Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter recently asked what kind of things someone can power with an external USB battery. I have a followup along those lines: what kind of modifications have you made to your gadgets to do things that they were never meant to do? Consider old routers, cell phones, monitors, etc. that have absolutely no use or value anymore in their intended form. What can you do with them? Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
I got a wakeup call once at 8am, it was my CEO whose Thinkpad laptop failed to boot due to a stuck CPU fan. He had a plane to board in 3 hours to visit a seminar where he had to present a slide stack.. the only copy of which was on that laptop. Naturally, there was no time to replace anything (much less find a spare fan), so after a short lecture on importance of backups I took his laptop, put my lips to the fan intake, pushed power button and gave it a gentle blow. That got the stuck fan started. Perhaps the same could be achieved with a dust blower, but we didn't have one handy. When he asked me how is he supposed to fix it in front of world's most known scientists in the field, I told him - "give it a blow on startup, that's all". Those EYES... It did the job though :)
My company gave us notebooks without SSDs, but they are pretty lax on external devices (you can bring your own mouse, pen drives and such). So I brought a SSD and bought an esatap cable (esata-powered, those cables are a pain in the ass to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and installed linux mint in it. I boot straight to linux (they don't lock the bios) and do not even use the HD inside the notebook. Since the company also seems to think that RAM is a non-renawable resource they also saw fit to give us only 4gbs of it, so my swap partition is also on the SSD.
This setup helps my work a lot, before I started doing this my workflow was frustratingly slow, now everything runs just fine. It helped a lot when the RAM runs out and it starts doing swap, it still gets slow but not anywhere near as much as before.
I used to work as a sysadmin at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. One day I got a ticket from an enginneer who had an external disk drive hanging off of his Sparc Station. He complained that the drive was noisy and was probably going to die. He wanted a replacement. I walked by his office and he had a meeting going on with a couple of guys. As with many of us, he had stuff piled all over his desk. Sitting on top of his disk drive was a plastic business card holder. When I removed the business card holder, the noise went away...
I was working on one of those gigantic 'motion theatre' fairground rides:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This was back in the era of 286 PC's - running DOS. The software was suffering timing issues and we really needed a hardware timer interrupt - but DOS already stole all but one of them - and we simply didn't have enough.
I needed a *roughly* 1kHz interrupt to monitor some ride function or other (I forget exactly what) - so I came up with the idea of putting a bent paperclip between the RxD and TxD lines of the RS232 port and using the serial port interrupt. I'd send a character out through the serial port - and at 9600 baud, with one stop bit and one start bit the character took ~1/960'th of a second to arrive back in the serial port chip...at which point it triggered an interrupt - and I could send another byte out to make it happen again.
We used paperclips on a couple of machines as an emergency hack - but later versions used a 'dongle' plug that went into the RS232 port with a wire soldered across those two pins)...this plug was named the HPE..."Hardware Paperclip Emulator".
www.sjbaker.org