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What To Do With 78 USB Drives Next Christmas?
ArfBrookwood writes "Every year, I write a Christmas Letter and send it to about 50 people, and every year, it's different. One year it was just the word blah blah blah over and over with keywords, one year I made papercraft wallets with full color cards and money in them, another year I created a Christmas Letter writing contest that instructed the recipients to create our Christmas Letter for us and we awarded prizes to winners, last year, I took a fake retro photo of my family, Inkscaped/GIMPed in a chemistry set and some wall art, printed it onto CD covers, and burned retro Christmas songs onto digital vinyl and sent everyone in the family what looked like a miniature Christmas album. Last week, I came into the possession of 78 2GB USB drives. I have already taken the time to wipe them clean and reflash the memory so they are blank slates." Now, Arf's looking for suggestions for how to best use all these drives; read on for more.
"My first inclination was to remove the USB drives from their careful packaging and plastic enclosures, dump them into a slurry of glue and rock dust, sandpaper the USB port to make it look ancient, and then make some videos or include some oddly formatted numbered/whatever text files to make them look like they cam from some dystopian wasteland fallout-3 type future and then package them in envelopes that looked like they were from some central futuristic government post office. The idea would be that in the future, incidents that happened this year would have had a profound affect on the future. I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule — I have to outdo whatever I did the last year."
"My first inclination was to remove the USB drives from their careful packaging and plastic enclosures, dump them into a slurry of glue and rock dust, sandpaper the USB port to make it look ancient, and then make some videos or include some oddly formatted numbered/whatever text files to make them look like they cam from some dystopian wasteland fallout-3 type future and then package them in envelopes that looked like they were from some central futuristic government post office. The idea would be that in the future, incidents that happened this year would have had a profound affect on the future. I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule — I have to outdo whatever I did the last year."
Send them to me.
If you're such a prodigy maybe you can come up with your own ideas.
Rick Roll on every one.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
They are just the right size to make excellent 200-yard rifle targets.
Or you could build an array out of them or something productive.
Shooting at them with a .308 would be more fun though.
Well, whatever you do, it's going to get out now, I'm sure at least one of these people read /.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Send out something like a video where you're recording your family and make like a UFO or monster attack. Since you have no problem with copyright, steal scenes from a cloverfield or war of the worlds dvd. Melt the cases a little and put in a manila envelope along with a letter from a fake law firm "In case of death".
At the end of the video, show your dead bodies, laying in christmas sweaters on the ground with bits of fire all around and superimpose the text "Merry Christmas 2009!"
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Put a customized Linux distro on each one with people's names as login names, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Do the USB drives have usage lights?
1.Remove them from their casing, exposing their green PCB organs.
2.Buy a stack of USB hubs, and chain them together. Plug your usb drives into the hubs.
3.Arrange the usb drives in the form of a chrismas tree.
4.Set up a program to access the flash drives at random, causing their usage lights to flash.
Et Voila, flashing usb christmas tree!
This year, add an autorun file that uploads everything on their harddrive to your FTP server and then formats their filesystem. Next year, send them USB drives containing everything that was deleted, or since you won't be on speaking terms with anyone after that you not bother and save a lot of time making cards. Win-win situation really.
Teach them all a lesson about attaching strange USB drives to their machines: fill the drives with viruses!
Christmas. Bah humbug.
Maybe put some books on them?
;-)
I checked, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is on there
I'm sure they'd appreciate a donation if you do. They do a great job.
Put the USB drives in an industrial shredder then eat them all. Die from heavy metal poisoning and internal hemmoraging. Then have someone send pictures of the experience to all these people who you send Christmas cards to, saying "Sorry for being such a gigantic, insecure shitlord and sending you gimmicky Christmas shit every year for no damn reason. As a token of the sincerity of my apology, here are pictures of me killing myself by ingesting metal scraps. It was extremely painful. I hope you will remember me in death as the attention-whoring sycophant I am, and tell your children about the dangers of mercury poisoning. God bless."
I'd label each one "Do Not Use This Drive." I'd put a program on it labelled, "Do Not Open This Program." Create the program so that it causes their mail client to email you from their email account. See how many emails you get. This would be a good opportunity to teach them how they can protect themselves from data theft, trojans, etc.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Virtual advent calendar: Pictures of your family for Christmas, home movies, etc, each encrypted with a different key you send to your recipients on each day in December leading to Christmas Day.
Stripe a 158GB drive across all 78, then distribute them such that drive can only be read when all 78 are assembled together. Of course, the contents would be a rickroll or similar.
Photoshop, like Google, is well on its way to becoming a common verb. One should be able to photoshop with any competent raster image editing program.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Do something actually useful. Donate'em to an inner city middle school.
Fill all of them with porn and the recipe for free beer.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule â" I have to outdo whatever I did the last year.
I fear I've fallen into that trap too, last year I made some edge lit christmas cards but instead of using coin batteries I included twisted white wire with a soldered USB plug so the card will never run out of power (unless you switch your PC off). Just about everyone who received one loved it.
:)
This year I'm planning on doing another edge lit card but with several layers, powered by a SMD PICAXE chip embedded into the card for animation, flashing, sequencing or whatever I decide.
The year after next I may do yet another USB powered edge lit card but include a flash drive for a christmas video or something *shrug* hopefully I'll get some good ideas from this topic
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Yeah, what grandma really wants for Xmas is an pre-loaded Linux thumb drive. I'm a dork and I don't even want that. It's Christmas. Give a gift that means something, not your ideology about FOSS.
I would use password-based cryptography, instead of sending them actual cryptographic keys by e-mail. Not only is it easier for the recipients, but you could choose fairly weak, Christmas-themed passwords (e.g., "snowflake," "cookie," "Santa," etc.). That way, the "peekers" in the family could try to guess the passwords in advance!
And I agree whole-heartily with the GP: make the USB drives into some sort of ornament. You could even use coloured pipe cleaners and those goofy stick-on eyes to make the USB keys look like reindeer. That way, the drives don't go to waste.
can't believe it hasn't been brought up yet. shame on you all.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Don't link your blog on Slashdot, then make it invitation only to read. Stupidest thing I ever saw.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.