I keynoted at MacHack twice. The second time, I shut the damned thing down for good (but that's okay; I also delivered the Keynote Of Death at the final Boston Macworld Expo that year). The first time, it was still the go-go-go Nineties (I think). I had heard about the Hacks contest. Sometime over the course of the three-day conference, you are to create a Hack to show off at midnight on the final day. I'd always known these Hacks to be utterly brilliant and heroically useless bits of software that found their way into download libraries the following week...like the hack that turned your entire Mac interface into ASCII. And it really, really worked: all of your apps worked precisely the same way, only instead of a bitmapped screen, the OS would approximate it all in ASCII letters. I haven't been Lord and Master of OS internals wince my Apple II days and couldn't really pull off any Ninja-style software hacks...so I thought I couldn't play. I was soon advised otherwise. All that was generally expected was that it was a commercially-useless project and that it would demo well. And so, I built my own hack: an AppleScript-controlled dartgun. I harvested an analog-to-digital converter and a solenoid from a homemade robot I'd brought, and supplemented them with stuff I bought at the mall across the street from the hotel. If someone tried to open a folder that you'd marked as Untouchable, or if you were simply watching from a different Mac on the network and saw some shootable passing by, the miscreant lost an eye. Originally it was supposed to blast him with Silly String, but the solenoid wasn't up the the challenge of triggering the valve. It was part of a doorlock mechanism from a Miata; I was disappointed. Oh, well. If I tell you that I won a Major Award for this hack, would you insist on knowing exactly how many Major Awards were handed out, or will you throw me a bone and just assume that I was named King Of Hacks? This was well before 9/11 but even then, I kind of assumed that packing this in my luggage for the trip home would be trouble. So I took one snapshot and then broke it down for parts. Hardware prototyping like this is the reason why Apple didn't ask me to design the iPod for 'em.

Modular Add-On Solenoid set-up, allows adding as many valve as desired, as they simply stack one onto another. 12V Solenoid is used for simplicity, and a 3-way valve for exhaust of the air within the cylinder, after being shut off. Propane tank is used for a booster tank, for extra air at each device.