PC Case For Hamsters, EZ Bake Oven in a Drive Bay

ResQuad noted that Slashdot's OSDN Sister site ThinkGeek is selling some exciting new products including a PC Case for Hamsters and an EZ Bake Oven that fits in a 5.25 drive bay. They also have a limited run T-Shirt with a s3kr1t message on it. Lots of other fun stuff too.

Comments

Bad Marketing

[American AC in Paris]

They're both neat little toys, but ThinkGeek won't have much success selling them side-by-side.

It's hard enough fitting a hamster into an empty 5.25 drive bay, after all...

Re:Bad Marketing

[b12arr0]

They're low-carb hamsters. Atkins lists them at .2 carbs. I'm sure they'll fit.

Good...

[snakattak]

Now I can cook my hamster in my ez-bake drive bay. Finally!

Terrible!

[Chuck Bucket]

must, not reload slashdot again today! come on April 2nd!

CVBS

Re:Terrible!

[Hoch]

You think thats bad, /. gave me mod points last night. Must, not moderate today! Must save. NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[Shakrai]

Back when I was a little kid I pulled a Tim Allen stunt and decided that my sisters EZ-Bake oven needed more power. After all who wants to wait a whole 10 minutes for their peanut-butter cookie? I considered various ways of doing this (my parents caught me trying to take the propane tank off our grill -- so that option was ruled out) and finally settled on wiring the battery terminals directly into 120v AC power.

Unfortunately the Oven didn't last very long and I got a nice electric shock for my efforts. My sister never did figure out why her EZ-Bake stopped working though. And my Dad never did figure out where his good extension cord and 3/4 of a brand new roll of electricans tape disappeared to either :)

To this day I still think there's a market for a more powerful version of the EZ-Bake oven. Any venture capitalists out there reading this comment? It'll be the biggest thing since Google and sliced bread -- which incidentally we'll be able to toast in less then 10 seconds with the new model!

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[Shakrai]

There is a more powerful version of the EZBake. It's called a microwave. It's been out a good long time now.

Ah, but Microwaves won't make my bread golden brown when I toast it. We need something that works with heat not EM. I need to reinvestigate the feasibility of the gas powered EZ-Bake oven. You could even take it camping where there's no AC power!

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[SandSpider]

In fact, you aren't the first person to think of this. I present to you: GE's Advantium oven.

The people who claim Microwave Ovens are the successors are Fools! Fools! The reason being that the EZ Bake works off of light bulbs. (Incidentally, you would have wanted to rig a better lightbulb into the EZ Bake Oven to make it more powerful - I suggest Halogen.) The Advantium cooks with, you guessed it, Light.

But, sadly, your joke has, in fact, been brought to, um, light. Sorry.

=Brian

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[Shakrai]

In fact, you aren't the first person to think of this. I present to you: GE's Advantium oven.

THOSE RAT BASTARDS!!!! I had prior art! Goddamn them!

There's only one thing to do now. If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em!

But, sadly, your joke has, in fact, been brought to, um, light. Sorry.

Everybody is a critic :) I was just trying to get into the apparent /. spirit of Apr 1st. I've been ridiculed in almost every reply. Oh well :)

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[jargonCCNA]

-shrugs- I don't know how it's done... all I know is a 15- or 25-watt halogen bulb can produce as much light as a 100-watt incandescent, if not more, but gets the entire lamp very hot to the touch. Probably not as hot as a light socket, but then again, we don't worry about those tipping over onto your bed and lighting your sheets aflame, now do we?

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[Shakrai]

-shrugs- I don't know how it's done... all I know is a 15- or 25-watt halogen bulb can produce as much light as a 100-watt incandescent, if not more, but gets the entire lamp very hot to the touch. Probably not as hot as a light socket, but then again, we don't worry about those tipping over onto your bed and lighting your sheets aflame, now do we?

Our friends over at Howstuffworks have an interesting summary:

A halogen lamp also uses a tungsten filament, but it is encased inside a much smaller quartz envelope. Because the envelope is so close to the filament, it would melt if it were made from glass. The gas inside the envelope is also different -- it consists of a gas from the halogen group. These gases have a very interesting property: They combine with tungsten vapor! If the temperature is high enough, the halogen gas will combine with tungsten atoms as they evaporate and redeposit them on the filament. This recycling process lets the filament last a lot longer. In addition, it is now possible to run the filament hotter, meaning you get more light per unit of energy. You still get a lot of heat, though; and because the quartz envelope is so close to the filament, it is EXTREMELY hot compared to a normal light bulb.

Personally I'd rather use florescents. They use less energy then either solution and don't run hot to the touch. Of course I suppose they aren't ideal for all applications and if you get cheap ballasts in your fixtures they are a royal pain in the ass because the blubs keep blowing and you have no idea why.

Back in my drunk and stupid college days we used to melt floppy disks with halogen lights. Never saw one ingite sheets but it doesn't seem like a leap of faith to assume that if it can melt plastic it would ingite fabric. If I was anymore of a geek I'd look up the temperatures involved but I think I've used up my geek quota for the day :)

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[netringer]

Umm what EZ-bake would you be refering to? The one my sister had used two AA batts.

This one. Requires one 100-watt lightbulb.

The first generation original one my sister had in the olden days had two 100-watt bulbs - top and bottom....AND WE LIKED IT!
We also had a similar 25 watt 120 volt light bulb in the original first-generation Lite Brite.

Kids don't have many line power toys these days. Too many lawsuits.

Let me tell you about my Vac-U-Form which was a plastic heat pack machine (WARNING! Electric toy! Gets Hot!) and my neighbor's Kenner plastic injection molding machine (WARNING! Electric toy! Gets Hot!) that made plastic pellets (WARNING! Choking hazard!) into smaller versions (WARNING! Choking hazard!) of those little toy soldiers you see in "Toy Story."

Re:EZ-Bake ovens and Geek childhood

[Trey Waters]

Hah, that reminds me of a story a salesman at an appliance store told me....

He was at a trade show, where some GE rep was demoing the Advantium oven. As part of the demo, he was cooking chocolate chip cookies and touting "With the Advantium oven from GE, you can cook 6 cookies in 3 minutes!"

At one point, a lady in the crowd piped up "Yeah, well with my Dacor range, I can cook 125 cookies in 12 minutes!"

The GE rep gave her a few coupons and politely asked her to move on. :)

For those not in the know, Dacor is one of your high-end "pro-sumer" (I hate that term) brands. Think Viking.

EZ Roast Case

[zubernerd]

Just wait until you put an {AMD|P4} processor in it, then that case will be an EZ Roast oven for hamsters...

They STOLE my idea!

[mr. phantastik]

I had the idea for an easy bake oven a LONG time ago! Linkie

T-shirt super secret message

[thelenm]

By the way, the super secret message on the T-shirt says, "I shopped at ThinkGeek on April Fools Day, and all I got was this lousy shirt!"

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[dougmc]

By the way, the super secret message on the T-shirt says

Yes, we know. More interesting would have been how to decode it. Here's the program I wrote to do it --

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
{
local $/ ;
$d = <> ;
}

foreach (split //, $d) {
next if ! /^\d/ ;
$b = $b * 2 ;
$b++ if ($_) ;

$c++ ;
if ($c > 7) {
print chr($b) ;
$b = 0 ; $c = 0 ;
}
}

Not meant to be short or pretty, just to decode the message. I'm sure somebody will show how they did it in 2 or 1 lines soon enough. In fact, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already :)

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[Plutor]

Holy crap, man.

perl -e 'print unpack("a78", pack("B624", "0100100... (etc.) ...100001")) . "\n"'

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[Jonboy X]

Nifty cross-platform Java implementation:

public class DecodeMessage {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
StringReader sr=new StringReader(data);
StringBuffer message=new StringBuffer();
while(true) {
char[] binaryDigits=new char[8];
int bitsRead=sr.read(binaryDigits,0,8);
if(bitsRead==-1) {break;}
byte b=Byte.parseByte(new String(binaryDigits),2);
message.append((char)b);
}
System.out.println(message.toString());
}
static String data=
"010010010010000001110011011010000110111101 1100000 11100000110010101100100001000000110000101110100001 00000010101000110100001101001011011100110101101000 11101100101011001010110101100100000011011110110111 00010000001000001011100000111001001101001011011000 01000000100011001101111011011110110110001110011001 00000010001000110000101111001001011000010000001100 00101101110011001000010000001100001011011000110110 00010000001001001001000000110011101101111011101000 01000000111011101100001011100110010000001110100011 01000011010010111001100100000011011000110111101110 10101110011011110010010000001110011011010000110100 1011100100111010000100001";
}

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[wawannem]

I don't even see the encoding anymore, I just see blond, brunette, redhead...

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[erichbox]

Or, rather:

perl -e'local $/;print pack "B*", <>'

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[thelenm]

Oh. In that case, here's what I used:

#!/usr/bin/perl -ln0
s/\n//g;
print pack "B*", $_;

with the binary code piped in on STDIN, of course.

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[RLW]

Weak, just read it. It's only binary. I bet you use a compiler to write your device drivers.
Real geeks key it in with cat con > driver! phf33r m3!
please? pretty please, at least a little fear? Just so the kids don't laugh at me?

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[Chembal]

You forgot your imports, you insensitive clod!

import java.io.*;

Re:T-shirt super secret message

[Loozrboy]

On the assumption that less legible -> more geeky, I present my solution in Befunge:
z>80:p0>#@~'0-:v
z, $ 1
#$ ^ w :!#v_
z|!:-1gj#:0+*2\< <
z>0:p 2^

(God, I think it took longer to get that to display semi-properly than it did to write it :P)

Having a good time today?

[hlh_nospam]

I'm guessing that the PC hamster cage was suggested by this news article: Fat Hamster in Printer Sparks Rescue

Apr 1, 7:45 am ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - A hamster called "Teddy" sparked a police rescue mission after he climbed inside a computer printer and got stuck because he was too fat to get out again, authorities said Wednesday. (rest of article can be found on www.iwon.com)

Given the date, I gotta wonder if either is for real.

Meta April Fool

[iCat]

Pity the poor souls who have to meta moderate all the April 1st threads that will show up in a day or two.

Disappointed....

[MajorDick]

I am horribly disappointed, not at the bad AF joke but for some reason when I try to add it to my cart it says...."Gotcha! April Fools, silly monkey! "

I was hping to buy both and turn it into a sort of concentration camp for rodents, kill them in the case , cook em in the oven. I even had my label maker ready to print an Arbeit Macht Frei label over the drive bay, Oh well, back to using the microwave..

Re:Disappointed....

[MajorDick]

In a word, maybe, if you dont find it funny, well go stuff it. I am so sick of "politically correct" asswipes that tell people what they can and cant say. You forgot Hiroshima victims, ...mmmm....extra crispy....

Re:I dont need an easy bake oven!

[madfgurtbn]

My overclocked p4 could cook a steak!

My water cooled p4 could chill wine!

Hamster Havoc

[leroybrown]

I once had a hamster named Forest that would hours and hours running in his little habitrail wheel. He loved that wheel so much that he drug some of his bedding into it to sleep there. Then he decided to start using it as his bathroom, too. So when he'd start running, there would literally be a shit storm in his wheel. Hamster poop and bedding flying everywhere. And, of course, all the flying debris would make its way out thru the airholes and onto my desk. I had to clean my desk of hamster shit at least once a day.

Can you imagine the havoc this would've caused inside a computer case? Little poop pellets landing on the cpu and causing quite a stink from the heat, or hitting the cpu fan and being thrown everywhere... no thanks, I like my cat who is scared of my computers.

Re:Hamster Havoc

[mark-t]

Our hamster did that too... she had a smaller wheel inside her cage, but she really liked the new big wheel that we got her that we had mounted on the exterior of her habitrail, so she started sleeping in there and putting bedding, etc....

Every day, I had to clean around it because it made such a mess outside the cage, but I eventually got tired of it, so I took the whole darn wheel off, and left it off for a few days, putting a little plastic window at the end of the tube where the wheel had been connected so she wouldn't be able to suddenly get out. She did not seem impressed. A week later I put the wheel back on.

We haven't had a problem with her doing that since... and she still excercises in the wheel as much as she ever did.

Re:Rejected Stories

[Endive4Ever]

Based on practical observation, I would say that not a lot of legitimate stories were rejected. This, however, is crowding the usual anti-Microsoft and trumped up 'Your Rights On Line' drivel off the main page.

PC's and Rodents

[juniorkindergarten]

Back a few years a go I had a contract to service computers in a pizza chain. I got a call to come look at a store's computer that had developed some problems.
I got there and and was told one of the remotes wasn't working. I opened the case up and inside it all the cards were covered in mouse turd.
I traced out which remote wasn't working and pulled out the make table to discover a mouse had chewed the cables and died. It had died long enough ago that it had liquified and left a permanent "chalk line" around the corpse.
And yes they were eventually shut down.

almost

[AnonymousCowheart]

Almost as good as 2001's USB George Foremans iGrill
The grill is still up at think geeks website

The s3kr1t T-Shirt

[belgar]

010010010010000001110011011010000110111 101110000011100000110010101100100001000 000110000101110100001000000101010001101 000011010010110111001101011010001110110 010101100101011010110010000001101111011 011100010000001000001011100000111001001 101001011011000010000001000110011011110 110111101101100011100110010000001000100 011000010111100100101100001000000110000 101101110011001000010000001100001011011 000110110000100000010010010010000001100 111011011110111010000100000011101110110 000101110011001000000111010001101000011 010010111001100100000011011000110111101 110101011100110111100100100000011100110 110100001101001011100100111010000100001 converts to:

I shopped at ThinkGeek on April Fools Day, and all I got was this lousy shirt!

I am actually building the hamster cage

[xThinkx]

OK, so no lie, I have made several (failed) attempts to build, and will one day successfully build a similar hamster case.

For everyone who's wondering why there are several attempts consider the following.

• Habitrail tubes aren't solid, they have holes for ventilation (which will be addressed later). Hamsters urinate alot, and not in the same place, which led to the first case with junk parts smelling like hot piss in almost no time. Also urine corrodes things quickly.
• Hamsters need bedding, which gets everywhere, they chew it up or scratch it into minute pieces that will clog fan intakes, etc. Bad stuff
• Hamsters need some sort of open air ventilation to survive (and breathe). If this ventilation isn't above where they can reach they'll throw bedding/poop out of it somehow. If the ventilation is too high, it won't work and the hamster is done for. If you use even a low cfm fan to add to the ventilation, hamster will avoid it like the plague, causing general health and discomfort to the hamster
• Hamsters chew...A LOT. One nearly unfortunate hamster chewed a hole big enough for him to get out into the case, he was working on the insulation of a 12V line when I cought him.

So, there's the trials and tribulations of the Hamster case. Can't belive someone stole my idea...

Re:I am actually building the hamster cage

[rzbx]

I believe I had a similar idea as well. Didn't really put much thought into it though, and I would have probably used a gerbil or mouse. Thanks for the info though, just incase I really do get the urge to make a living place for a future rodent. Now that I think about it, why not make a huge network of space for a rodent to move about. One could use many clear tubes moving from place to place around a room with a few large places such as a computer case or tank on top of a dresser or even another compartment on a shelf. As long as the right materials are used, and all scenarios are thought through, then it shouldn't be too much trouble. I would love to see how a few mice would live in such an environment.

Re:I am actually building the hamster cage

[MoneyT]

Even though this story is a joke this guy actualy succeeded in building one.

Re:I am actually building the hamster cage

[WTFRUDOINBiotch]

Dude... You're not the first.

Check out the "Hammy" Series:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy1.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy2.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy3.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy4.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy5.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy6.jpg
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wlknier/pics/hammy7.jpg

Re:Rejected Stories

[Catbeller]

Based on practical observation, I would say that not a lot of legitimate stories were rejected. This, however, is crowding the usual anti-Microsoft and trumped up 'Your Rights On Line' drivel off the main page.

Ashcroft? Izzat you?

Re:I call bullshit.

[Short Circuit]

Notice the number of geek points if you buy it...

Ez-Bake oven...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Do they have a Pentium-4 without a heat sink?

Anyways, here's a story I know.
Long time ago, back in the original Pentium divide bug days, some guy had a Pentium machine with the bug, and wanted to replace the CPU. Since the CPU was hundreds of dollars, he had to send in the bad one before he could get the new one. No problem, since they just came out with the new Zero Insertion Force sockets. He tries to pull it out, but he can't. Turns out the manufacturer had glued it in. Seems that people in the loading dock found out that Zero Insertion Force meant also Zero Removal Force and stole the chips, necessitating the glue. What to do, what to do...
Then he remembers, "Hey, this is a Pentium isn't it". He removes the heatsink, and runs his computer. CPU gets so hot it melts the glue, and he pulls it out. Don't have to worry about thermal failure anyway, since it's destined for the scrap heap. Sends it back, gets his CPU.

hey thinkgeek!

[holzp]

you want to see something funny? here is a slashdotting.

"ha-ha"

Re:Almost useful...

[Anonymous Coward]

$ while read -n 8 binary; do echo -ne `printf "\\\\\x%x" $((2#${binary}))`; done <<< '0100100100100000011100110110100001101111011100000 11100000110010101100100001000000110000101110100001 00000010101000110100001101001011011100110101101000 11101100101011001010110101100100000011011110110111 00010000001000001011100000111001001101001011011000 01000000100011001101111011011110110110001110011001 00000010001000110000101111001001011000010000001100 00101101110011001000010000001100001011011000110110 00010000001001001001000000110011101101111011101000 01000000111011101100001011100110010000001110100011 01000011010010111001100100000011011000110111101110 10101110011011110010010000001110011011010000110100 1011100100111010000100001'

ph33r my m4d bash sk1llZzzzz
I shopped at ThinkGeek on April Fools Day, and all I got was this lousy shirt!

Re:Bad site design

[Sepper]

And a link to those HTTPanties' which are FOR REAL...

With Customer Action Shot!... I still can't believe they... with a camera.. to... %/%!T2E$"/"/!% BUFFER OVERFLOW

Fake Ad

[May Kasahara]

Am I the only one who noticed the HL2/Doom 3/Halo 2 "Now Shipping/Click to Order" notice on the left hand side of the page? It's a pretty subtle joke compared to the others on ThinkGeek's site...

Dear ThinkGeek ...

[merdaccia]

Dear ThinkGeek,

Your little ploy was rather clever! We are very gullible here at Slashdot, and we all clicked on those links to see your lovely Hamster Case and EZ Bake oven. So, we humbly admit that you got the better of us toda...

...wait...

... we all clicked it?? The millions upon millions of us?!? Ummmm, you did host these pages and pictures on a different webserver than the one you use for commercial purposes, didn't you? You know, the one you use to sell stuff? Otherwise, your just obliterated your own ...

You idiots

Love, Slashdot

Already have one

[myov]

... Removable drive rack + Athlon = mini pizza oven!

ThinkGeek points

[Mr. Spleen]

Anyone else notice that if you buy the hamster case, you get 3.14159 ThinkGeek points? Or negative points for the PC EZ-Bake 5.25" thingamajig?

Actually, I'm going to answer that. Yes, someone noticed that, and they probably already posted it, but I'm too damned lazy to read all the preceding comments and find it. So there.

Mr. Spleen

hot dog cookers

[zogger]

you ever make a hot dog cooker when you were a kid? Easy instructions. Take a clean board (a 1 x 4 is handy size), pound two 16 penny nails through it, distance separating them approximately 3/4ths the length of a hot dog (check fridge meat drawer, hotdogs vary). Leave a 1/4 inch of nail and head showing. Snag (dad's) extension cord, cut off the female end, separate the wirez. Strip them a half inch or so, wrap one end to one nailhead, one to the other, then finish pounding the nails in. Get vice grips, bend nails parallel to board about halfway up the nails, pointing towards each other. Impale hotdog onto nails, making your circuit. Plug it in, cook to your specs. If you leave them on too long, reality will remind you of the fact....