Hacks, ties, and videotape
David M. Chess
the experience partook enough of the Hacker Nature that I
think it deserves posting here.
I'm for some reason on at least one "rich and gullible" ad-mailing
list (I like to think that it's entirely mistaken, not just half!).
The other day I got a call from someone wanting to sell me interest
in an oil well in Texas. Yow! That's not what the story's about,
though. Yesterday in the mail I got a 10-minute videocassette from
some car company about some car. About as thrilling as you'd
expect a 10-minute commercial to be, BUT the baby and I had a
great time for the rest of the evening taking the cassette apart,
playing with the pieces, and putting it back together again.
All hackers must immediately go out and disassemble a video
cassette, if they haven't already (maybe I was the only one left
that hadn't). Not only do the major halves make excellant owl-
masks (a 2-and-a-half-year-old assistant is highly recommended
if you can obtain one), but the innards contain lots of interesting
hacks. I normally think of manufactured objects like this as
being variously screwed, glued, or sewed together; but (once
you've undone the five little screws to get the major halves
apart) a VC is full of little interestingly-shaped parts that
are just sitting there, ready to pop out, fall out, or be
grabbed by tiny fingers. This is no doubt "designing for
manufacturability", but it definitely involves hacks!
We eventually got it back together (all but one part that didn't
seem to fit back anywhere), and it worked again (I guess that
counts as a small hack in itself...). And now we know various
Secrets of Technology, such as what tab to push to let you
swing open the little door protecting the tape, why you can't
spin the tape reels by hand (that's one of the cuter little
hacks to be found inside), what recessed surface to push on
if you do need to spin them by hand, and so on. Highly recommended!
- -- -
David M. Chess / "...net.net.god,
High Integrity Computing Lab / I wanna be
IBM Watson Research / a net.god..."
Dave Weingart
|> All hackers must immediately go out and disassemble a video
|> cassette, if they haven't already (maybe I was the only one left
This reminds me of a cassette tape hack that I used to pull on unspecting
annoyances in college. Some cassettes used to be held together by screws,
so you could (if you were sufficiently masochistic and had nothing better
to do with your hands) open them and switch the tape inside for another
one. Works well especially if you can replace someone's favorite tape
with "Songs of the Mating Manatees" (or something else equally inappropriate).
Part is that you can unhack it just as easily, so as to drive them utterly
bonkers. If they had several tapes of this nature, you could always swap
them essentially indetectably.
--
73 de David Weingart KB2CWF In the event I am captured or killed, the
phyd...@cumc.cornell.edu Cornell University Medical College and the
phyd...@guru.med.cornell.edu Department of Academic Computing will disavow
phyd...@src4src.linet.org any knowledge of my opinions.
Andreas Meyer
> All hackers must immediately go out and disassemble a video
> cassette, if they haven't already
But, don't you see? A hacker, by his/her very nature, *will* have
already disassembled a video cassette to see how it works.
ObHack: a videotape which has snapped can be repaired using a ruler,
a single-edge razorblade and some Scotch(tm) tape. Overlap the ragged
ends of the videotape and use the ruler as a guide to make a nice
straight cut. Make sure the newly cut ends of the videotape are
perfectly aligned, and use a piece of Scotch(tm) tape (on the front only)
to repair the splice. This should hold long enough to make a copy
onto another videotape; I wouldn't play the repaired tape more than once.
It's also probably a bad idea to use cheap adhesive tape, ie. other
than the real 3M stuff.
Andy
--
==--
-====--- Andreas Meyer, N2FYE a...@hoqas2.att.com
--==---- AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel NJ ..!att!hoqas2!ahm
----
WATERMAN
>> This reminds me of a cassette tape hack that I used to pull on unspecting
>> annoyances in college. Some cassettes used to be held together by screws,
>> so you could (if you were sufficiently masochistic and had nothing better
>> to do with your hands) open them and switch the tape inside for another
>> one. Works well especially if you can replace someone's favorite tape
>> with "Songs of the Mating Manatees" (or something else equally inappropriate).
If you can be bothered - a little more tedious though:
Rewind the tape.
Open it, and flip over the empty spool.
You'll need to hide a half twist somewhere
Close it up again
Rewind it onto that spool.
Open it again
Flip the other spool - removing the twist
Close it again, and replace all the screws.
Now, when you play the tape, it's actually reading the BACK of the tape, and
it's reading it BACKWARDS. This gives LOUSY quality, but it's backwards, which
is the fun part.
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