Favorite Janky Workaronds?

[DoomRater]

What are some of your favorite hacks you've done or seen done in your life?

I have done a few in my time, but my favorite thus far is actually one that was done to me: A friend set up a whole desktop computer with webcam as a prank so he could observe the kitchen area via Skype. It's worth noting that despite him being in another apartment at the time he was technically still helping pay for the apartment I was in, so he wasn't technically doing anything illegal. (edit: Actually Michigan has full party consent laws so technically it would have been had he recorded any audio) And while that might sound creepy, it seems he rightfully guessed I wouldn't be upset over it.

One that I tried myself was when I needed a camera I could observe from another point in the house, so I set up my tablet to run MPC-HC and just let it play the outer camera while I set it up to observe what I needed, then used TeamViewer to connect to the tablet and look at what my camera was able to see from anywhere. This had the added benefit that it didn't matter if I used my phone or main computer, or whether I needed to leave the house or not, so I could use it to keep an eye on the laundry or watch the dog.

Other tricks I've tried included placing long boards over two filing cabinets to make a desk I could sit at and taping cardboard over gaps in the window and fan when I put in a window fan. But sometimes, it's the little hacks that get used the most, like using storage bins stored underneath the bed as a stepping stool for the little dog in the house.

[wildweasel]

I once used a Game Boy Camera and a Super Game Boy as a web cam.

[Nevander]

I don't know how much this counts but I have this pair of speakers that are meant to be plugged into a USB port on a computer to use for speakers, but I wanted to use them for my TV instead. The power for them is from the computer itself via USB, but I needed to plug them into an outlet instead. So what I did was I took my phone charger adapter that connects USB to the outlet and used that instead. Works like a charm.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I've done the boards-across-bricks shelving solution a fair number of times.
I use a USB webcam as a microphone whenever I'm in need of audio recording, because it's still somehow a better mic than the cheap actual mic I bought. I've also done the earbuds-plugged-into-mic-jack trick, which works but you have to be pretty desperate to record something for that to be worth it.
I've extracted sounds from games the messy way with loading the whole lump of data as raw audio and cutting out the sounds (Witchaven in particular), and I know I've experimented with some weird toolchains involving DOSBox and old apps to achieve some obscure format extraction/conversion but I can't think of an example offhand (and am gradually moving to the code-it-yourself solutions as I learn how).

[Enjay]

Many years ago the main leaf in my leaf spring on my car broke. It was being held together by the clamps that hold the leafs together but it was just waiting to fall apart entirely. For those who don't know, this is a leaf spring and the arrow shows roughly where mine broke:

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I was a poor student and about 600 miles from home visiting a friend. So, I jacked the car up to take pressure off the spring and allow it to return to something close to its original shape then I tied it in place using the copper cores from a whole bunch of household cabling my friend had lying in his garage. Then I drove home! 600 miles on UK roads is a major journey BTW. To add to the fun, a huge hole the size of my fist blew in the main silencer on the exhaust while going through the Dartford Tunnel (replaced by a bridge in 1991). I had no way to repair that on the road (I tried a filling station-bought repair kit that blew off after a few minutes) so I had no choice but to drive for something like 10 hours with my car sounding like a light aircraft. My ears were ringing for days.


Then there was that time that I completely dismantled a really old "music centre" (read early hi-fi) to repurpose (via a lot of soldering) the various volume controls (etc) to make a very crude mixing desk that I then used to DJ at a friends party. Strangely, it worked pretty well and was actually more intuitive than some proper desks that I've used. Of course, it's all done by software now. If anyone wants some decent DJing software, I like Mixxx.

[Matt]

Custominventory as cross-class action function.

[SouthernLion]

On my old 1995 Z28 Camaro with the LT1 (NOT my awesome car I've been modding in the "What did you do last?" thread) the previous owner deleted an emissions related air pump and left a gigantic hole in the exhaust without sealing it up. This caused a nasty afterfire to blast dangerously close to the fuel line. I had to take a bolt and hammer that thing into the exhaust and pray it held. I'm so glad to be rid of that car.

My old PC had a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra overclocked and the fan died. I put a case fan on a plastic grill and stacked it on a pile of CDRs until it was close to the primary GPU heatsink. It lasted 5 more years like this, overclocked. BFG was a great company. RIP.

[DoomRater]

Some items in Second Life are no modify. Although you can technically take things out of a no modify object, especially if they have the copy attribute, if they don't have the copy attribute and you take it out of a no modify object, you permanently alter the object with no way to put it back in. Instead of doing these sorts of things to get no modify objects working with different animation sets, sometimes it's just better to attach the object to the HUD so that it's invisible to everyone else, but still functions the way you'd expect it to. At that point you can wear a prop where the object would have been and it'll have similar if not the same actions.