Slashdot Mirror
A Pizza Box for Your Laptop
Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."
And when the pizza gets thrown in the garbage...
The thief is hungry.
I carry mine in a non-descript back pack rather than an obvious laptop case that has DELL written all over it.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
until some stoned kid walks by your car and decides he wants some pizza ....
he'll take it home and be pissed off he only got a laptop.
"Nicked" is English for "Stolen" for those who only speak "American".....
My Favourite Meme
1. Steal Pizza Box (because you're really hungry)
2. Put laptop on Ebay.
3. Profit!
Oh wait, I need a ??? in there somewhere...
This
If your pizza box has a Domino's logo, there is no chance that anyone would steal it to get the contents, either.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Looks cool, but ...
I don't see any protective padding at the edges where it's needed.
-- Sally
...and buy a pizza for that much. Or better yet, buy the pizza and ask for a spare box. Some acoustic foam and velcro, and you're good to go.
Wouldn't carrying a pizza box everywhere look more suspicious than carrying a bag around?
Look for people walking around with pizza boxes tucked under their arms... That's what'll end up happening after people get tired of carrying their laptop around like it's a pizza.
If real.
And I can't be asked to do the due diligence to see if it is.
To prevent some finger pointing and laughing it'd be best to carry this "Pizza Case" horizontally - which would be a real pain and kind of limits this carrying case usefulness.
How do you carry a laptop in a bag? Vertically
How do you carry a pizza in a box? Horizontally
There's your disguise spoiler right there.
"Please allow 14 days for delivery." Thats gotta be the slowest pizza ever!!!!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
This reminds me of back in the day when I delivered pizza for college money. To prevent hungry college students from stealing the pizza, I disguised them in "Packard Bell" computer boxes; that way no-one ever bothered me!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hint : a guy handling a real pizza usually does not carry it vertically under his arm...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...
Many laptops are stolen in airports because they are in clearly visible laptop bags - why not stuff a laptop bag full of "old" pizza just for a laugh? This could guarantee some extra-fun airport security checks!
- Putting your PowerPizza in a carrier bag will not only increase the level of disguise - it'll keep it dry too.
And how awkward would it be to walk around carrying a pizza box? If you tucked it under your arm, people would know it wasn't a pizza. If you walked around with it held in a proper pizza manner that would suck too.Really, how hard is it to pick up a nice black leather or blastic nylon bag that isn't plastered with "TARGUS" logos and just KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE DAMN LAPTOP?
I've owned many laptops for many years and I've never once come close to having it nicked because I tend to pay attention to my surroundings when I'm carrying it with me.
I saw a guy on the plane the other day who I thought had the right idea: He didn't have a case - just stuck the notebook in the seat-back pocket.
I got a big anti-static bag from one of the lab techs that should be sufficient to protect it from such "weather" as it might encounter, and I figure to keep the power brick in my purse/pocket/whatever...
Laptop cases are an anachronism.
"The Internet is made of cats."
This was released several months ago...
/. crowd - another cheap way to "protect" your valuables is to leave two BIbles on the front seat - one where they can plainly see the words Holy Bible - the other with the 8th commandment (Thou Shalt Not Steal) highlighted.
I had done a story on my website about it back in July.
I proposed that people use tampon boxes for their iPods too.
Eventhough mentioning the Bible doesn't go over well with the
Even if they can't read or are not religios they know what a Bible is.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I had a machine stolen about three months ago, and notified the local police. It was running the GMail notifier (that checks mail on bootup), so I emailed Google from my gmail account and told them: "The only machine running the GMail notifier keyed to *account name* was recently stolen. From now on, if someone logs into this gmail account, they're doing it from a stolen machine; could you give the IP address to the local police so they can track it down?
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
No, I don't believe it is. It allows you to order it. If you click the fictional products link at the top of the page, it doesn't list the pizza box. RTFM indeed.
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote" -- Kosh
What, nobody points out what a bad idea this is? Besides, I can't see the point. In the first place, lugging that thing around can't be comfortable. Also, if by some deviant twist in reality these stupid things become popular, it no longer does anything but describe the owner as someone who pays thirteen pounds for some cardboard and eggshell foam.
Go buy a backpack.
Slashdot: News occasionally. Stuff for sale.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
This is really old news now, I saw it a long time ago and decided to make my own, with a twist. Instead of a pizza box I took a box file (for holding documents), lined it with furniture foam and my 12" iBook, mouse and power brick fit snigly inside. What's more the whole thing can also fit in a rucksack.
How on earth did this get slashdotted? This is pure Fark fodder and nothing more. Are they letting the dog post?
Until your drunken roomate throws the pizza box away!
Oh.. yeah.... right.. a drunken roomate actually throwing something away!! LOL!.. nevermind...
From the websight
"Spam: from Human Beans. An exhibition of fictional products"
So your right, it's fictional, but also funny.
We are the Borg...
It's not a real product (just in case people don't get it)
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Dumbest product, but best idea in the world. I can buy a Little Caesars Pizza for $5 USD. I can probably get enough foam, straps, and hot glue for another $5 USD to do AT LEAST 5 boxes. Shipping will be cheap because all the parts weight so little. We're talking ~$8 USD
Not only do you make profit on every one, you get free food. If someone would hire me to do one of these a day, I'd never have to worry about food again. I imagine the entire "case" takes about 15 minutes to make (excluding pizza eating time), and it will even have grease stains on the outside to give it an authentic feel. Free food for relativly no work = good idea.
But, I'm betting those are bulk-purchased boxes w/o a real brand name (as that might come into legal issues). Assuming they actually sell as many as they bought the profit is going to be very large, even at $12 USD. All this for a non-custom case that is bigger than most laptops and pretty shoddy looking. I guess you get what you pay for.
As a former Pizza delivery person (Hello Mamma's in Edinburgh !), I can guarantee that an unsecured pizza box is far more likely to be stolen on a Friday night after the pubs turn out than an unsecured laptop bag.
The thief wants pizza, is fairly confident that the Pizza company is too busy to report the theft and in all likelihood would never dream of stealing a laptop.
-S
I have blue masking tape wrapped around the edge of the screen housing.
It looks like that's what's holding it together.
Plus it looks different from all of the other laptops going through security, making it easy for me to keep my eye on it.
If someone's going to lift laptops, they'll move along to one that looks less like a piece of s...junk.
Oh, and I also keep my bag with me everywhere except the security checkpoint.
Especially on a college campus?
Proverbs 21:19
You would disguise it as a beat-up accordion file like accountants use. Nobody would give a damn about that. If all else fails, how about a suitcase that looks like a homeless person's shoppoing cart?
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
Maybe "Infectious Medical Waste" or "Pauly Shore Movie Collection". People like pizza.
What a coincidence. Mac OS X Hints is just this morning running a hint on protecting your Mac by using an Open Firmware password, and setting a banner that pops up a warning and/or ownership message when booting is attempted. There are also interesting comments as to why this might not be a good solution.
There's company, that offers a software that phones home secretly. It is difficult to detect and to remove. check it out http://www.pcphonehome.com/index.php
I see this as functioning on the same principal as the club. The club doesn't keep your car safe so much as make it look less desirable to thieves. If a thief wanders by a few cars with cd cases in them and then yours with a pizza box on the back seat, which one do you think he'll break into first?
I really think thats how this thing was born. I think some slob with a trashcan for a car just started stashing his laptop in one of the many discarded pizza boxes strewn about. At least this is more convincing than those incredibly conspicuous plastic rocks that some people try to stash keys in...