I’m blessed with…wait, I mean cursed… cursed with a ridiculously slow dial-up conenction (26.4 most of the time, it has dipped to 19.0 on occasion) and as a result I usually can’t get my Windows Media Player to download media files directly from a site.
And just a few days ago a friend of mine sent me a URL to an ASF file on a site, I tried to DL it using WMP, but no go. I was dis-heartened, but I remembered an old trick I’d thought of back when I was fiddling around with HTML.
I wipped up a little html file like this in Notepad:
<html>
<a href="[URL of the file">Click here</a>
</html>
I opened the file using IE and I was able to right click on the link and Save Target As the file.
My girlfriend locked her keys inside of a small kitchen-ish place at her work, and I managed to get in using two straws, a shoelace, and my College I.D. It took one and a half hours.
She is now my ex girlfriend, but for other reasons.
I once had a hotel manager in New Zealand pay me NZ$10 to fix his payphone. There was a card stuck in it (two actually if I recall). Spent about 5 minutes with a Swiss Amry Knife and a business card. I wasn’t really interested in the $10, but needed to make a call and he wouldn’t allow use of the business phone.
Hmm… well, not TOO recently… but when we had our old Festiva it was a wonderland of MacGyer rigs.
Had the lid to the windshield washer reservoir go AWOL. As a result, not only was there no washer fluid for the windshield, but, when driving, the airflow over the top of the filling tube sucked the fluid out into the engine comparment. Had a very clean engine block and hood interior. Anyhow, fixed it with a scrap of tinfoil dug out of a dumpster and a hair rubberband. Think the jury-rig is still on it, but I’d have to ask the current owner.
Another time, the pump for the washer fluid died. We were quote some insance 3-digit price to replace it. My husband (the household’s true MacGyver) dug an old aquarium air pump out of his junk collection and used that.
I have used duct tape to reattached a radio-and-intercom unit to an airplane. This was particularly exciting, it being an open cockpit airplane where you really did not want to drop anything.
That’s it off the top of my head. If I can think of more (there has to be more) I’ll come back.
One time I needed to monitor the pressure of a gas tank for extended periods of time, to see if the tank leaked or not. The obvious method is to use an electronic pressure gauge and a strip chart recorder, but we only had mechanical pressure gauges. So I brought an old webcam from home, pointed it at the pressure gauge and set it to save an image every minute.
I didn’t think much of it but my boss was impressed.
I got locked up by bad guys, refused to use a purloined gun, and instead used the materials at hand to fashion a crude sort of “gun” with which I could escape.
Heh. Not for the car, but I have used those to fix up situations with my wife.
Same car, story 2. I was driving down the interstate one day when the engine lost power. It would idle - poorly - but couldn’t generate enough power to move the wheels. I opened the hood and saw a vaccuum housing had come loose. It was mounted to the side of the engine and the holding clip had broken. I found a piece of shredded tire carcass, pulled out a steel belt and tied the vaccuum housing to the side of the engine. It didn’t run optimally, but it got me home where I fashioned a clip from a piece of scrap steel for a permanent fix.
Someone recently actually called something I did MacGyverish, although it was a pretty simple thing. I’d bought a filing cabinet on sale (75% off) for very little money. The drawer for the hanging file included two metal rods that fit into the front and back of the drawer, and apparently the ‘hangers’ which the file folders hang on to were to be installed perpendicular to these, but were not included. So I bought a strip of metal used to hold adjustable shelving (just the right thickness for hanging files), cut it and enlarged the holes as needed to fit on the rods; works fine.
Not exactly MacGvyer, since it took a little more time and preparation - the various upgrades to my old PowerMac 6500 required more power, and I’d previously used a separate ATX supply sitting on top of the back with wires running inside to power the CDRW & Zip drive. I finally got tired of this and bought a cheap ‘mini’ ATX power supply which puts out more power but fits entirely inside the case of the old Apple supply. I created a new wiring connector (using another Molex in between the two) and put in an inverter (for the ‘Power ON’ signal) so I can still hit the keyboard to turn it on, and everything’s nice and pretty.
I once recovered my house key from the bottom of an elevator shaft using some string and a speaker magnet. The hardest part was once I got close to the elevator body, the magnet would snap to it, and the shock would drop the keyring. Of course if I really wanted to make ol’ Angus proud, I’d have created the magnet myself by banging a pipe or something.
