Apropos of nothing, we’ve just moved into a new office to house our ever-burgeoning workforce, and naturally there are a few important tweaks that need to be made to make the place fit for use. Like upgrading how much sweet, sweet caffeine the new coffee machine will dispense in one go, for a start. Until 2 weeks ago, it gave precisely half a cup of coffee every time you pressed the button. Ok, not a problem, just press the button twice, yes? Except that you now have a mug so full that surface tension is the only thing keeping the coffee inside it. And its temperature is best described as ‘volcanic’, so sipping it down to more practical levels is not really an option.

One of the more prosaic benefits of having seriously technical people in the building is that they are very good at tinkering with anything electrical. In this case, they managed to convince the coffee machine to give us a decent cup of coffee at a temperature more tolerable to human beings without fire-proof throats (and for that we are all eternally grateful). They’ve also had a go at reconfiguring one of our fridges, though I was too afraid to ask exactly what they hoped to achieve *. Email in the desserts, perhaps.

It amused me to walk through the kitchen and hear this hushed conversation:

“Ahhhh…”

“So this is…”

“Yup, and then you need to press …”

“Right… so how do you get the next…?”

“Just press it again”

“Oh, ok.”

… and then turn around and find Nigel and Rob peering into the innards of the refrigerator. When I finally got the courage to ask them about it later, their only comment was:

“We are 133t h4x0r5”

I’m too scared to ask what’s next on their hit-list. Has anyone else hacked / modded an appliance?

post by Chris Massey

* I subsequently discovered that they were trying to get the top shelf of the fridge to cool down, as it was, at the time, actually hotter than the ambient room temperature.