chrisb@hubcap.clemson.edu (Instant Insanity) (01/07/90)
This is in follow-up to my original posting in early December of last
year.
I have never seen a posting containing anything like this before, and
since my request for "Perf Ideas" went over so well, I have expanded it
to include other categories of obvious interest in the replies I have
received. Thank You to those of you who have contributed to this first
release. I am sorry I have not kept names of contributors, but due to
the current size of the file, a 50% savings results. Please Enjoy !!!
Below is what could become a great collector's item. It lacks some
categories and some existing categories are lacking in places as every
first version of something does. With your help, this lacking quality
can be greatly improved. Please read and forward changes, additions,
deletions, modifications, extractins, new categories, new sources, etc.
to me personally. Please hold complaints to yourself. Please forward
compliments and motions of encouragement to me as I need all the
encouragement I can get right now. If support for this idea is not
widely accepted, then it will die peacefully at Version 1.0.
Chris Behrens
Struggling Comp Sci Student at large
ChrisB@Hubcap.Clemson.Edu
O / O /
---------begin-----x---cut-keep--------x-----contribute--------------
O \ O \
Odd Office Product Ideas V1.0 1-1-90
--------------------------------------
These are just what the name implies - Odd ideas and things to do with
common everyday office products. Read them and you will catch on. Some
are not as "odd" as others, but they still qualify as ideas.
Perf Ideas :
-------------
Eat them.
Recycle them.
Paper mache'.
Use them for cat toys.
Christmas tree garlands.
Biodegradable trash bag filler ?
Measure your head size with them.
Use them for mulch in your garden.
You could stuff a pillow with them.
Tractor strips make great cat whips.
Use them as snow chains on your car tires.
You could use them under logs in fireplaces.
Use them for streamers at New Year's parties.
Wear them as Cousin It at the haloween party.
They make great box fillers for X-mas presents!
Tie a knot in one end of a bunch and throw; pretty stramers!
You could use them to plug something up while making a firework.
You could make a costume wig with them (after dipping them in dye).
You could wrap gifts in them--use them instead of ribbon, perhaps?
Glue lots of them together like a laminate and make paper erector sets!
Fill a room with them and play Hide-and-Seek. (Watch out for paper cuts!)
Quick-dip them in a solution of food coloring to dye them?
Maybe use some light glue and sprinkle glitter on them?
Make helicopters out of individual strips and have competitions flying
these tractor-copters into a target area from a balcony or ledge.
Collect them, slowly rolling them into a little ball. The ball will get
bigger with time.
Weave into a snowflake. (This one's tough - You may need to pin them
to a bulletin board to keep the snowflake reasonably symmetric)
Soak them in water for 24 hours then compress into bricks for the
Bar-B-Q or open fire.
Give them to your pet guinea pig, rat, mouse, hamster, etc,
to use for nesting material.
Put some in your yard in the Spring and see if birds will use it in
their nests.
Turning homework in on it-one word per space between the holes.
It will really piss off the profs.
Take a LOT of 6-page strips, and tape the ends to the ceiling with
duck tape. Makes one bead curtain Use aluminum cans for a window frame.
Should you desire a long line of small dots on your car or
other surface, the perf makes an excellent stencil!
Sell your perf to Oliver North as `shredded Iran-Contra evidence'.
Senator Tower would never notice the difference.... :-)
Take 5 1-page lengths, and make a star. Needs tape at the five
points. (works better with those wood coffee stirrers - because they
hold themselves together and don't need tape or glue)
Make jewelry, sculptures (throw in some paper clips for variety).
Make a perf farm with only folded perfs... no glue or tape or anything
but perfs.
Give them to grade school kids for use in their craft or art projects.
E.g. they could substitute for hair in a paper mache doll,
could be braided to make paper necklaces.
Lay a single 'bundle' on its edge near the edge of a desk or table, and
pull the first strip over the edge. The rest will 'siphon' over the
edge, too. If the bundle is curved at all, it works best with the
concave side toward the table edge. (slinky)
Use them to take measurements (bust, waist, other objects)
if you don't have a tailor's tape available. Since they're
disposable, you can cut off the exact length and use it to
directly measure.
Tear from one edge to center, and link them crossways into a grid, make
many grids and stack them up into cubes, then use the cubes as building
blocks. Build a house deep in the forest and live in it. There will be
one grid left over, which will make a nice boot scraper.
Building an Eifell Tower with perf. When you fold them in half
lengthwise they become reasonably stiff. You can also then slip the
end of one into the hole of another to connect them.
Perhaps use glue or something also to hold them together.
Take some strips and assemble them all into a single thick stack (the
way the strips look while still attached to the paper in the original
box). Staple one end of the stack all the way through. Separate all of
the strips at the other end. Hold by the stapled end and use as a
pom-pom.
Since ticker tape has become obsolete, the perfs are now used in its
place at parades in New York. Some persons do not bother separating
it from the paper before throwing it out the window. 2000 feet (one box)
of double perforations separated by sheets of paper make an impressive
display when thrown out the 40th floor window. It makes an even more
impressive dent if you don't take it out of the box first.
Hang long sections of it off the ceiling of a stairwell, making sure
the paper drops thru the open center of the stairwell until it hits
the ground floor. Lots of these side by side look like long drapes.
Watch people stare at your decoration and follow it all the way up
(or down). It might be entertaining to set the bottom on fire and
watch the flame travel all the way to the top (If you're crazy
enough to try this, you might keep an extinguisher handy).
Just take them and separate them into individual 11" strips, then take
about 8 of them crisscrossing in the middle to form an asterisk-shaped
thing. Now take this thing and hang it from a piece of string from the
drop-ceiling in your office. Now make about fifty of them with the
string length varying from 6" to 18" and hang them all over the office
ceiling. This is especially good if you have to answer dumb questions
interrupting your real work, because when your boss asks "What are those
things ???", you can tell him that each piece of paper represents a
stupid user question that he should hire a work-study-warm-body-or-two
to answer instead of you.
Perf Place Mat Ideas :
-----------------------
Weave into a place mat ---> | | | |
-|---|---
---|---|-
-|---|---
---|---|-
| | | |
To make sure it doesn't unravel, tuck the loose ends over and under.
Color some strips, and weave them into the placemat as lettering.
Take several place mats, and tape or weave them together into a cube.
Works best if they're small, because they aren't too sturdy.
Building a Perf Bridge :
-------------------------
(for the terminally bored engineer) Take 2 _long_ (15-page or so)
strips and about 30 aluminum cans. Duck tape the aluminum cans like
this:
|| ||
|| ||
|| ||
==================================
|| ||
then run the strips up and over like a suspension bridge. support
each can with a 1-page strip taped to the main line and the can.
makes one suspension bridge.
_-||--_ _--||-_
_- || !--_____--! || -_
_- || ! ! ! ! || -_
=================================
|| ||
Perf Paper Disk Ideas :
------------------------
Making Disks :
Wrap a long section of it around and around itself tightly until you
have a hockey puck of sorts. You need strips from longer printouts as
the disk grows. Make sure you tape or glue the outside end.
They travel pretty far and fast when thrown.
Might be used as slingshot ammo.
Use as a mini dart board.
Use as hockey pucks.
Make a mobile of the solar system or of flying saucers etc.
Wrap disks in boring staff meetings.
Useful for playing "Tower of Hanoi".
Stack disks of diminishing diameters and paint green to form a
Christmas tree.
Larger ones could be used as Frisbees. On impact, these larger disks
would explode creating a mess.
Make disk. Put a toothpick or coffee stirrer through the center and
hold in place with glue or a rubberband. Makes one top.
Use as a substitute for skipping stones across a lake, though I
suspect since it gets soaked in a hurry, you might only be successful
at it once.
When the disk gets big enough (about 6 inches in diameter),
you can poke out the center, hold the disk by the edges, and then yank
down on the poked-out center. Then the stuff streams out one strand
at a time, each looking like a helix shooting down out of the center of
the disk. (This worked best if you had long printouts.)
For small disks, you want to do this over your wastebasket or fireplace
(after this treatment, the stuff makes great tinder).
For large disks, you want to find a convenient balcony
(preferably directly above a large, open dumpster).
Perf Spring Ideas :
--------------------
Here is how to fold two strips together to make a nice looking
springy construction :
Take two stripes, equally long. The longer, the better. Take each by
one end, and glue the ends together, in a right angle to each other.
Now take one of the stripes (A) and fold it over the other stripe (B).
Then fold B over A. And so on. When they have been woven together
entirely (hopefully making ends meet at the final end), glue those
ends together too. You now have a springy sort of thing, about half as
long as the original stripes.
Fixing Springs:
The problem with long springs is that when you pull on it, it also
torques on the ends, and it twists so much sometimes that you can't pull
very far. To get rid of this problem, put a "dummy" link into the middle,
so that you basically create two springs attached in the middle. Then the
ends won't twist, but the center will.
Make many springs and hang them on your Christmas tree in place
of icicles.
Make spring. Draw face around the hole on the end. Makes one computer
bug. -------
|* *|
| O |
| \_/ |
-------
Make spring with three strips instead of one. Arrange strips attached
at one end, at 60-degree angles. --> \ /
__\/
fold each end over in turn, going around clockwise. Ends up as a
nice hexagonal helix.
Paper Dot Ideas :
------------------
Glue onto construction paper in a design.
Find the little round pieces of paper punched out from each hole
and use *them* as confetti.
Punch Card Ideas :
-------------------
Use 80-column punch cards as stencils for t-shirt prints.
Use to make Christmas wreaths : Create a square with 2 or 3 cards.
Then make a sun-burst design by stapling one end of about 12 - 15
cards around the center. Fold outside ends backwards into a point,
and spray-paint the entire creation a festive color (Red, Gold,
Silver, Green etc.). Garnish center with small cedar clippings,
ornaments, pine cones, and a bow.
Punch Card Chip Pranks :
-------------------------
Chips in the hair.
Filled coat pockets with them.
Chips down the back of someone's shirt.
Cover your friend's car with card chip....
Better....wait until a single digit degree day, splash car with water
followed quickly with card chips.
Paper clip Ideas :
-------------------
Make a chain and connect ends to form a necklace.
Use straightened clips to rescue diskettes from immature computers
which depend on software to eject them. (Macs for those not sure.)
Make a "jumper". : Expand clip till ends are just close enough to
touch. Stretch apart a little. Then while keeping the tension in the
clip, barely connect the open tip ends in such a way so they stay
connected until dropped. Then they should "jump" when the ends come
unclipped.
Pencil Ideas :
---------------
Use as darts on drop-ceiling tiles. (Could use paper clips here also.)
Use to launch rubber bands.
Launch from rubber bands as missiles.
Use to fling bent paper clips across the room.
Rubber Band Ideas :
--------------------
Irritate pets by putting them on their feet.
Wear as bracelets, tight necklaces, finger tourniquets.
Used Diskette Ideas :
----------------------
Book marks.
3.5's make good coasters.
Leveling uneven furniture.
Good excuse for late assignments.
Use the insides as a mask for Halloween.
Hang 3.5's on Christmas tree as ornaments.
Throw them as Frisbees. (8" works very well.)
Paint pictures on them. Frame them. Sell them for more than they are
worth to simpletons who don't know any better.
##############
Future Categories :
--------------------
(NOTE: There will probably not be a Scrap Paper category due to
to the expanse of Origami, and these projects can get pretty
complicated to explain without drawings. However, if there is
wide enough support and contribution, it may be added on the
next release of this compilation.)
Used Diskette Sleeves
Used Ink Pens
Extra/Used Write Protect Tabs
Used Printer Ribbons
Bad Tape
Used/Left-Over Mailing Labels
Liquid Paper Pranks
Post-Its
Uses for Mac-Micegruen@macs.UUCP (gruen) (01/11/90)
In article <7589@hubcap.clemson.edu>, chrisb@hubcap.clemson.edu (Instant Insanity) writes: > > Chris Behrens > Struggling Comp Sci Student at large > > ChrisB@Hubcap.Clemson.Edu > > O / O / > ---------begin-----x---cut-keep--------x-----contribute-------------- > O \ O \ > > Odd Office Product Ideas V1.0 1-1-90 > -------------------------------------- > > These are just what the name implies - Odd ideas and things to do with > common everyday office products. Read them and you will catch on. Some > are not as "odd" as others, but they still qualify as ideas. > > > Used Diskette Ideas : ----------------------- For those of us with stress (and who with a computer doesn't have it?) a bad 5.25" disk is a great stress reliever. A mental health diskette thumbtacked to a wall so you can rub your finger where you "shouldn't touch". This has been done by my brother and I quite often. ---Vicky Gruen /--------------------------------------------------------------------\ |The Cavalier strikes again--This is what being a CS/Math major does!| \--------------------------------------------------------------------/ (Homemade .sig's are fun, aren't they? You can just keep going forever! and ever! and ever!)
dbell@cup.portal.com (David J Bell) (01/14/90)
>> Used Diskette Ideas : >---------------------- >For those of us with stress (and who with a computer doesn't have it?) > a bad 5.25" disk is a great stress reliever. A mental health diskette > thumbtacked to a wall so you can rub your finger where you "shouldn't > touch". This has been done by my brother and I quite often. > > >---Vicky Gruen > Another fun way to display a diskette: I keep a 5.25 floppy, conspicuously labeled "SYSTEM DISK --- SAVE" near my PC at work, in case of needing to boot from the floppy, rather than the hard drive... No big deal... BUT the floppy in question is stuck to the side of a file cabinet with a small, round loudspeaker magnet. Really draws stares/questions fom newcomers... The *really* neat part is when they call me on it, I pop it in the drive, reboot, and do a directory of it. Then I tell them I have "special" magnets for the job, "don't try this at home..." Of course, the system tracks, FAT, directory, and first xxxk bytes are on the outside edge of the diskette; I put the magnet (with the diskette in the Tyvek sleeve) directly over the hole. Dave