a bunch of executives are
shredding paper out the window.
NIce.
Highly entertaining read, and props for putting the Google Cache link into the summary.
On that note, I'm going home.
--
Why not mod a shredder to look just like a fax machine. Take it to the office, and watch hilarity insue!
How ya like dat?
Modding it to be cooler so it runs longer?
...
... really ... hot ...
Nah.
I bet you it destroys more paper if you mod it to run hot
really
All it takes is mention of the words "case fan" for Slashdot to get a hardon and proclaim the story "news worthy".
If someone can wade through the uber-cool-intelligent-student humor and tell me what the fuck they actually did, that would be much appreciated.
I had to stop reading after about the third paragraph due to a headache.
"And like that
It's overclocked. It would be modded if it gained an aluminium case with a window, some blue lights, something to measure fan RPM and "whohoo, l33t" dremelled into the side.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Look at the bottom of the Web page and look for modded water bottle. Insane. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wouldn't a full-on geek have bypassed the heat sensor entirely and put a gas engine in there?
Nitro-charged brush shredders, and then some vacuums exploding.
That, my friends, is a well-booked weekend.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I'd be afraid to go to this hospital.
My Ass hurts.
...by an episode of Home Improvement.
Soon we'll see a Slashback linking to the Darwin Awards.
We should outlaw shredder "mods". These are obviously an attempt to rob shredder manufacturers of the profits from their "razor-and-blade" business model of selling third-rate plastic products and expecting customers to buy a new one every year. Shredder hackers must be stopped.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Or is this a Canadian thing?
--sdem
They demonstrated a tripling of the throughput of the machine with those soup-it-up fans! That's impressive. I'll bet that's better than the fan-and-heatsink donor got from his Athlon. It's too bad they couldn't get that "1 Roll eXtreme Duck Tape" to physically support the twin 120 volt fans to really cool off the beast. My experience with these (shredder) devices is that there is another metric besides raw throughput that makes all the difference in perceived "beastliness", and that's the speed of the feeder, analogous to the "first page" speed of a printer, except obviously the opposite. And as long as they have to run 120 VAC to it, they can add all sorts of lights and stuff. (For more 120 VAC computer projects, see etherkillers). Maybe with some tweaking they can hack a truly useful device that attaches to the output bin of a fast printer, and shreds as fast as the pages come out. Then they can haul away the incriminating evidence as fast as it's output.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/bottle.ht ml
What are they putting in the food up there?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It couldn't make it through the number of credit card offers I get in the mail everyday.
Nuff said
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Not much snow, except the upper heights, here in BC either. Kamloops, Merritt, Vancouver... all bare.
Which leads me to think... computers+snow, not good.
Ok, so there are legitimate uses of shredders that would make it bad to just send out copies, but legitimate users wouldn't mind having their picture taken (much). Maybe the mods should enable themselves after hours.
Illinois Gov. George Ryan would never have become Governor if it hadn't taken so long before we learned about the shredding party at the Sec. of State offices before he was elected.
... I wonder if this work contracted by Global Crossing or Adelphia?
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
Yeah we all know college is a party, but carrying stories like this, where an acredited learning institutions students are wasting their research time with such frivoulus pursuits makes CS look bad in general.
If I were an ulumni I would be less inclined to donate.
I have seen military grade. They'll shred 100's of pages per minute, into pieces roughly 1/4" by 1/10".
Then they go out and burn it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
hm. so heat is generated by resistance of paper to cutting. sharpen blades, decrease reisistance, decrease heat, increase life of paper shredder. THEN add cooling fans.
just a thought.
moox. for a new generation.
3) if they were engineering students they would well have directed the shredded output to a mini incinerator and used this to a run a cooling pump
Or find some way to just pump the motor heat directly to the paper. Unlikely.
Engineering students might have tried to up the motor and its drive circuitry too so that it has better torque. then one might need the blades and rollers made from stronger materials.
Or maybe improved on the design by building a better one from scratch, hopefully so that it mulches down to the fiber and composts in an automatic two stage process, it's pretty hard to put the fibers back to gether after that one.
Hmmmm, to me modded means modified with no actual increase in performance.
I think that even by slashdot's standards, we're both thinking into a hole.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Real shredders use 3-phase!
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
You don't need 115v to shred! This is only crap the shredding industry feeds to you to get you to upgrade! Try running the motor with 80volts and see how long it will run. So it runs slower. You don't need a 3Ghz cpu either!
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Just pour the LN2 on the paper and hit it with a hammer a few times. I bet that would shatter the old record. Pun intended!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We've had a number of placements from their CompSci Co-Op program -- I can't recomend it enough. If you're looking for good students, this place has them.
:)
They have extremely long placements (16-18 months -- unlike some other programs we've termed "bungee" programs *cough*Waterloo*cough*) which allows the students to become part of the team, and take on much meatier tasks.
We've hired a few of the students we've had after they graduated... take some time and investigate the program if you're either looking to go to school, or looking for some interns.
Did I mention I think quite highly of the program?
Not a single Enron or Andersen joke to be seen. Come on people, what's this place coming to?
The proper link is http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html (Note the lack of a leading 'www'). I presume that ugweb stands for undergraduate web pages.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
That they're down to buying cheap paper shredders leaves me worrying that the society is now in dire financial straights -- and they're probably selling beer for $2.00/glass now.
And the proper link is http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html (note the lack of a leading 'www').
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
With more pitful disregard for anything remotely resembling quality journalism, it seems slashdot editors don't even click on links to see if they work now.
CORRECT SHREDDER LINK
Hemos, working as he usually does, repsonds to CmdrTaco's question about the link working. "Of course it works. Why wouldn't it work? No one would send us a broken link. That's impossible. Also, since i'm telepathic now, I don't even need to read the story to know it's front page material. Damn I'm good."
Hemos cliks *post*, grinning smugly, "Congratulations, Hemos, another feather in your cap. Job well done."
Yeah, but how many frames per second does it do with FSAA?
**NOTE:
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie