Again, I am impressed at the alacrity and accuracy of the answers posted to name that ware. This time, people made generous use of the SHA-1 hash, but unfortunately, it doesn’t help much at the end of the month for judging. Luckily, bdb’s second post has a hash that I was able to generate a collision for: echo “geiger counter” | sha1sum matches. I’d be floored if his answer was anything else, and as such, he wins! email me to collect your prize, bdb!

A little more on this ware. This one is a little chunk of American history. It is a “civil defense” geiger counter, a Victoreen CDV-717.

These units were sold/distributed back in the cold war so that people could hide in their bomb shelters and know when it was safe to come out again. It has a detachable ion chamber with a six-foot cable so you can hang it outside your shelter and read the radiation levels without having to open the hatch. Duck and Cover! As such, the unit is actually fairly insensitive…I originally got it because it was cheap and I wanted to wander around the lagoon in my backyard to see what sorts of interesting things were being washed into it from upstream in San Diego (you never know…), and to see if any of the granite in my house contains radioactive veins. The unit doesn’t seem to be sensitive enough for that, so I guess I’ll just have to someday spend real money on a modern unit. But, hey, this is a neat ware and an interesting conversation piece.

And, btw, this unit comes from a day when schematics were put in just about everything. Check it out:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 1:30 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.