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

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

[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

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

[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

[Chembal]

You forgot your imports, you insensitive clod!

import java.io.*;

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..

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.

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

[MoneyT]

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

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...

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....