I worked at a car dealership that put out very nice, fresh muffins for the customers. I was a drug addict at the time and wasn’t spending money on food so that’s where I ate
a long time ago I worked at an event production company, we bought a plastic card (think credit cards) full color printer to print client logos on NFC cards, and I had to test them, so I printed McLovin’s driver licence on a card, and I still keep it on my wallet.
Printing/scanning on the company printer. Was careful at a corporate job as I suspected they might monitor what I send to the printer or what the printer scans, so I was low-key with that
I was working in my (poor third world) government job, and our keyboard broke. Replacements took months, since they only bought mouse and keyboards in bulk once per year or so, and they ran out of.
I had a second job working as a contractor for a private company, where we were contracted for a public hospital providing system administration and technical support. We had some old PS2 keyboards that were to be decommissioned, but since they didn’t have inventory number, I got hold of them and brought some to my other job.
So I donated some equipment from one area of government to another, but it was kinda illegal, lol 😆.
In 1999 when the entire town was on dialup, I set up this relatively small PC with FreeBSD 3.3 and eggdrop, and hid it in the school library. That way I had an IRC bot that worked while I was offline. After a while I also set it up to automatically grab files from FTP servers for me, but getting these out from the “server” offline was tricky due to 1.44MB floppies being the only removable storage I had available.
Back then internet carried dialup charges per minute for me, so this was a huge time and money saver.
Instead of using a space heater like everyone else, I run Folding@Home on one of my work machines to pump out a few hundred watts of heat. That way at least someone is getting some Alzheimer’s research out of burning that electricity.
Haha this is actually an awesome idea. My work has a bunch of super cheap servers for sale that could totally be used as a space heater. Actually a super cool concept because there are so many good servers and cpus being thrown out that could legitimately be used as a space heater.
Most of the space heaters that I’ve seen are like 1,500 watts. According to the UPS this computer is plugged into, it consumes around 650 watts. So it’s not as powerful as a space heater, but when the exhaust is pointed directly at your legs, it gets plenty warm.
I wonder if one could create a computer that generates the heat while doing that cool computing stuff, but also have it regulate the temperature so that it slows down when it hits, say, 65 degrees in the room. I’m intrigued very much by this idea.
Assuming Folding@Home has some sort of API or if it can be started and stopped from the command line, it should be fairly straightforward with an Arduino a simple script.
It already exists. There is a company that sells a space heater that mines crypto currency. You get like 50% or the profits which sucks, but you at least recoup a bit of the cost of the electricity to run the heater.
I think we should try to heat ourselves with computing as much as we can since the side effect of computing is heat generation (and minor RF losses). How cool would it be to make a large supercomputer out of millions of homes heating up in the winter?
“The winter discovery boost”! I can imagine that. It would be so cool if humans cooperated together for these cool projects. Maybe if society was more like a beehive; meaning the way that everybee does some part to help out the whole hive instead of the widespread me-first individualism that neglects the problems they don’t have.
The company’s PCs were running XP, but had Windows 7 Pro license stickers on their back. I wrote down a few license codes for using them at home. One of those is now my Windows 11 Pro license.
I was issued a monitor in the early days of COVID when they were sending us home to work. We already had laptops. They had literally pallettes of monitors, people were just grabbing one or two. Tracking was through the honor system, writing name and number taken on a piece of paper.
Now they’re having us go back into the office ~3 days a week and want us to return the monitors. Lol, no.
New people who don’t know wtf they are doing because we don’t have structured training and our written documentation is piss poor and we’re overall bad at helping them. Some new college grad botched a multi-million dollar program and come to find out, they weren’t getting any meaningful mentoring or guidance.
The thought is we will be better at seeing these sorts of gaps earlier if we’re having real conversations, not just the routine PowerPoint presentations sanitized to show all is good.
Could a team train and mentor via virtual interaction only? Sure. Can this particular team? Nope.
This was more of a community service, but when I worked for a university office I ran a TOR node on one of my PCs. After a while though, IT sent someone to ask me kindly not to make it an exit node. Other than that they didn’t seem to mind. It was nice having excess bandwidth.
I also ran some distributed computing apps like folding@home.
I used a forklift to move a car that blocked me into my parking space. I’d already put in my two weeks though and the whole “losing unemployment because I was fired with cause” sucked. Worth though.
My colleagues back in the early bitcoin and cryptocurrency days were mining across any spare infra and customer servers they could get their hands on. Back when you could do it with just CPU.
I’ve taken a PC that was laying around at work and donated it to a non-profit I’m involved with.
Was a bit surprised to find there was a Proxmox server installed with a customer’s IP, but I just wiped it.
I got a company to install an extra consumer grade internet connection with a different ISP on top of the main (already redundant) business one.
Sold it to them as being best for redundancy and to make sure that if sync traffic between our 6 locations was heavy, it wouldn't impact the main line.
The main line was actually more than sufficient to handle 100x the heaviest traffic we ever had. We were right next to a university, which got us a hookup to the national backbone on fiber (this was in the age of T1 and T3 lines being the norm, 2 of those 6 locations had to make due with 256KB lines), so it was rock stable, blistering fast and because it was backbone connected, utterly and completely unrestricted and unmonitored by third party.
But the advantage of consumer lines in that period was that cable and DSL were starting to become common for consumers, at speeds comparable to most business internet lines. These also usually had dynamic IPs.
This was simply so my and my colleagues internet and at the time Napster traffic wouldn't show up on the traffic logs and wouldn't be identifiable by our official IP range :p
Add comment