Useless things

[djap]

What is the most useless thing you know or have created your self?

I'll start with something I wrote just few days ago (Check the picture attached). It's an animated Bender that will read out loud in binary what ever is written on the text field. Now isn't that useless or what!

[techieMoe]

When I was younger I had a very active imagination. I would often take several random (but harmless) things around the house, put them together with masking tape and call it something ridiculous, meanwhile expounding its virtues as a gadget to end all gadgets. I don't remember all of them, but here's a few that come to mind:

Ice Tester - basically a set of those plastic sticks you put balloons on all linked together into a semi-robotic-looking arm that could be used to tap ice in front of you to see if it was safe. This was particularly funny to my mom because we lived in east Texas, where an iced-over pond was about as likely as a Godzilla attack.

"Invisible" Ink - this was basically three or four different colors of water-based paint I mixed together into some putrid green color and painted onto the side of a cardboard box. The water content made it show up for a few seconds and when that dried, it turned "invisible." The rub was that you couldn't make it reappear.

Growth Formula - I mixed together several different forms of shampoo and hand soap into an old mustard squeeze-bottle and deposited the ooze onto the limbs of a peach tree we had in our back yard. Ironically, the soap probably inhibited more growth than it helped, but I was 6 years old, I couldn't very well be an expert botanist yet.

Key finder - one of my first computer programs, written in Pascal, would basically tell you the last place you put your keys. The downside was you had to recode the answer and recompile the program every time you picked them up, so it wasn't much more useful than writing it down on a piece of paper. I had the idea of the program tracking the keys, but this was several years before the advent of GPS.

Genocide - The Pointless Door! - another Pascal program. This one ended up being the inspiration for Space Farce so maybe it wasn't completely useless. The program itself was pretty much a little adventure game where you were given a story snippet and a series of choices. All but one of them ended in your death, so there was a lot of restarting the game. It was intended to be a "door game," which for those unfamiliar was a game you played when logged into a bulletin board system (BBS) on someone else's computer. This was pre-internet. I did actually upload the game to a BBS once but I don't think anyone ever used it. It even had some ASCII art for the opening splash.

[Freston]

LOL, I've written a script that introduced random typos to what you type in an input line. It even took percentual reliability as an argument. Useless, but fun.

[Bemk]

For me that was a series of hello world apps,

I made a version 1, 1.1, 1.2, etc, just to try out new things in my code. It's all pretty much useless, because I have the documents in front of me, with which I made them.

[djap]

LOL, I've written a script that introduced random typos to what you type in an input line. It even took percentual reliability as an argument. Useless, but fun.

Wow. Sounds pretty useless alright. Just started wonder how to make this happen on kernel level so it wouldn't matter who is typing and where to. Useless AND irritating

[Artesia]

It's not useless if you enjoyed making it! I love Moe's inventions



I've made a series of wood spheres. In my workplace, I'm exposed to a significant amount of nice wood. We have some types that we buy in a 4" x 4" dimension. I picked out a scrap piece of mahogany out of the trash, cut a cube, and proceeded to cut corners for a few months until I had a sphere. (If I got done early with my work, that is.)

The challenge was to make a perfect sphere without any measuring, just eyeballing. It came out looking a bit lopsided. (on the left in the pic)

So I did it again, and the result was much better. (center) And then I did it one more time, this time using rock maple, which is a very hard wood and quite difficult to work with (right).

The first one is that shiny because I sanded it for a long time. I used no finish. These three represent well over a year of work, a little at a time.

I might finish them one day, because I think the maple one could look cool. But nowadays I'm making a sword out of maple, ebony and bloodwood.

[Artesia]

Another useless thing was when I decided to stop dotting my i's.

In 9th grade History, the teacher gave us a series of questions for each chapter that were taken exactly out of the book. We had to submit these in writing. I once got chastised for being too brief, so being ever the model student I started being very thorough.

But it was still just copying sentences straight out of the book. This was excrutiatingly boring, and so I decided to use the opportunity to challenge myself to stop dotting my i's. It took a while, but I eventually overcame the habit. The j was a silent victim because I never intended to deprive that letter of its dot, but such is life.

I still don't do it. I used to feel all special over it, and as the years passed I came to find out that quite a few people don't. Arg!!

[techieMoe]

Another useless thing was when I decided to stop dotting my i's.

In 9th grade History, the teacher gave us a series of questions for each chapter that were taken exactly out of the book. We had to submit these in writing. I once got chastised for being too brief, so being ever the model student I started being very thorough.

But it was still just copying sentences straight out of the book. This was excrutiatingly boring, and so I decided to use the opportunity to challenge myself to stop dotting my i's. It took a while, but I eventually overcame the habit. The j was a silent victim because I never intended to deprive that letter of its dot, but such is life.

I still don't do it. I used to feel all special over it, and as the years passed I came to find out that quite a few people don't. Arg!!

I did something similar in high school math class. I started crossing my sevens and letter Z's. It actually served a useful purpose because I could better differentiate between a Z and a 2 in an equation, but it confused some of my classmates. I still do it to this day.

[Thrillhouse]

I did something similar in high school math class. I started crossing my sevens and letter Z's. It actually served a useful purpose because I could better differentiate between a Z and a 2 in an equation, but it confused some of my classmates. I still do it to this day.

I was a Math minor in college and I do that too, as did all of the Math professors I had. I think you reach a certain point where you're just tired of having to spend the extra second to figure it out every time.

[Jaredvcxz]

DVD rewinder.