The Reminder Brick of Knowledge (and/or Doom)!

This was one of those projects that turned out to be a hilariously bad and dangerous idea (see also the Blammo! Clock).

The latest incarnation of the Reminder Brick system

Overview

A nice, big rock (formerly, a red brick, or, in early trials: various objects such as soup cans, a large plastic Tux the Penguin figure, an empty fire extinguisher, etc.) has a note affixed bearing a reminder or other important information, and is attached to an electromechanical release device anchored to the ceiling. At a predetermined (or random) time, the brick is released into free-fall, generating a significant disturbance upon impact -- especially if its path intersects a person or other solid object.

RELEASE MECHANISM PHOTO HERE

A generic hobby servo is used to actuate the release mechanism (above). When the command "brick" is entered locally or remotely into a command prompt, a simple program sends a series of pulses from the DB0 line of the PC parallel port to command the servo arm to move to the extent of its travel, triggering a free fall of the object of choice. Of course, without a real-time kernel, it is practically impossible to create pulses with any useful degree of timing precision, so the servo arm tends to just swing around wildly – but it does the trick! A much better solution would be to spend 5 minutes rigging an oscillator circuit to generate the desired pulses, but that would constitute actual work.
The KAlarm scheduler, or the "Buddy Pounce" feature of GAIM (a universal instant messaging client) can also be used to trigger the system, which makes for many fun possibilities...

The Reminder Brick didn't last long, as I kept forgetting not to place things under it, and finally elected to pursue safer options.

This page is in progress. More content will be added as soon as I have a chance.