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Quickies

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Quickies 298

Posted by CmdrTaco from the or-maybe-thats-just-the-cataracts dept.
It's been a long time coming, so lets start off the quickies with some acts of senseless damage. Old Wolf sent us a link to a bunch of pictures of someone Defrosting a Freezer in the best way ever, and an anonymous reader sent in a site that shows what happens if you put a CD in Microwave. Don't use AOL CDs., send them to this lady who collects them (from gr8fulnded). On to the sex! An anonymous reader submitted a story about the Robot Pet Vibrator which is I guess AIBO gone wrong. elkm discovered Computerized Contraception. And with all this digital doin' it going on, its good know that MITs Erotic Computation Group is here to research it (thanks Chris Moon) The world is full of strangeness, but little of it is as scary as MissNachos's link to the Hello Kitty laptop, srini's link to the Single Pixel Webcam, and aneanti's link to a collection of the strangest canned foods you'll ever see. Finally, since it is the holidays, check out mrv's link to LED Christmas Lights which sure beats the hell out of finding the broken bulb.
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It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Quickies More

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Quickies

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  • The top of the page says "Hobbies gone wrong...". Nuff said :-)
  • i bet you could cook a neat ham sandwich on a cdr. That metal foil would help to distribute the microwaves. May taste a little plastic'ky
  • The Quickie (sp?) is back! They should have used the Hell Kitty [themes.org]laptop.

  • LED Christmas Lights (Score:3, Informative)

    by Aztech ( 240868 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:06PM (#2684873)
    I've had some since around 1992... but that's innovation for you.
    • No... seriously, I bought some LED Christmas lights around 7-8 years ago, I just got them out the loft yesterday when I was getting the decorations out.
      • how much do they cost?
        • I bought a string of 60 outdoor LED lights at Walmart last January when they were dumping all their Christmas stuff. It was about $5.00 Canadian, regular price $16.95.

          They are Noma "Forever Bright" lights and they're neat because the LEDs have a little plastic sphere molded over them to make them look like bulbs. The 60Hz flicker is annoying though.

        • Just bought some at a Rite-Aid chain for $4.99/strand. They flicker at 60 (30?) Hz and look much more... "saturated" than typical bulbs, kind of like Mike & Ikes gone Nuclear, but they're okay, especially after I spent the weekend learning just how flame-happy the "normal" little lights are...
  • Quickies posted at 6:59, Defrosting a Freezer URL doesn't work at 7:04, site http://illogic.co.nz/ down. :-(
  • Amazing ... I thought I was the only one who collected those. But I don't go as far as the woman in the article. *BUT* I do have a 'Compuserve' branded AOL 5 CD. As we all know, AOL ate compuserve for lunch some years ago. It was a clever marketing ploy for them to send out compuserve discs because people don't think 'same old, same old.' It's one of my favourite discs in the collection!
    • Despite my best efforts to throw them all away, AOL keeps trying to grow my collection with their latest offerings...

      It's like those blasted music clubs - spend nothing now, but if you sign up you'll pay through the nose later. No matter what, their gonna keep sending you cd's until you wish you'd made a better choice!

    • Nomoreaolcds.com (Score:4, Informative)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:21PM (#2684943)

      May I suggest to you, and all you AOL CD haters, to save up your CD's and ship them to nomoreaolcds.com [nomoreaolcds.com]? They have over 7,000 already, but need alot more to reach their goal of one million!

      • Bah, why go through all that waste? Just take the CD out of its case, stomp on it a few times (preferably on coarse cement), put it back in the case, and "return to sender." Seems to have worked for me, and this way I'm not wasting money sending a CD to someone else. Plus it's really satisfying. :)

  • coupla things (Score:3, Funny)

    by fjordboy ( 169716 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:11PM (#2684899) Homepage
    first, about the microwave thing...tis old. :) But, very cool! I love using grapes/blueberries in the microwave..you cut them in half most of the way, leaving a tiny bit of skin attached in the middle and put it in the microwave for a few moments....huge flames shoot out...tis super cool. Not entirely sure why, but it is definitely neat.

    another thing, always poke holes in your hamsters before microwaving.
  • I supper glue them together(two cd together reflective sides out) and string them with fishing twine(tying knots so that they don't slide all together) and use them as interior christmas decorations with my lights. All ways gets a few looks.

  • Freezer defrosting (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:13PM (#2684905) Journal
    That link is probably slashdotted by now. It shows pics of someone using a flame torch to defrost the ice that builds up on the inside of the freezer.

    Contrary to that method, the traditional action involves putting a boiling kettle into the empty freezer. This removes the ice quite nicely. If you ever try to de-ice an upright freezer by any method, MAKE SURE you put some sort of vessel in the bottom to catch the water dripping, otherwise you'll turn around and see water flooding out of the freezer and ruining the floor. Yes, this is from experience ;-)

    • And make sure the water ends up there! I recently noticed that there's a loose plastic pipe hanging off the back of my fridge. I haven't got around to wrestling the fridge out to take a look, but I suspect defrosting without fixing that would be a Bad Thing.

      Humph, these days I expect the fridge to be on the Internet so we can watch the temperature and water level rise for ourselves, as well as check the inventory. (Don't use Microsoft IFS unless you install the Code Red patch fix!)

      • That could be the water intake for an automatic icemaker--if so, it wouldn't affect defrosting one way or the other. (Not that I'd think it would anyway, given that when you defrost, the water doesn't go into the inner workings of your fridge; it just drops down to pool in the bottom or wherever.

        Amusing anecdote from my mostly-not-misspent youth. One day when I was about four or five or so, I was crawling around under the sink in my folks' old house. There were all these valves under the sink; I think I wondered what it felt like to turn them, so I did turn one. And then I forgot about it.

        My youthful mind completely didn't connect it with the water that thereupon began streaming out from a copper pipe sticking out of the wall behind the fridge. My Mom had no idea what caused it either, so we just had to put buckets under it and dump them into the sink, until Dad came home and found out what was going on.

        I hate to think what our water bill that month must have been.
  • From the AOL Disc article: "I think AOL is a huge part of our pop culture," Cline said. "I think AOL has had a larger impact than Coke or Hershey's." If there were an AOL user for every Coke drinker and Hershey bar eater out there, I think I'd take my own life.
  • Grab a coster or an AOL CD and give that microwave thing a try. The pictures on the site are cool, but they don't do it justice. A few words of advice though; don't leave it in for very long. Five or ten seconds will do fine. It won't damage the microwave if you leave it longer, but cleaning melted CD off the tray isn't so cool. It also looks better if you do it in the dark. Flick the lights off, start the microwave, and enjoy the show!
  • I'm sure I'm not alone when I ask you, CmdrTaco, why did you stop posting quickies for so long? They are an essential part of the Slashdot experience, a completely silly and mindless break from all the serious, downbeat Microsoft and DMCA stories that make up the majority of Slashdot's articles. Thank you for bringing them back, but why did you stop posting them in the first place?
    • I think he was hoping that we would forget that this has been posted before [slashdot.org]. Then it would be fresh and hilarious, once again.
    • The approximate quote went something like "I actually really like the quickies too, but they take a lot of work. You need at least a half dozen links, and people just don't send in many interesting, small things for me to use. So send in more quickies, and I'll post them more often." I think it was in a Geeks in Space episode (which are highly entertaining, I listened to most of them while playing Half-life).

  • Canned food? PORK BRAINS! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stefanlasiewski ( 63134 ) <(moc.ocnafets) (ta) (todhsals)> on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:18PM (#2684931) Homepage Journal
    How can you include an article on strange Canned food that doesn't include my all time favorite (I have a can sitting atop my monitor): PORK BRAINS in Milk Gravy [google.com].

    Yes, this little 5.5 oz can has a whopping 3500 calories, and over 1000% (Yes, one THOUSAND) of your RDA intake of cholesterol.

    The recipe on the back? Pork Brains and Scrambled Eggs. At least Eggs have alot of the 'good' cholesterol, otherwise you'd have a heart attack halfway through your second can! Yum!
    • There's one in every crowd, so here goes...
      5.5 oz times 28.4 grams per oz is 156 grams. Pure fat, the highest calorie food available, has 9 calories per gram, so 156 grams times 9 calories per gram is 1406 calories maximum.

      According to the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 14 [usda.gov] Braised Pork brains have 138 calories per 100 grams or 215 calories in our 5.5 oz can.

      Yeah, I know, the satirical art by Mom and Pop artist Mandy Warhole makes a better story, but someone has to standup for the pork producers.

      Amazingly just last Saturday, I was discussing hog butchering with some of the old-timers and they said that they used to serve Pork Brains and Scrambled Eggs for lunch on Butchering Day. I'm not making this up...
  • Found the hidden directory with all the pics... no html though. http://ecg.media.mit.edu/ecg/ [mit.edu]

    They have hot Members... hmm [mit.edu]
    ChiefArcher

  • Yeah. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Byteme ( 6617 )
    Like that AIBO thing is anything extraordinary... I have been using my pager in silent mode for six years now.

  • If you put pop tarts in the toaster for too long you get a 20 inch flame!

    http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/~pmichaud/toast/ [tamucc.edu]
  • Who will be the last site standing under the Slashling bum-rush? Who can continue serving pages the longest? What site will be the first to return only an apology?

  • Webcam (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 )

    In theory, if the pixel's color were deep enough, you could imagine that it showed a whole scene, just extremely anti-aliased.

  • I regularly buy Cento anchovies, because it helps with the fresh breath problem. I never thought I'd see it in a weird canned foods collection, let alone linked from slashdot!

  • Pink Hello Kitty Laptop has **Moved** (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheMCP ( 121589 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:31PM (#2684984) Homepage
    The new URL is http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/ [exonome.com].
    Please use the new URL. The owner of the site of the old URL would probably rather not be slashdotted.

    Incidentally I know the guy who did this, he's utterly cool. You should check out some of his other stuff at http://www.exonome.com/fj/ [exonome.com] such as ToriAntiTori and Virginity At Last. (ObDisclaimer: I had a hand in the latter.)

  • Erotic Computation archive (Score:3, Informative)

    by yoz ( 3735 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:33PM (#2684988) Homepage
    Slashdotted... so web.archive.org to the rescue!

    http://web.archive.org/web/20011201213554/http://e cg.media.mit.edu/ [archive.org]

    -- Yoz
    • In addition, I hope goes without saying that this site is a (very silly) parody.

      (Although some of the Media Lab's real projects are frequently just as bonkers)

      -- Yoz
      • Still, wouldn't it be great if we could harness the sexual frustrations of geeks to improve the world's sex lives? The sex industry is always highly experimental, and quick to adopt new technologies (see vhs, popups, multiangle dvds, etc), but unfortunately seem to lack the brainpower for true R&D.


        Seriously, with a bit of money and research, modern technology really ought to be able to develop amazing new sex toys. Or for that matter, what about a porno made by the team behind Final Fantasy? That would be obscenely cool.


        I guess, when you come right down to it, I just want a holodeck, with "the safeties off," if you know what I mean...

  • Robot Pet Vibrator? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jackal! ( 88105 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:41PM (#2685012) Homepage

    So who comes when this thing is called?

  • Shame on that woman for hoarding all the rare and valuable AOL disks, when this poor sick little girl [omnigroup.com] is trying to break the Guinness record.

  • Hellllloooo Kitty!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by wavq ( 216458 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:45PM (#2685027) Homepage
    Folks, folks, that's not what Hello Kitty is all about.
    Check out this vibrator [ebay.com] !!

    I've never looked at Hello Kitty quite the same way...

  • Yugoslav Microwave Radarjamming (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xueexueg ( 224483 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:46PM (#2685028)
    By far the most interesting thing on the microwave fun page is here [utwente.nl]

    It's about how the Yugoslav army used microwave ovens as decoys against NATO troops. Quote: "It was funny listening to NATO claiming to have destroyed some 20-30 MiG-29s when I knew that we have had only 16 of them at the beginning of their attacks."

    • This story has so many errors in it that it isn't even funny to put right...
      • B-52 bombers do not drop "tens of HARMs"
      • HARM does not mean "Homing Anti-Radar Missile"
      • HARM does not "hang from special parachutes" (mixup with a British anti-radar missile)
      • Most anti-radar weapons are programmable to react to certain, specified threat signatures (frequencies, pulse repetition freqs, modulation, ...), which would be hard to simulate with a MW oven
      • Oh well, why bother?

      But mainly, using Venik's Aviation page as a source disqualifies the story. Venik is well-known in Usenet aviation groups as a conspiracy theorist who likes to give events his own spin. Current claim (called a "theory"): AA587, the Airbus that crashed in NYC, may have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

  • I'm mildly interested, but none of the links seem to have them available. Are these things actually reasonably priced, and has anyone seen them in stock anywhere?

  • Quotes from the LED Christmas lights page. (Score:4, Funny)

    by hackerhue ( 182083 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @08:56PM (#2685054) Homepage
    As their name implies, Foreverbright lights are rated for up to 200,000 hours of use - or almost 23 years.

    Sounds like they changed the definition of "forever" while I wasn't paying attention.
    The principle behind LEDs, while complicated, can be made easy to understand. An LED is a special type of diode and is similar to a transistor.

    And then it goes on to talk about N and P silicon, and so forth. I guess they changed the definition of "easy to understand" too.
    • 200,000 hours of Christmas lights... If you have them up and on for 30 days for eight hours a day (during the Christmas season)-- that's 833.33 Christmas's that these LEDs will last. Since no human being can live that long, 833.33 years, is, essentially, forever.
  • The canned food link reminds me of the time I went shopping at the Super 88 Asian food store in Boston and saw for sale packages of "Cock testicles" in the meat section. I didn't pick them up to see if there was a recipe on them, or if satisfaction was guaranteed. At least you can get a discount card for them: http://web.mit.edu/cssa/www/year01_02/services/sup er88_shopping.html

  • Measuring the speed of light with marshmallows (Score:5, Informative)

    by Brant ( 10852 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @09:15PM (#2685114)
    I've actually done this with a first year physics class I taught. They thought I was a bit loony, but it worked.

    Take a bunch of mini-marshmallows and spread them out evenly on a plastic tray, covering the whole tray with a single layer. Put this inside a microwave, making sure that the tray doesn't rotate. Turn the microwave on for ~30 seconds on low.

    Now, take the tray out of the microwave. You'll see a repeating pattern in the marshmallows, going from puffy to flat and back to puffy again in an array. What you're seeing is the standing wave of the microwaves reflecting off of the sides of the microwave.

    Now, measure the average distance between peaks in the standing wave. This is the wavelength of the microwaves. Now, here's the cheating part. Look on the back of the microwave for the frequency of the microwaves. It's usually around 2540 MHz. Calculate the speed of light from

    c = frequency x wavelength

    Heh. Now that I've written that all out, I've found a link. Here's another, very similar method on : bowle's physics [bowlesphysics.com].

    Brant

  • Pink Hello Kitty Laptop (Score:3, Funny)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @09:20PM (#2685131) Homepage Journal
    It would be worth modifying my Thinkpad 600X to a PHKL, just to see the face of the IM guy when I return it next year for memory upgrade. That'd be priceless!
  • that microwave dude is like the next Marie Curie.

    Seriously, I would not want to live next door to someone doing that shit without a dentist's wall of lead in between.

    Can you imagine all those messed up things that happen, and yet we eat food that comes out of it?!

    • Re:caution (Score:2, Informative)

      by xX_sticky_Xx ( 526967 )
      There is absolutely no danger as long as the casing remains intact. Microwaves don't cause the object subjected to them to become radioactive. If they did, you would see a hell of a lot of people walking around glowing in the dark (cellphone users, people living by microwave towers).

      Having said that, it is IMPERATIVE that you NEVER operate a microwave oven with the door open or even suspect that the casing may be damaged in any way. Otherwise, these little tricks are safe.
    • Actually its not that dangerous, but you must know when to stop and make sure you do it outside or in a controlled environment so you can get the fuck out of the way when stuff goes awry. Your kitchen is definately _NOT_ a good place to do this kind of stuff in.

      There are lots of cool science you can do with your microwave, like creating floating plasma balls for instance. They make cool filming/photographing material.

      Check here [tripod.com] for more wacky fun with that kitchen appliance. It has even more links to microwave science and stuff you can do with your microwave.

      DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER:

      If you _do_ one of these experiments, make sure you get all the safety precautions [tripod.com] right, and don't over-experiment. If you go blind and everything looks fuzzy you should stop IMMEDIATELY, since you are busy boiling your cornea and the inner fluids of your eyes solid. This is a sure sign that your microwave is leaking and you are standing too close. Luckily, his is a temporary infliction if you're out of the way quick enough, but certainly not healthy for your eyes. This same thing happened to a bud of mine who was messing with microwave antennaes and signal-amplifiers. He actually took a microwave apart to hook up to his amplifier. And yes, he was standing too close. It took a few months until he had his full vision back.

  • OK, maybe the baby conch is a little offbeat, but in my neck of the woods there's nothing unusual about Vienna Sausage, Beany Weany, or Underwood Deviled Ham. No fishing expedition is complete without a few cans of the above, along with a sleeve of soda crackers, a couple cans of beer or Coke, and a few sticks of beef jerky tucked in a mini-Playmate and stowed under the console of your bass boat. If Vienna Sausages are strange, then where's the tin of sardines or the smoked baby oysters? As the other poster said, Pork Brains in Milk Gravy [dearauntnettie.com]: now that's strange!

    --Jim
  • http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17055.html

    It's got Crusoe processor in it.

    And guess what? It dual boots to Linux. There is a switch on the right side, Set it to A and it boots Windows (2k I think) set it to B and it boots a very stripped down Linux that only runs Winamp. (for obvious reasons)

  • plasma ball in mw (Score:3, Informative)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Monday December 10, 2001 @09:56PM (#2685219) Journal
    Another neat MW trick is building a sustained plasma ball [angel.elte.hu]

    it is done w/ a pencil led and a microwave-safe glass ball... very cool, must try.

    see here [tripod.com] also.

  • I can't wait. Hello Kitty is already on everything else, I'm sure the Segway won't escape its evil grasp, (if it lasts long enough.)
    BTW, forget the eBay post, the evolution of the "Hello Kitty vibrator " [pleasurebox.ca] is going strong, their new version looks to be quite a bundle of joy, (for the kiddies, I'm sure it just mixes hot coco, oops, sorry for the pun.)
  • the strangest canned foods you'll ever see
    I guess choices are limited in Michigan. Not a single item there that I haven't seen on a grocery shelf in Silicon Valley.

    That reminds me. I'm all out of pickled fish cakes.

  • You know, I swore I was going to see the next inexplicably popular collectible item coming - classic arcade games, those postcards for defunct dotcoms from the free dispensers in coffeeshops and bars, etc. But sure enough, I miss out on the next big thing, the mighty AOL CD that has been keeping my coffee table ring-free. Just goes to show you. I'll never throw anything out again, ever.
  • ...is it bad if I've eaten half those "odd" canned foods before?

    ...is it bad if I actually *liked* them?

    ...is it bad if I actually eat some of them regularly?

    ...oh my...is my life not sad or what? You know you're in bad shape when the company that makes the stuff you eat can't even afford a product name, so they have to call it exactly what it is, even though nobody, not even them, is really sure of exactly what it is... ;-D

    DennyK
  • Can someone explain to me why tinfoil sparks in a microwave? I've thought about this a bit, and had a few bull sessions with fellow physicists about it, but I've never heard a convincing answer. The first thing everyone says is photo-electric effect, but that can't be right because the work function for most metals is ~1 eV, and that's in the visible or near-infrared.

    My only other guess is induced eddy currents. Anyone have a good answer?

    Thanks,

    Brant
    • That's true, but according to stochastic nature of sub-particle processes, some electrons will still be able to leave the surface of the metal, even if very few. This is, btw, a good example of demonstrating how, some electrons, even if they have lower energy than a certain energy barrier, will be able to cross that barrier. It's just the likelyhood that's very small, hence the small number of electrons that will make it through.

  • Erotic Computation Group a Hoax (Score:3, Informative)

    by iReflect ( 215501 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2001 @01:22AM (#2685666) Homepage
    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/technology/03ERO S.html?searchpv=nytToday [nytimes.com]

    or copy/paste:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/technology/03E RO S.html?searchpv=nytToday
  • Microwave oven seems to do quite a lot of tricks on
    anything conductive. Here I found a plasuible explanation. Not sure if it makes scientific sense....

    http://members.tripod.com/~hochwald/microwave/ba rr os/sam.html
  • Hey, in case anyone is interested, here's a New York Times article [nytimes.com] about the ECG.

    And here [monzy.com] is the website of the grad student behind the hoax.

    Damn. I went to grade school with that guy...and I'm nowhere near as...well...creative? (Monzy, if you're reading this, congrats, you crack me up.)

  • Who gives a rats arse about all the other stuff on this site? MORE QUICKIES!!!!
  • Anyone look at the bottom of the Erotic Computation Group page at the admissions qualifications?


    The Erotic Computation Group seeks creative, hard-working, team-oriented, and sexually competent graduate students. (do they include references?) ... Special sexual abilities are also important assets. (does being able to suck-start a Harley count?) Oral (of course!) and written communication skills are essential, as our work is regularly presented to visitors and submitted to major conferences (held in Vegas, I'm sure...) and journals.
  • Yuck [plankers.com].

    Spam spread?
    Dear God, who on earth would eat such a thing?!? And I thought Marmite was foul...

  • PHKL (Score:2)

    by Gleef ( 86 )
    In the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop article, it recommends going to FAO Schwartz for the appropriate volume of Hello Kitty merchandise. For those of you in or near New York City, Sanrio (makers of Hello Kitty) has an entire store on 42nd street (they even carry the Hello Kitty coffee maker [yahoo.com]!).

    For the definitive list of places which carry Hello Kitty Stuff, try here [know-where.com].

    Hello Kitty, Destroyer Of Worlds :-)

  • Oldest AOL (floppy) disk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2001 @10:45AM (#2686809) Homepage Journal
    Thinking of that woman with the AOL disks, it makes me think about my AOL collection: a pre-release AOL 1.0 5.25" floppy disk for the Apple ][.


    Back in the day, AOL was once called AppleLink. I used to beta test for them, and one day they sent me a letter and two new disks for the new renamed service.

    "We're renaming AppleLink to America Online..."


    Thus, I have two floppys for the Apple ][ that say America Online, and an accompanying letter. I think I even keep it in the original mailing package.


    I've figured that I'll keep it around and one day I'll sell it on eBay or something. Just curious what that would draw...


    Oh well...

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