All bananas in any kind of office go mouldy and funny after a couple of days. It's good to get some use out of them.
Squeeze the banana to log into this office Wi-Fi
In some offices, you have to ask around for the Wi-Fi password, or find it written down on a bit of paper. In others, you do it by poking a banana. Danish network engineer Stefan Milo constructed his fruity authentication system by wiring a piece of fruit to a Makey Makey board and a Raspberry Pi mounted on acrylic glass. The …
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Saturday 23rd January 2016 16:13 GMT JeffyPoooh
"...small piece of paper that someone printed out on an A4... ...I cringe"
It perfectly obvious that the total environmental footprint of the banana-based system is at least a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the paper-based system. Just the banana-to-paper ratio makes it obvious. Let alone the continuous power consumption, even sans-banana.
Planet killer.
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Monday 25th January 2016 12:04 GMT Danny 14
Re: "...small piece of paper that someone printed out on an A4... ...I cringe"
The bananas given in our staffroom are green and crunchy. They have a really fine balance as you need to keep on in your pigeon hole for precisely 2.25 days. If you wait longer they instantly turn black and mushy.
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Monday 25th January 2016 16:02 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: "...small piece of paper that someone printed out on an A4... ...I cringe"
The real problem, as I see it, is the well-known banana genetic bottleneck.
Banana plants are asexual rhizomatic herbs; the banana fruit is a vestigial berry. So you basically have a closed-source system here with a single point of failure from an unreliable supplier.
Should've gone with a tomato, if you had to have a berry. (Handy rule of thumb: Sexually-functional berries are more reliable.) Or skipped the berries entirely and used a strawberry, which of course is a fleshy stem.
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Saturday 23rd January 2016 12:15 GMT TeeCee
Yes, but the banana provides a simple visual check of how close to failure it is. Change when >25% covered in brown spots.
For a real problem fruit for this rig you can't beat a pear. Those little fuckers go from inedibly hard to overripe while your back's turned. A bowl of pears is a waste of space, unless you can scoff the lot in the brief few seconds while they're perfectly ripe.
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Friday 22nd January 2016 19:26 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
I read the sub-headline
whilst enjoying a post-lunch coffee. Please advise where I should send the bill for replacement monitor, keyboard, shirt, and a nearby co-worker.
Props for the clever solution to a problem but, one is forced to wonder if the device is indeed cellular, modular, AND interactivodular.
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Friday 22nd January 2016 19:33 GMT Sgt_Oddball
could be worse
It could request that you pull on a sausage or squish some plums. I also have to wonder if the cost of fruit / extra electricity (whilst I admit it will be small but it's an extra machine that wouldn't have otherwise been running. Unless you turn off the Secretaries machine in which case all the better) would offset the cost of the paper?
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Friday 22nd January 2016 19:48 GMT Preston Munchensonton
Re: could be worse
Could be far worse, like the South Park vehicle (IT) invented by Mr. Garrison:
That would be going the extra mile.
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Saturday 23rd January 2016 08:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: acrylic glass - WTF?
To be an even bigger pedant, a glass is a solid with no regular long-range structure. Most materials can exist in the form of a glass - even if their usual form is crystalline. For example, both water and some metal alloys will form a glass in the right conditions.
Furthermore, crystallinity is not a yes or no proposition: it is quite possible (and in the case of polymers, even common) to form a structure where microscopic parts of the material form a regular, crystalline structure, while other, connected regions are amorphous.
A regular repeating structure of the polymer chain is necessary, but does not guarantee that it will form a crystalline material (ie a material with regular long-range structure). Depending on the technique used for polymerization and the subsequent handling, the resulting polymer may have crystallinity anywhere in the 0 to 100% range.
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Friday 22nd January 2016 21:37 GMT Camilla Smythe
I suppose using a push button would....
My Keyboard is Full of Eels..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao
http://www.royaldanishfish.com/the-worlds-most-responsible-eel-farm-is-located-in-denmark.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel
"Please tickle the Eel for your Wifi Pass."
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Sunday 24th January 2016 01:19 GMT JosephEngels
Voltage drop?
"causing a voltage drop in the fruit" ???
what complete toss. It's just a touch switch, which works like every other touch switch ... when you touch the sensor (which in this case has been extended with a bit of wire to a banana) you couple stray 50Hz electrostatic field from all the general mains driven stuff in the area (60 Hz in places I guess) into a high gain amp (usually a CMOS gate biased nearly on) ... that turns into a 50Hz square wave and then gets rectified ...
the other sort is a capacative sensor ... where it either oscillates or nearly oscillates ... and when you touch it, the added capacitance of your body either changes the frequency, or causes it to start oscillating, as appropriate.
Either way, voltage drop (across or in) the banana don't come into it. What are they teaching in electronics class these days?
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Monday 25th January 2016 10:42 GMT theOtherJT
Would probably be illegal here.
We have to have people sign for guest wifi accounts. We have to have a persons name attached to every account so we know where to direct the police should they ever request the
peeping tom, sorry, "Security" information we're required to collect on everyone who uses our network. I'm told that after a long and expensive process our lawyers decided that we were probably liable to prosecution if we didn't, so anonymous access had to go :( -
Monday 25th January 2016 13:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
I do hope
no public purse funds went into creating this pointless piece of shit.
I mean, this isnt worthy of the ignobel awards. It is simply a piece of crap and IF he had replaced the banana with a switch this wouldn't have even been a story.
No, a waste of time and effort that could have gone onto something actually useful.
The shit El Reg prints sometimes takes a lot of fathoming...
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