ThinkGeek’s LED light mine works like this: when exploring lightless coridoors in distant abandoned space outposts, you turn one on and hurl it before you. One of its bristling crown of neo magnets will stick to something useful.
Because each LED Magnetic Light Mine is one super-bright, wide angle LED light surrounded by 12 stalks. Each stalk has a neodymium magnet on the end. Which means you not only can attach these lights to any magnetic surface, but you can aim the light, too.
It’s $7 and needs three coin batteries.
LED Magnetic Light Mine [ThinkGeek]
This is just the thing to stick to your shirt when visiting the airport. They’d never suspect that you had a mine on your person!
Oh, no! It’s dark in my server room and I can’t see to work on my hard drive enclosure. I know! Let’s attach a bunch of neodymium magnets to it! What could possibly go wrong?
Not much, unless by “hard drive enclosure” you mean “hard drive platter.”
I bought 5 of these. They are tiny, but pretty cool. I gave away a few to the IT guys who help me run my lab and I keep 1 in my car. I recommend them, too.
Let me help debunk a myth – magnets strong enough to destroy a HD would have to be so strong you’d have to worry about them ripping the iron out of your body.
Build a fucking PC case out of magnets and you’ll probably still be ok as far as HD retention goes.
Woo, an eight dollar throwie.
This brings back memories…
A long time ago, the only time I ever went to a comic/gaming conference, my buddy brought me to a room telling me, you’d probably like this game. They were demonstrating Paranoia.
So I sat down and listened to the game.
GM: “OK, so there’s this huge machine with knives and saws and stuff, and it’s pretty much the size of the corridor, so there’s no space between it and the walls, floor, and ceiling. So what do you do?”
Clone #2: “Um, (consulting his inventory) I throw a magnetic hand-grenade.”
GM: “What’s your Strength? Agility? Intelligence?” Rolls dice and immediately says: “Clunk, clunk.”
Clone #2: “Whaddaya mean, ‘clunk, clunk’?”
GM: “Whaddaya think the walls and floor right in front of you are made of?”
Clone #2: “Oh, no! So, I jump into the nearest doorway?”
GM: “Dexterity? Strength?…”
Hmmm……I wonder, do they come with HL2′s rollermine soundeffect ?
Something I’ve been wondering: How badly do magnets affect modern monitors?
This seems like an excellent method to test it in a real-world environment. Just send these to a few offices for free, with an email address printed on them, and “Comments? Complaints?”
@ #9 CHIRS
If my “modern” you mean flat screen, I don’t think they’re affected by magnets at all, unless they’re so ridiculously strong that they rip any magnetic parts out of the monitor. They used to screw up CRT – leave brown marks on the screen, I recall, but resting on my laptop and TV have had no effect, as far as I can tell.
Is that Dr. Manhattan in the second picture?
theawesomerobot@5: the iron in your blood isn’t in a form that’s magnetic, actually.
Anonymous: theawesomerobot@5: the iron in your blood isn’t in a form that’s magnetic, actually.
^Tell that to Magneto.