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31 March 2008

Our culture makes me cry. How to hack an air "freshener."[More:]I am dumbfounded by the stupidity of an "automatic" home-use air freshener. A criminal waste of resources.

Imagine the water, coal (electricity: it's made in China), petroleum (it's made of plastic; it was shipped a bajillion miles), and toxic chemical waste (the literally poisonous pressurized liquid inside; it's got a circuit board) that went into manufacturing this piece of shitty consumer merchandise.

Were I the boss, I'd imprison the executives who approved this product.
Ah, coal. Do you know it still produces like, 50% of US electricity? And that's it's being pushed as an "alternative fuel" (alternative to gasoline, I guess)?

Anyway, I was going to come here and talk about how I "hacked" my universal remote that doesn't work with my stereo amplifier, but maybe I should save that for my blog.
posted by muddgirl 31 March | 22:19
If you're going to go through all that trouble to hack an air freshener, just buy a bottle of the damn stuff and push the button every time you poop. Last time I went shopping, my grocery store had 10,000 bottles of air freshener, from "clean linen" to "french vanilla."
posted by desjardins 31 March | 22:22
Here's the board. There's a control chip underneath the black epoxy bump.

Wait, what? They encapsulated the chip? Why? Do they have top-secret NSA-level technology in their poop-masker? Clearly, this device must do more than mask poop scent. A stone-axe simple 555 timer and a couple of caps would be enough to make a device that automagically farts flowers every n minutes.
posted by Triode 31 March | 22:42
I hate going to houses with these stink bombs. Blasting sickeningly sweet scents into to air does not make your house smell clean.
posted by arse_hat 31 March | 22:50
Whatever happened to opening a window afterwards?
posted by bmarkey 31 March | 22:57
Think too, of the educational resources wasted. All those years of schooling, math, physics, electrical engineering--so this guy could spend an hour cracking open the poopstinkcoverupper and reverse engineering it to behave the way he wants it to.

At another level of idiocy, would this qualify as a DMCA "circumvention" I wonder?

Better still: use a fan, light a match, wave a newspaper frantically, or, y'know, accept the fact that your shit stinks too, like everyone else's on the planet.
posted by Joe Invisible 31 March | 22:58
And the air "freshner" stuff is nasty cancer-causing chemical shit. Only stupid people would willingly breath it.

Which, I suppose, is the target market for this wholly unnecessary and wasteful air "freshener" device in the first place.
posted by Five Fresh Fish 01 April | 00:14
Farnsworth is dead.
Oh Farnsworth, how ye fell, to think, ye started with tv.//

That's brilliant. Hacking an 'air freshener'./ I love this. Too funny.

Light a match, let it burn down some, problem solved.
You know, this AskMe thread had many suggesting those 'air fresheners'. Yoiks.

posted by alicesshoe 01 April | 01:26
air fresheners and potpurri are the horrors. Nothing smells better than a *clean* bathroom! CLEAN IT!

Though I will admit to not being above dropping scented oil on my vacuum bags for that nice smell after vacuuming.
posted by dabitch 01 April | 06:54
I dump lavender on the rug and vaccuum it up. (Gives it that old lady smell I like.) I also have sweetgrass here and there when I remember, which gives it that swampy smell.

I try to pretend I'm in the sloughs instead of super urban Oakland. yeah, those noises are wind and water rushing by, and NOT actually heavy traffic. And that boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-booming is really a weird sort of bird (or possibly bullfrog), and not someone's crappy woofers... I'm asking my brain for a lot here, aren't I.
posted by small_ruminant 01 April | 12:32
Whatcha listening to? || For My 400th Post, I Give You - Wristcutters, A Love Story!

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