Customer Reviews

Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things: How to Turn a Penny into a Radio, Make a Flood Alarm with an Aspirin, Change Milk into Plastic, Extract Water and ... a TV with Your Ring, and Other Amazing Feats

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book isn't / doesn't include 1500 uses for vinegar or how toothpaste gets rid of pimples.

Nope, this book and it's sequel (Sneakier Uses ... ) is chock full of simple gadgets and science experiments you can build in your home using coins, magnets, leaves, etc. Any boy and a lot of girls would love to spend time with a parent, uncle/aunt or godparent putting this Spy Stuff/Survival Equipment/Home Security Systems together.

Included are sneaky sources of power (a battery using coins or fruit); how to scavenge wire (to connect your sneaky battery to something); how to use Mother Nature to help you survive in the wilderness; build radios, amplifiers and wireless microphones (baby monitor?); lights, alarms, telescope. There is also a "Green Lantern" magic ring to control the objects you make.

So let's see: Build useful stuff for the home, office, outdoors; spend time with your kids; teach them some science, creativity, frugality, recycling, how to protect themselves, how to survive. That makes this quite a full package.

When I let one youngster read the table of contents it elicited a series of "ooo's" from him. But you can judge for yourself by using the "Search Inside" feature above.

Just the entry on making your own form-fitting ice pack to place on your strains and sprains makes it worth the price!

As for some previous comments, they are cynical and have no soul and no imagination. They knock the book as nothing more than common sense. I'd like to have seen one make a radio from a toilet paper roll and a penny with no directions, just common sense. I've got a fairly broad science background and it wouldn't occur to me, particularly not in a pinch of, say, no electricity due to approaching hurricane and I want to hear the warning broadcast. Using a plastic bag and plants to get drinking water is common sense? As for web sites, who is going to think: "Gee, I need to fix the chip in this picture frame. I've got some milk. Maybe I can log on and find a web site that will tell me how to make a maleable plastic compound out of milk." Common sense just isn't all that common, anyway.

This book is a sort of training manual for MacGyver wannabes. It's a collection of low-tech, cheap little projects that one can do in order to simulate "real" technology. You could certainly use some of these in an emergency, which is what the author suggests, but that's not really the point of the book in my view.

The real use would be for kids-- or, even better, kids and parents-- who want to mess around with some every day items in ways they haven't previously, have some fun, and enjoy some "Wow! Look at that!" moments. Had the author designed the book explicitly for that purpose, many of the negative reviews here wouldn't have been written.

So, the book is both pretty silly and enjoyable, but it's not any sort of survival manual. A word of advice: Avoid the sequel; the author used all of his good ideas in this volume.

With maybe the exception of 5 year olds, this "book" is completely useless. I've had it for 20 minutes and its going in the garbage. Nothing inside this "book" isn't plain ol' common sense. Some of the highlights of this book are:

Using Ordinary Objects as Sneaky Weapons - You can throw coins at an assailant to "stun and throw him or her off balance." Yeah right, that'll work!

Sneaky Wire Sources Are Everywhere - Big surprise, you can use tin foil and speaker wire as spare wire.

Make a Portable Light - Tape a flashlight light bulb to a battery. Wow, that's amazing!

And the most amazing part of the "book":
Capture Break ins On Film - Great project if you don't mind having a large eye sore built next to your door, and the burglar is too dumb to take the disposable camera with him after his picture has been taken.

This is my first time writing a review for anything, but I felt I had for this "book" because its so ridiculous. Even the couple useful things like turning milk into plastic can be found on the web. Obviously the author made up most of this stuff off the top of his head, or found a couple useful things on the web and published it as a "book".

This small book assembles a considerable range of content. Some of the devices proposed to be constructed (as, for example, a contraption that would photograph an entering burglar) seem so farfetched as to belong to the realm of Rube Goldberg. Others are quite practical. For example, there are simple, helpful tips for foiling intruders and for hiding valuables in homemade safes. A procedure is given for the manual rewinding of cassettes and VCRs. There is a section on survival techniques in the wild. This includes ways of starting a fire, including the use of a sparking arc from an automobile battery.

As a science teacher, I especially appreciate the ideas that can be readily converted into science projects. There are, for example, several different ways that batteries can be made from homemade materials. A homemade telescope can be built. There are various activities that manipulate everyday electronics. There is, for instance, an interesting entry on the modification of an everyday radio so that one can eavesdrop on aircraft pilots' conversations.

Finally, the end of a book contains a list of helpful websites, and books, for further reading.

Just in case you didn't understand, let me say at the outset, this book was written and is obviously intended for kids. Boys, most likely, and under the age of 10 or 11 is about right.

For THAT audience, this book is actually quite interesting. If you have a Ph.D. in physics, don't buy it. And if you considered the idea, how did you get that Ph.D., again?

Not to be a smarty, or anything, but I'm really surprised at readers trashing this book because it's not useful. The book is meant to put kids into the discovery mode, to see capabilities in things they might not otherwise have seen, to think outside the box, as it were.

And while not all the suggestions here provide the least bit of interest to an adult, I have to wonder why anyone would have bought this book expecting to get a Master's Degree in Science from it. Geez, the title alone is a dead giveaway.

If this book were published by Brown Paper School, a la The Book of Think: Or, How to Solve a Problem Twice Your Size, it would have five stars from everyone. And apart from the marketing, which should put "for kids" or something like on the cover, the book deserves 5 stars.

Personally, while I've no intention of running the experiment, I found it interesting to read about how to extract drinking water from a plant. Remember, "you can survive a month without food, but only a few days without water."

And for curious kids at least, this book is akin to water.

I bought the book for $3 and it may have been too much. If you were awake during 3rd grade science class you have already seen these "sneaky" things. Most of it is common sense, for instance, this gem:

Use ordinary objects as "sneaky" weapons:

You can throw a handful of coins at an attacker's face to stun and throw him or her off balance.

And believe it or not they have an illustration (see figure 1) just in case you forgot how to throw a handful of coins. What a magnificent "sneaky" weapon.

The theme of this book is more for kids with nothing to do and have a little MacGyver in them. Not a bad bathroom read, but I don't really see myself ever using more than one or two of the projects described in the book. The theme is more for sneaking around which may be better for child thieves than survival tips.

This book describes how to make gadgets. If you already know about electricity and magnetism and basic physical science, buy this book and impress your young cousins/nephews/ nieces. there is survival stuff like collecting water from plants, safety stuff like making a fire extinguisher, and cool stuff like building a magnetic ring or wand to do things (hence the radio shack title).

Also a good purchase for budding mad scientist and science teacher.

Color me disappointed. This would be a fun book for pre-teens to early teens, but the Make magazine / Burning Man crowd should stay away. Anyone with a basic grasp of physics or electronics probably won't find much to astound or amaze here.

This is an interesting set of ideas on how to make things with common everyday items; things we would never just think of. Few have an practical applications but they still provide an outlet for imagination and creativity.