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[wombat]

OMG BEN-SAN!

[pmcd9]

Paul, you'll be pleased to know that my character did, in fact, gather the necessary materials to turn the team's van into a flame-throwing zombie death machine. My fellow adventurers were totally impressed when I described the process in-game. She hadn't had a chance to torch any walkers yet, though.

Two days ago I ran into a friend who told me "I was just talking about you to my boyfriend." Apparently she wants him to convert his car into a death rock artcar with flame throwers. I offered to help. He seems down with the idea so we'll see how it goes.

[jay-ell]

This is pretty well-known but it's just as well that you're not following Anarchist's Cookbook instructions for homebrew explosives - their methods and recipes are pretty unsafe and people do hurt themselves pretty badly following it. It's not bad as a "this is the kind of substances my character will need to find" reference, though.

I taught myself pocket-picking and simple lockpicking when I was younger for basically the same reasons as this. I haven't done that kind of thing for a while, though.

Yeah, I was reading it thinking, "this was written by fifteen year olds, no sane person would ever try this." And I am pretty sure that some of the info is based solely on urban myth. Napalm from gasoline and styrofoam? I'm skeptical. But it's useful for role-playing when your GM knows next to nothing about chemistry. And, I did learn how to make matchbook igniters and time-delay fuses, those actually could come in handy.

[jaydub]

One of the best time delay fuses ever is a cigarette.  They don't self-extinguish and their burn rate is inhumanly consistent.  No doubt much R&D went into those characteristics.

[Ben-San]

One of the best time delay fuses ever is a cigarette.  They don't self-extinguish and their burn rate is inhumanly consistent.  No doubt much R&D went into those characteristics.

Ssh, the camp commander might overhear!

[smick]

Although, holy crap people. Phone phreaking -- 75% of the cookbook is devoted to it; who knew it'd be totally obsolete by now?

Me... but I was super into it when I was young.  I spent a ton of time on K-RAD H/P/A/U/X BBSes when I was a yute.  I was forever scrounging and reading text files which had delicious bits of Bell Labs stuff in them.  I felt SUPER badass, but in a nerdy way.

then in 2001, I started working in a telephone company central office.  It's not totally obsolete.  Certainly it becomes a minority, but the nice thing about Belllabs/Telcordia/Neustar/Verisign handling all the specs, is that (almost) everything is backwards compatible on the wireline network.   Chunks of the world are likely still using some old stair-stepper switches out there, and they need to be able to receive calls from your cell phone.

I get incredibly misty about some of this stuff.   When I worked in the CO, I felt like I wasn't just keeping the equipment in repair.  The stuff going on inside the equipment was far more interesting.  I was safeguarding communication.  How much raw emotion was happening inside of these giant blinking stacks of equipment?  Young couples breaking up, young couples coming together.  News of life altering events.  People falling in love.  People telling their friends that they've fallen in love.  Maybe they're talking about how they aren't in love any more... all very important business.  I took great pride in facilitating these things.   

I used to like explaining to people that when they're talking to someone on a phone, there is an unbroken strand of copper going from them, to the hand of the person they're speaking to wherever they are in the world.  You were literally in physical contact with the person, however abstracted it was.   Granted with glass and light, and wireless services... not so much the case.   Probably not even the case back when Ma Bell was urging you to Reach Out and Touch Someone.

Phones are heady dealings for me... for sure.

[jay-ell]

smick, that is pretty awesome. Never really thought about it that way -- telephones sort of scare me (but then, so do most people). And phone phreaking always struck me as kind of a dumb crime -- like, if you're going to put that much effort into something, why not steal something more useful than free long distance? But when you put it in the perspective of building connections between far-flung people; well, that makes more sense.

One of the best time delay fuses ever is a cigarette.  They don't self-extinguish and their burn rate is inhumanly consistent.  No doubt much R&D went into those characteristics.

You haven't smoked a cig lately, have you? They *are* self-extinguishing these days...it's a "safety feature," supposedly, so that drunk people are less likely to burn their houses down.

Mosquito coils, though. Those'll work if you got one handy. Learned that one from LA Noire.

[jaydub]

You haven't smoked a cig lately, have you?

Guilty as charged.  I should have known someone living around Tobacco Road would have the inside scoop on that

Seriously, the only use I have ever had for a cigarette is as a time delay fuse for firecracker mischief.  The last time I did that I was...20? 23 years ago.  Huh.

[jay-ell]

Yeah, I caved and took a smoke off a friend after work one night. I smoke maybe three or four cigarettes a year; I still call myself an "ex-smoker" but the cravings never really go away.

[smick]

smick, that is pretty awesome. Never really thought about it that way -- telephones sort of scare me (but then, so do most people). And phone phreaking always struck me as kind of a dumb crime -- like, if you're going to put that much effort into something, why not steal something more useful than free long distance? But when you put it in the perspective of building connections between far-flung people; well, that makes more sense.

It has very little to do with stealing, since you'd never want to call anyone you actually know on a stolen phone call.  I think for those folks in the prime of the Phreaking, it was more about being able to do things that you weren't supposed to be able to do.   Taking these labyrinthine systems and getting them to bend to your will from a simple phone...  For some, I imagine it was simply learning things that people didn't want you to learn.  They wanted to level up, where others would rather they not.

Took me a while to dig this link up:  http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/ - Dude used to drive around the PNW and record the sounds phone switches made to try to figure out what was happening inside those brick buildings.

I had another that I can't find.  It had quite a few recordings from the 80s of conference lines. (The link above has them as well but these are different)
  They were really interesting that they revolved around these guys in NY calling into and getting dumped into a broken message machine.   The message isn't playing loud enough, and all callers are dumped into the same trunk with 2 way sound.   Basically, intead of "The number you dialed is no longer in service..."  These guys got each other and started talking about how they could force these things to happen, and start discussing the technical details of the crossbar switches in NYC and how you can force trunks to disconnect, or reorder connections to get an outside line... All very interesting... very little of it applicable to anything after the mid 80s.

[Doc]

They're slightly more illegal here than in the US do most of the places to order from are overseas.

Oh man anarchists cookbook. Also fuck*ng with the pay phones at our high school until they made it digital. Also finding lists of pay phone numbers and being all Thomas Crowne.

[Mr Trout]

After losing my job as a 3D animator last winter I decided to level up my skills as a bicycle mechanic by volunteering at local collectives until I had enough practical experience to land a job as a paid mechanic. It worked out pretty well; I wrenched all summer at a pretty high-end shop working on $10k bikes, yard-sale finds and everything in between.

Now that the season is pretty much done I'm planning on driving north to the mountains and living in a camper at a ski resort. I will be leveling up my skiing abilities by attempting to get 100+ days on the slopes in a season. I'm also teaching myself how to fix a propane furnace, insulate an RV, and wire in a few solar panels.

I've never had this much fun in my entire life. 30 is the new 20.

[jay-ell]

Trout, that sounds amazing.

My pick set arrived today! I have two old locks I changed out when I moved in to my house that I'm going to practice on; one I'm going to strip down and re-pin and the other I'm going to leave intact for when I've mastered the stripped lock. One I get the dummy stripped, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours (so the book tells me) to learn the basics. I'm hoping to be able to show off my new skills on Sunday afternoon.

[Ben-San]

Trout, that sounds amazing.

My pick set arrived today! I have two old locks I changed out when I moved in to my house that I'm going to practice on; one I'm going to strip down and re-pin and the other I'm going to leave intact for when I've mastered the stripped lock. One I get the dummy stripped, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours (so the book tells me) to learn the basics. I'm hoping to be able to show off my new skills on Sunday afternoon.

Better make it Sunday morning. Houses are more likely to be empty then.

[jay-ell]

Haw haw.

I'm up to three pins; a standard household lock has five. I can do two pins quick enough to be impressive but I struggled for ten minutes before I got the three-pin setup to give. I've got three sets and I'm going to strip one of them down to a one-pin so that the tweens in our RPG group can play with it & get a feel for how it works.

I haven't really learned enough to be useful in a lockout situation yet, but if you give me a lock and a key that fits it, I can disassemble it, rearrange the pins, and have it working again in under ten minutes. If I had a variety box of pins and springs, I could theoretically re-key the locks on my house to match my mom's housekey, or any key made from a correctly-sized blank.

I could even, for example, rekey my existing lock to match my best friend's housekey so that she can pick up my mail and water my plants while I'm out of town, and then change it back when I get home (though I'd have to pick the lock to let myself in first).

Most useful in the short term, if I can learn to pick five cylinders I can disassemble the lock on the door at work for which my boss does not have a key, and I can rekey it so that it matches the other door. Before I started working at the store, someone accidentally locked that door and I am pretty sure my boss had to call a locksmith to open it. I don't think he had a key made for it (he is super tight with money) but I bet he would like to have one if he could get it for free. I'm not going to even mention it until I'm confident with five-pin cylinders, though.