Introduction to my Business Card | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to my Business Card

t4f.org

228 pointsbrk55 comments

I like this because he is demonstrating his technical ingenuity by designing and building the thing - from scratch - by himself. A great lead into getting an interview or being called in to quote for some work.

But does this show commercial ingenuity ? Perhaps less so. People will be terrified of plugging a random USB device into their machine. And anyway it's pretty easy to buy things just like this - you see them quite a lot at trade shows these days. (eg: http://www.flashbay.com/wafer_usb_card.html)

Sadly, people will just stick this, and any random USB device into their computers. I can't remember the company in question, but there was a story about a security audit where the hacker team got in by handing out free USB drives in the parking lot.

I heard the story attributed to Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and they have fairly strict security (ie men with machine guns, lots of trainig). Probably has to do with the plutonium...

It's a good thing you can't smuggle plutonium on a pendrive... At least not out of LLNL.

yeah, but you probably would have to stand out there for several minutes before that would work at most companies :-)

They could probably just "drop" them on the cement and someone would pick it up.

In at least one security audit, that was exactly what happened:

http://www.darkreading.com/security/perimeter/showArticle.jh...

Or, give them away at the local starbucks / during lunch hour.

I like the idea of these a lot. I've been looking for a way to make sure people don't just throw out my business cards, and making them useful over a long period of time (ie: usb key!) would definitely help...

I like it, yet can't help but think: "Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark!" only in the technological equivalent.

  Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL

The eloquence, the succinctness, the <style> tags after the <body> tag... beautiful.

(yes, I know I'm not seeing what's intended, just having fun)

The proper error message for this situation is "Feed me a stray cat."

followed by "I am Alf and I hunger" and "cherry blossoms fall" if you're going for Zen.

Anybody else getting a redirect?

Mine goes to

http://custom404error.com/?keywords=citibank%2business%2loan...

Poor CMS/server died. It's Joomla, probably no page caching.

Missing images but mirrors:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...

http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net/projects/business-card

Schematic: http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net/archives/Business%20Card/Busines...

Coral Cache works for me:

http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net:8080/projects/business-card

It seems to bounce on and off from the custom404error.com domain to T4F. I've gotten both the correct page and the custom404 one.

This is very cool. Geekout aside: I have a micro-SD card (it plugs into an SD card for housing). It's about the size and thickness of my little finger nail. It holds 4GB (ie 5 CDs; 4000 novels), and it's near the bottom of the range.

Though his interest is in an electronic circuit board since thats his profession.

The website is down with Database error.

Can't find it in Google Cache too, Bing saves the day. http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=Introduction+to+my+business...

If you go to his site's home page at http://www.t4f.org/index.php it will display a message about the service provider having problems (he also provides an alternate GMail address, since he can't get to his t4f.org e-mail). However, from the home page, you can click on the Projects link at the top of that page to get to the pages for the business card project, and others (the home page comes up in Español, just click on the British Union Jack icon in the upper right corner of any page to switch to Ingles from that point forward).

For those who think this is just a USB memory stick (e.g., the FlashBay memory card referenced earlier), it's not - he's showing his skill at integrating a PIC microcontroller that has a number of features for digital/analog data/signal acquisition (see the specs paragraph on his page). His resume and contact info are stored in the flash memory of the PIC controller (only 24KB) - but, he also provides solder pads for an optional 8-pin SPI (or I2C) flash memory chip (up to 32MB).

Of course, Homeland Security, the TSA, etc., won't understand any of that, and he could wind up in Gitmo or whatever hell-hole is being filled, now, except that he speaks Spanish, not Arabic, Persian, Erdu, or other Muslim-dominated languages (they still might not realize that for way too long, though).

Just don't try to take it through airport security.

They are a tad insane about DIY.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9782860-7.html

"But officer, I always leave my calling card every place I hit."

This site is redirecting. Don't click on anything. Especially the cleavage.

It sent me to mybookface, which definitely looks shady.

and not nearly as cool as YouTwitFace!

He should mass produce these. I'd buy a stack for myself and I bet a lot of other people would too.

It's neat, but I'm kinda leery about plugging random USB devices in. Lots of room to compromise security there.

My first thought was, "Oh neat... oh wait.. Autorun... people won't like that"...

I really love the idea and would love to own some of them myself but I suspect most employers would say, "Oh it's clever... can you email us a CV also" and never plug in the card.

Yeah; he needs to give some care to who he hands them out to. At smaller firms where the person doing the hiring has some sort of technical background, it would probably work. But at a big company where everything is going through HR people who couldn't tell a microcontroller from a hole in the ground? Probably a waste of solder. At best someone might think it's kind of neat looking, but the real cleverness will be lost.

It'd be a neat thing to have around to hand to other engineers, maybe encourage them to pull some strings from the inside for you. At some companies an internal recommendation can count for a lot.

Wouldn't people who don't like autorun already have it turned off?

the entire reason it's impressive is he did it himself. if you want, i'll sell you a bunch of USB drives and you can stick your resume on them too. it kind of kills the interview when the go "wow we are so impressed by this awesome business card resume circuit board!!" and you go "well actually i just ordered it from some guy"

Doesn't mention how much it costs or how much time it takes to make each one. Certainly nontrivial on both, though. If you're going to have a business card like that then you it's a serious investment every time you give one out.

Actually he does say how much it costs:

"Clearly, it is not the cheaper business card in the world (about 5 euros/piece for a small batch order), but it is a (relatively) small price for having a card in your pocket that has more CPU power than the computer that led the man to the moon."

5 eur each apparently. Although that probably doesn't include the soldering.

A snippet of a suggestion what I posted on my blog "Now why don't credit card companies make something like this. Make an image of their credit card with a USB stick."

You might want to try selling this idea to credit card companies

Where I work, the Barracuda filter gave me this error when clicking on the link:

> The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is: W32.Scrapkut

Hmmm..you might have to include an instruction manual with that :).

Come on, haily has a point. It’s not at all intuitive. It doesn’t look like a USB device to most people. It doesn’t even say “USB” on the device, unless I missed it.

If this is going to HR-types, how do they know to tear off the corners? Is that in the cover letter?

Look at the card, this post's url is some of the only text on it.

(which would make me think the same care & attention should be put towards this post as his resume... typos [e.g. Opeh instead of Open in the final sentence]? really?]

FortiGate flags this site as containing malware. Odd.

Phenomenal! I would suggest adding mac support :)

Mass storage USB devices work on Macs too. Autorun might not though.

Thanks, I was specifically referring to the mac version of 'autorun.inf' but don't know the terminology :x

Mac OS X doesn't have an autorun.inf equivalent. The closest you can get is a configuration file to tell Finder (the file browser in OS X) to use a custom window size and background when viewing the drive.

There's a thin line between novel and gimmicky.

Cute idea, but I'm not sure I'd take ideas about job-hunting strategies from someone who apparently hasn't managed to find one anywhere in the world for quite some time. :-)

Creative.

I get redirected to mybookface.net, what the hell?

Ditto. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be looking at.

Ads.

I feel really stupid in this thread.

my reaction: you're hired!

dude, you're freakin' me out. amazing.

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