Slashdot Mirror
Bob The Builder Gets A Personality Transplant
McCarrum writes "Here at 'undisclosed company,' there's been a push to bring a mascot into our IT team. After much discussion and many excellent ideas, the PHB made the executive decision on Bob the Builder. Enter one Bob the Builder talking doll. Talking?! By Crom, that means a chipset! (cue evil laugh) A quick bit of exploratory surgery and a little research later, we purchased the equipment to create EVIL BOB. Want to make your own EVIL BOB? Click the clicky clicky thing!"
And the geocities site linked to slashdot has hit its data transfer cap...who didn't see that coming? Show of hands? Okay, you all can leave now.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Shame the site is down the video of the demo where Bob passed the Turing Test was really impressive.
This is what you get for previewing your submitions -- all that testing your link maxes out the bandwidth cap for the site! See why there are so many bad links/dupes on slahdot? It's because the editors don't want to kill the sites fore everyone :)
My other car is first.
...since not even paying subscribers had the time to read the content on that Geocities cite and we'll forget all about this before it becomes available again...does that mean that we all can post without reading the article, guessing and writing IANAL and IANAEB (I Am Not An Evil Bob) posts?
:-)
I don't think anyone will notice the difference
The clicky clicky thing is bwoken!
A Geocities site slashdotted. Well I never.
yes, we have no bananas
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tomday/
generic
"Bob the IT support guy!"
"Bob the IT support guy!"
"can he fix it?!?"
"No he can't, because that's not his department, it's a software issue and it was raised with management over a month ago"
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Mirror
generic
I bet you're one of those people that always wonders why slashdot doesn't get slashdotted.
(sorry)
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Bob the Builder. A lot of people know him, he is an all round Mr. Fix-it handyman sort of chap. He is the subject of a TV show and videos along with much merchandising. Worshipped by a lot of children gave him confidence, possibly buoyed by these successes he ventured into fresh territory. Hostile territory. Where forces lurked beyond his fixing, forces that warped him into a twisted copy of his former self, made him into something that could change between his former chirpy self and something that looked the same but spoke in many voices most of which are not nice. Here is the tale of how this came to pass.
As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office. The idea being that if someone was having a bad day then Bob could help them through it. The model we received has a story book with it and you can read along with Bob by pressing the numbered patches on his body. Bob's voice is bright and chirpy and, above all, all so British. About five minutes after having Bob quite a few people started muttering about making Bob say something else, this just goes to show the danger of lobbing an electronic toy in amongst a mob IS Professionals - the desire to hack things became strong.
So off to google we went to see if anyone else had managed to do the job already. After a bit of a search around we found no hits on hacking a Bob the Builder toy, someone had hacked a talking fish but that was not what we were after. After failing to find anything on Google we did a bit of exploratory surgery by unpicking the stitching. Pulling out the electronic voice box revealed a bit of a setback, the electronics that controlled the voice were sealed under a blob of black epoxy. Evidently, there was no simple way to modify the existing hardware to bend it to our will. Another method needed to be found.
As it happened, not long before Bob turned up we had been digging into our diesel generator voice notification machine with the view to reprogramming it. The voice recorder part of the machine was the APR9600 made by APlus Inc. This chip can provide up to eight short messages, is programmable on the fly and does not need any MPU to perform these functions. In short, the chip was an ideal fit for what we wanted to do. By paralleling the existing switch points used to trigger the original speech segments and switching the speaker outputs between the original chip and the new one we could give Bob a whole new personality but, more importantly, we could keep the original Bob intact which is something we needed to do. We had a plan...
Sourcing the APR9600 was surprisingly difficult but we managed to locate one place that sold them locally which saved us importing one from overseas. We needed a container of some sort to hold the circuitry, given the APR9600 is a 28 pin DIP, an old film canister made a reasonable sized container to provide protection for the circuitry. A piece of veroboard was cut to fit into the canister, the very few passive components required for the operation of the APR9600 fitted fairly easily into the restricted space. The circuit is almost exactly the same as the example given in the applications notes for a eight segment recorder, the only difference is that the input is fed via an external active source (clamped by a couple of paralleled diodes) instead of an electret microphone. The APR9600 is a wonderful device, it handles all the anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, digitisation, storage and playback of the sound samples by itself, the passive components are only there to set the sample rate and the AGC time constant. Once the circuit was built, it was tested on the bench - interestingly enough, the first segment of the APR9600 appears to be factory programmed someone saying some Taiwanese - probably as a factory test. After a short debug the device was fully operational an
Schlock Mercenary.
No we can't 'cos its on Geocities.
Looks like Spud was the editor who decided to post a story with a link to Geocities
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
For the copy-paste impaired...
Lemme see... the site is Slashdotted and not cached, so I'll take a guess that 'Evil' Bob is going to express dodgy political opinions and make sexist comments at passing women.
Sounds like a fairly run-of-the-mill builder to me...
For bonus points, pull Bob's trousers down far enough to expose at least 2" of arse cleavage and give him a copy of 'The Sun' (doesn't work if he's meant to be American though...)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Second mirror: http://shifted.ca/btb/
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Bob didn't need a mod to make him evil, he already was!
Think about it for a moment... when was the last time that you met a builder who was polite, well spoken, efficient, well dressed (no builder's bum), fixed things quickly, didn't have a copy of The Sun in his back pocket, didn't drink tea and talk football (soccer) constantly, didn't whistle at women constantly, answered the question "Can we fix it?" with anything other that "It'll cost you" and actually wore a hard hat?
One you take the talking (possessed) site equipment into consideration Bob seems very much like the Anti-Builder!
Sorry, no. The chip in the doll was pretty much unusable, so we bypassed it (I prefer the word upgrade) to be able to do the new sounds. The bonus was having it so we retained the original Bob personality for when the PHB wanted it, and making it turn Evil when the rest of us had him.
Robert Anton Wilson
"As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office."
At any of the places I've ever worked, that sort of thing would have killed morale. The more I think about it, the more insulting it seems.
First there is the idea of having a mascot. So the company thinks you're a bunch of high school kids and they're trying to pump you up for the big game?
Then there's the idea of a cartoon figure for 5 year olds as your mascot. I guess they don't even think of you as high school kids.
Thank the gods that I don't own a stake in your company. I would imagine that the owners of your company would prefer you guys to be working on turning a profit, not playing with toys you should have put away in first grade.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
My favorite came from the time that a box was needed to put a prototype board into. One of the engineers made a trip to the hardware store and found a battery operated radio controlled doorbell. The case was just the right size. Afterwards the guts of the thing was still lying around so afterhours the ceiling tiles in a VP's office were lifted and the bell was placed in there. The button went to the bulletin board along with a sign reading "Press Me". So, naturally, it got pressed. A LOT. The VP being your typical PHB type never could figure out where the door bell noise was coming from. And he couldn't put two and two together as he was seen, in the lunch room, vigorously pushing the button and asking "What does this do?"
The piece de resistance was when the engineer in question had a meeting in the VP's office. He took the button off the board and kept it in his pocket, pressing it at appropriate times during the meeting.
Who wants to start going to Toys 'R' Us (notice it's spelt Us and not U$) and/or Amazon.com and/or where ever and going to buy a Bob the Builder, mod it...
and return it.
Well, Evil Bob can be altered at your whim. All you need to do is flip the record switch to on, plug in the cable from your Audio Out to his input (that's right folks .. Bob does it Matrix style), and press the required trigger (ie his hand, the hammer, his head, whatever) and wait for the beep. Hear the beep, press play on the sound you want recorded.
...
My favourite is his left foot. Currently, it's 'Screw you guys, I'm going home'. But it's a close second with his spanner saying 'I'm going to get medieval on his ass'
M
Robert Anton Wilson
"Yup, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to 'Evil.'"
(It's the treehouse of Horror 3 episode)
From [9F04]
Doll: Guess who, Fat boy!!
Homer: [blinded, bumping around, with the doll strapped to his head]
Marge! Marge! Look!
Marge: [from the kitchen] Oh, my God!
Homer: [staggering into the kitchen] The doll's trying to kill me and the
toaster's been laughin' at me!
Homer and the Killer Doll roll about the floor and Homer has his face dunked
in the dog dish (``Eeeew! Dog water!'') Marge calls the number on the
Krusty doll box (1-900-DON'T-SUE).
Marge: Your doll is trying to kill my husband! [pause] Yes, I'll hold.
Marge lets the Krusty Co. repairman into the kitchen, to see Homer on the
floor, the doll yanking at his tongue. Picking up the doll, the repairman
identifies the problem.
Repairman: [pointing to a Good/Evil switch on the back of the doll]
Yup, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to ``Evil''.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
User: "What do I need to do to get this work request approved?"
Bender: "Kiss my shiny metal ass!"
The supplied like to Bob the Builder may not be the official one. Which accoding to my younger friends is Bob the builder. Its actually kept a lot of kids in the hood amused for a good long while, despight being a very unslashdotish flash site.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
www.sniggle.net ("the culture jammer's encyclopedia") links to a couple of little hacks like this. In the most famous one, a group switched a bunch of voice chips between Barbie and GI Joe dolls, so Joe was saying things like "Let's go shopping!" Another interesting if less pointed experiment involved filling a bunch of teddy bears with cement and placing them on the shelves of a major toy store ...