Tag: hacks

Great moments in airline confirmation codes

Back in the day… early 90’s, before the interwebs was really popular, I was a travel agent, using Sabre, which is/was (I’m not sure now) American Airlines’ reservation system. Those confirmation codes are more commonly known, in the industry, as record locators. Pretty much anyone on the system could retrieve anybody’s record by record locator. When I was bored, I would pull up random record locators, by typing in words of the correct length (I believe they were 6 or 8 chars long) Doing this, I found a number of records in which American Airlines employees would chat in the comments fields. I joined them and made some friends that way. The way it works is you would add some comments to the bottom of a record. Then you save the record, and others would add their comments.

bookmarked not for the funny haha, but the awesome story about using sabre as a BBS of sorts for bored travel agents

Address Hacking

hack used by Russian netizens to trick e-commerce stores into delivering US/Canada-only merchandise to them in Russia: So what was possible to do is to put totally Russian address in the order delivery form, like: Moscow, Lenin St. 20, Russia in the address fields, usually there is a plenty of space to enter long things like this, and in the field country they put Canada in the field ZIP code – Canadian zip code. What happens next? The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.

i guess the post office now routes around problems too?

Cylon Roomba

Here’s how to make your very own Cylon Roomba. Like the projects in the book, this one doesn’t harm or permanently modify your Roomba. After you’re done playing Cylon with it, you can turn it back into a music box, painter, or even a vacuum cleaner (I hear they do that too). You don’t need the book to do this project, but it might help if you’re not that experienced with electronics and programming

and so it begins