Re-program the system you are on to stream data which normally simply disappears into the proverbial bit-bucket to an RS-232 port or similar, to which a device would be connected that would in some physical way represent the discarded data (possibly, a bank of LEDs, or, for the wealthy, a dedicated SVGA monitor displaying a comical rendering of a trashcan which is filling with data, represented by chaotically printed, out-of-alignment green characters.) Alternatively, a public radio channel could be set up. Each machine that has a dev/null could be set by its master (voluntarily) to broadcast the tossed-out data with a short range transmitter. This way, other people could ride around with laptops connected to simple digital receivers, as perhaps "one man's trash is another's treasure."
-- dsm, Jul 19 2002

Baked in the form of chad recepticals. You're probably too young to remember paper tape or punch cards.

In fact, we used to joke that the chad had to be destroyed so the Russians (remember, they used to be the enemy) couldn't reconstruct the secret data.
-- phoenix, Jul 20 2002


Awesome. Attach /dev/null to a small receipt printer bolted a couple of inches above a scanner, so that any data is printed out and immediately shredded.
-- Detly, Sep 20 2005


I neve knew /dev/null could be so much fun! :-)
-- ixnaum, Sep 20 2005


I've always wanted to write a device that pictorially shows you how many 1's and 0's have been deleted... Easy to do with a 256-nibble LUT. It'd be interesting to see the ratio of 1:0's in documents.
-- Dub, Sep 20 2005


I like this almost as much as physical biff. A colleague of mine (Rensselaer Polytechnic - Troy, New York) baked such a thing so he would not have to leave bed to see if he got email. Message received...RS232 sends signal to microcontroller that raises flag. Read mail, flag goes back down.

Pastry.
-- ed, Nov 14 2005



random, halfbakery