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"

Comments

Enron et al.

[andyrut]

They can now cook their books in half the time!

Re:Enron et al.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be the RIAA/MPAA equivalent of 3, or 4 shredders?

Fans

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

Maybe they should have used some of those fans, and the duct tape, and overclocked their server.

Re:Fans

[rehannan]

If you you're refering to the "modded the office shredder" link, the url is incorrect. It's pretty hard to /. a server that doesn't exist. Remove the "www." bit.

Duct Tape!

[core plexus]

Duct Tape, of course! Ever see the Red Green Show? Now all they need are some blue tarps.

Just goes to show you...

[TechnoLust]

It's really boring in Canada. ;-)

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?

Even better...

[jonman_d]

...I'm scared to think of what these people would do to this poor shreader if they were introduced to liquid nitrogen cooling.

correct link

[rehannan]

http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html

V8 chainsaw...

[FyRE666]

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...

Re:Call me a troll, but ...

[macdaddy357]

Why not mod a shredder to look just like a fax machine. Take it to the office, and watch hilarity insue!

Jesus

[poopdik]

All it takes is mention of the words "case fan" for Slashdot to get a hardon and proclaim the story "news worthy".

Re:Meh

[Dr Caleb]

At least in Calgary we know how to spell

But perhaps you should by a hockey team. :P

(mistakes intentional, being from Edmonchuk n all.)

This isn't modded.

[WasterDave]

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'm reading..

[RumpRoast]

Since we had yet to swap the motor with one more powerful, the shredding was trying our patients.

I'd be afraid to go to this hospital.

I'm sure this was inspired..

[Anonvmous Coward]

...by an episode of Home Improvement.

Soon we'll see a Slashback linking to the Darwin Awards.

Leave it to CS students

[I Am The Owl]

To be chugging bottled water instead of beer.

Or is this a Canadian thing?

A great overclocking project

[abirdman]

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.

The Water Bottle

[Alien54]

They also modded a Water Bottle:

http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/bottle.ht ml

What are they putting in the food up there?

No, make the fax machine look like a shredder

[Gerry Gleason]

That was my first thought when I read this item. Just making a faster shredder isn't that interesting, but either sending someone a copy of what is being shredded, and/or getting a picture of the person doing the shredding seems a lot more interesting.

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.

UACS up to it's old tricks.

[Black Copter Control]

it's good to see that UACS is up to it's old tricks. Back in my day, we were (among other things) known for our parties, where the beer was only '$.50'/glass. This was supposedly an attempt to burn off the extra money that we got by reselling computer accounts (back in the late '70s early 80's) (we were non profit, so we had to do something creative with the profit). It never really worked that well, so we ended up paying $5000 for a couple of intelligent terminals for the club office.

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').