www.otton.org

How To Open A Lock With A Credit Card (via)

Bump Keys (bump keys turn up on eBay sometimes) (wikipedia article on bump keys)

A surprisingly in-depth entry on lock-picking at Wikipedia

Update: Beer Can Shim

I love customer service blogs. There’s something about the combination of wage slavery, futile rage and occasional tiny victories that makes for bleakly funny writing. I liked Clerks and Empire Records too; maybe it’s because I can identify.

• Grace Undressed
  

  I’ve finally got the customer every stripper dreams about at night, the kind who comes in three times a week and buys out your shift and treats you like a princess all night long so that you get to walk through the room all tall and sassy on your way to and from the dressing room — no sitting at the bar chain-smoking like some washed-up floozy from Talladega tonight, baby, nosir. Gotta hurry, mama, can’t talk right now, gotta guy waiting for me up in VIP.

  We’ve got a whole little routine going, loverboy and me, with a corner staked out in the VIP and the hostess knowing by heart what shots we like, and the whole damn bit. I feel bad, is all. Well, a little.

• WaiterRant
  

  It’s Thursday night. The headwaiter’s stuck me in a three table section by the men’s room. The few customers I have are low spending college students pissed off that they’re sitting by the toilet. They probably feel like they’re being discriminated against. In a sense they are. None of the other waiters want to waste their time serving them.

• Behind The Counter
  

  The Wal-Mart I work at seems to be some sort of feeding trough for the great herds of free-range white trash which boil forth from the trailers and dilapidated row houses that bring to mind the sad and sorry mid-century Depression-era buildings of Steinbeckian woe. I don’t know why they can’t roll the beat-up pick-ups with dual antennas and “KICKIN KUNTRY” bumper stickers on down to the Sav-A-Lot and seriously — save a lot.

  “Michael” works the customer service desk at a ghetto WalMart in Florida. As the face of an evil corporation his customers have no problem laying into him with abandon, and there’s not much he can do about it. His soul becomes a little more black and shrivelled each day. Oh, and he hates women - the old ones are all stupid and slow, and the young ones are probably whores. (Related: Walmart Astroturfing)

• True Porn Clerk Stories (Page 2, Page 3)
  

  Lots of people are hung up on a particular race, or a particular racial combination, and many straight men are pretty specific about breast size (The Nice Rack series and the Itty Bitty Titty series seem to rent fairly evenly). The most common fetish, if you can call something so common a fetish, is for borderline jailbait. This is true of both straight and gay porn. The gay series to watch are Eighteen Today, Just 18 and Gay and First Time Tryers. The straight series are Bring ‘Em Young, Barely Legal, and, horrifyingly, Faces with Braces. We actually have a guy who vets all our videos and makes sure that nobody is under 18, but still, guys who bring a stack of those up to the counter make me want to hiss and warn them away from my little sisters. And it’s never the 21-year-olds who rent Barely Legal, it’s always the 45-and-ups. Gah. The 21-year-olds do occasionally rent the one Older Women, Hotter Sex video we have. I approve of this, in a shocking display of my own personal prejudices.

  This one ended in 2002 and the host site has since dropped off the net, so I had to dig the text out of archive.org. Ali Davis worked as a clerk in a video store in Chicago. She was a lot more understanding and thoughtful than some clerks, and her job was probably less pressured, but some of the people she had to deal with were pretty squicky. Good writing and interesting observations.

I never really thought about where these came from. If pressed, I probably would have guessed that they’re artificial, or some kind of scaffolding for a microscopic sea creature like a sponge:

Grow Your Own Loofah

I’ve got to try that next year.

The car blew up on me today while driving up the M27 to work. Most likely it’s the head gasket, and hence a write-off. Clouds of white smoke as the radiator emptied itself into the engine.

It’s not even like I was speeding.

So… the search is on for something new, probably a generic, boring Japanese saloon car.
On the up-side, I’ve been playing with a Bluetooth GPS unit that a client passed to us. It’s pretty neat - their software runs on a Symbian phone, pairs with the GPS unit and alerts you to upcoming blackspots, speed cameras, etc. It does the job it’s designed for very well within the limitations of its environment (you can’t hear a Nokia phone over road noise without amplification), but the software shows some rough edges - it’s obviously been designed by a programmer rather than an interface designer, and the commercial constraints show through (800k install, it appears to pull the entire UK database from the server, instead of just the database for the local area).

Technically it’s about as good as you could hope for, but I still think dedicated hardware would produce a better experience (larger screen, map data) for less money in the long run (the mobile software has a subscription model).

But still, mobile + GPS… hope nobody asks for the hardware back :) I’m on the lookout now for something that will tag a pic with lat/long as I take it, upload to a URL, and bundle the uploaded photos as a KML file.

I installed Hamachi (Wikipedia overview) last week, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been so impressed with a piece of software. It’s as close to a zero-config VPN tool as it’s possible to get - just install and forget. No scary networking questions, no fiddling with settings. From a usability point of view it’s obviously been modelled on an instant messaging client, which makes it immediately intuitive to a decent proportion of users.

I’ve been using it to tunnel to the PCs of family members, and it’s flawless; you can quickly throw together ad-hoc networks simply by setting up the software on each machine and logging onto the chosen network.

The only problem I can see is that because it relies on an external server to bootstrap the connection, it will die if the company offering it kill free access to the server. If they do that I’ll go with one of the other solutions, but for now I’m happy.

A friend is currently (probably?) in Syria, after having left Lebanon a few days ago. This spurred me to read some of the blog posts from the region. In amongst all the invective, finger-pointing and (quite legitimate) panic I came across this.

I can’t comment on the accuracy of his opinions, but I thought it was interesting and well-argued enough to link to.

(edit: according to this article, the US will be charging its citizens $300 to get them out of Lebanon. Way to tear down the social contract, guys.)

In the end, sterility was my downfall. I couldn’t sterilise a jar of growth medium sufficently by boiling it, and in the meantime the petri dishes dried out and got infected.

I plan to buy a pressure cooker so I can nail the sterilisation part of the process, then start over in August, in time for the natural mushroom season in September.

Story here (via pretty much everywhere, but especially Scoble and Slashdot)

Pontification below

Google Checkout, at first glance, doesn’t seem like a Paypal killer (the lower fees are attractive but its US-only, requires a credit card and has a scary list of products it won’t touch in the T&Cs - not just porn, but anything that someone, somewhere, might find offensive). Nevertheless, eBay’s response has been to take their ball and go home; the entry of Google into online payments seems to have scared them.

Maybe that’s because their customers have been crying out for an alternative to Paypal for years. It’s universally detested, but universally used, because there’s no better alternative. To be honest, I always felt that the “virtuous circle” aspect of eBay (buyers go there because sellers are there, sellers go there because buyers are there) made them pretty-much unassailable (have you looked at QXL lately?), but now I’m starting to wonder.

An eBay transaction, completed via Paypal, absolutely nickle-and-dimes the seller to death, and I think the majority of eBay users look back with fondness to eBay circa 2001. There may be an opportunity for an eBay replacement with some or all of these features:

1. lower fees
2. open API for mixing up data
3. a ban on large commercial sellers
4. a ban on junk auctions (websites, ebooks, etc)
5. more nuanced user feedback (a decent reputation system)
6. a customer-first ethos
7. improved seller’s tools (eBay’s listing tools are so bad that they’ve spawned an entire industry of add-ons)
8. Improved UI (eBay’s trapped in 1998, has confusing marketing messages everywhere, and is dog slow)

I guess the best approach would be to start out in a niche, and really service that niche, negating eBay’s one-size-fits-all approach. Collectors of small, valuable, not-too-delicate items would be an ideal market. Vinyl records? Jewellery? Lead figures? Clocks and watches? Baseball cards? Comics? Doesn’t really matter which, all are valuable and can be easily shipped to buyers. Once you’ve got that niche sewn up, you can think about expanding into other areas.

Interesting Slashdot post that disagrees with me

Reply from someone who’s actually doing it

6th sense - I want!!!!!

Off to the Isle of Wight festival this weekend.

Here are a whole bunch of links to DIY projects that I’ve bookmarked over the past year or so. Most, but not all, have been culled from MAKE:Blog. Links are presented very loosely from simplest to most complex.

• Paper Aeroplane (what could be simpler?)
• Weird Goop (ok, it’s a silicon polymer)
• Sugar Glass (the stuff they break over people’s heads in movies)
• Hero’s Engine (from a Coke can)
• Stirling Engine (more complex, also from a can)
• Van de Graaff generator (yet another Coke can project)
• Water Rockets
• Modify and Build Water Guns (lots of information on building super-soaker-style water guns)
• FerroFluid (I’d love to have some of this stuff, but some of the ingredients are a bit beyond kitchen chemistry. You can find sources in Google.)
• Vacuum Pump (from fridge compressor)
• Electric Bicycle
• Building Miniature Model Aircraft
• Homebuilt Submarines, Submersible Semi-Autonomous Robots and ROVs (fantastic stuff, but where would you begin?) (UPDATE - ROV in a box)