Recently, finding that the bar code on my grocery store “member card” had been beat up too much to be reliably scanned, I fixed it.
I scanned it (and my wife’s, which has the same number and is similarly beat up,) took them into Photoshop, lined them up, zoomed in some ridiculous amount, then methodically cleaned up a slice through the code and vertically stretched that slice to create a nice crisp reconstruction of the bar code.
While I was there, I replaced the nearly-illegible numerals with something that can be made out without relying on a combination of squinting and guessing.
These reconstructed elements were transfered to an address label template, so now I have a sheet of thirty replacement labels. Fixed the keytags, slapped an extra one on a card in my wallet, and have a healthy reserve for the day that they get too beat up to scan reliably.
Now, some may reasonably object that this process took longer than it would have to get the cards replaced at the store. It did (though not more than about 15 minutes) but it was done comfortably, without the social anxiety that comes with holding up a queue. Indeed, the last dozen times I’ve gone grocery shopping, the observation “This is getting too beat up to scan” has never been met with, “Well, let’s take care of that now, then.” Always multiple attempts with the main scanner, then more with the hand scanner, and as a last resort, squinting at the number and keying it in. They don’t want to be bothered with it, and I don’t blame 'em.
What pointlessly geeky solutions to problems (or barely problems) have you got?
My Digi rat’s nest. Basically, TV is hooked up to the desktop which functions as a PVR. Meanwhile desktop, laptop, and phone can all UVNC into each other. I run a DHCP server on my desktop so I specify which network device always gets which IP address, plus specify my phone’s IP as the gateway. My internet comes in through my phone using custom shell scripts. My phone runs android so I can use it’s Linux guts to share the internet.
Meanwhile I’m working up setting a VMware server n guest OS on my laptop of win2k3 so I can do portable offline updates of computers with a mobile install of Windows Server Update Services.
Also gonna make a GUI tool to set the WSUS registry settings for setting up WSUS clients. Normally you need to set it through group policy but using the registry there’s less messy ways for workgroups.
The best part is you can completely control VMware serve from the browser. I even installed UltraVNC on it so I can use the UVNC java applet instead of WMware server console plug in. So basically it’ll be like having win2k3 embedded in a web page.
In college my roommate and I set up a server that played MST3K episodes 24/7 on the AUX TV channel so that we could flip to it whenever there wasn’t anything else on.
Later that year the same roommate and I set up a computer in our room that was connected to a remote administrator program to our other two house-mates’ computers (they didn’t know remote admin was running). We had an old CRT monitor sitting in a corner that continuously displayed whatever our house-mates were doing in the other room, and we would occasionally wiggle the mouse and other general tomfoolery. A moral thing to do? Probably not. Hilarious when they found out? Extremely. (we were all friends who pranked each other a lot, it was in good fun).
Back in my Everquest days my friends and I set up three computers that could be viewed and controlled from one chair by one person, requiring the use of both arms for mice, both feet for arrow keys on the keyboards, and the occasional nose if all three needed to be used at once. If the person was on his game, it was possible to run our entire group of a warrior, druid, and necromancer all at once. This made leveling much faster as we could do it in shifts.
Years ago (when such things were all the rage), I took all of my stupid “membership barcodes” - Blockbuster, all the grocery stores, etc. (around 15 in all), scanned them all, and then printed them all onto a single wallet-sized card with each name below, and laminated it. It made my wallet about 1/3 thinner - and you should have seen the looks of amazement I got!
I just built a motion-activated microcontroller-programmed water fountain for my cat, so that he can have fresh water whenever he wants, and so that he will stop pestering people to let him into the bathroom so he can drink from the sink.
This isn’t really tech geeky, but I guess it was geeky for the time.
I spent an entire summer when I was 17 (geeze, over 20 years ago) teaching myself to pick locks with a lock pick kit I made in machine shop. I went to the hardware store, bought a doornob, took it apart to figure out how it worked, and then put it back together with only one pin in it. Once I could turn the tumbler on that, I’d insert another pin, and so on. I got to use my skills when a woman in our building accidentally locked her sleeping infant (and keys) in her office.