Thursday, April 02, 2009

Breaker of things

No, I didn't break a bike. Sally's bike is all geared up now, with fresh handlebar grips and brake pads. Almost all the way adjusted.

This evening, I helped some friends break into a phone card vending machine at CCCKC. My friend Jon bought it from a local surplus shop. One of the guys at the surplus place accidentally locked it without having the key.

After a trying to occasionally pick the lock and failing... (This is my friend Trent using a special tubular-lock picking tool)


We just went ahead and drilled it out this evening. A few years back, I found some drill bits in the dumpster that were designed for drilling hardened steel locks. They came in handy tonight.


I'm having a bad hair day.


Inside? No money or free phone calls to Mexico. But now we can actually set this thing up to do something useful. Jon (the middle guy above), who owns it, is thinking of turning it into a machine that can burn copies of free software, like Ubuntu Linux, for example. It may or may not charge money for the service. I look forward to seeing what happens with this little project.

2 comments:

Yokota Fritz said...

Once upon a time I had an ATM card reader machine -- swipe the card and the ATM card info was spit out via a serial port. All kinds of nefarious plans sprung up in my mind, but I'm too much of a goody two shoes to do anything actually malicious.

Noah said...

I had a whole atm machine at one time. I, too, thought of doing something like setting it up somewhere that an ATM would be "convenient" then making it record ATM numbers and PINS before saying "Sorry, insufficient funds" but like you, I am also a goody two-shoes when it comes to that kind of thing. I ended up using the main cash storage area as a vault for a few years. I eventually wrote an article on what was inside of it, then gave the ATM away to someone else. Most useless 350 pound item I've ever owned, really.

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