Try it before you buy it

Implants are a big commitment. They should be. I have
been pondering the idea of an NFC implant for a few weeks. To help me decide I
ordered an NFC ring and I’ve been using it to unlock programs in my phone for a
week now. Nothing secure, just things like SMS and Facebook. But if someone
found my phone I wouldn’t want them to look through all my personal stuff. This
isn’t high security but someone who finds my phone lying around hopefully won’t
to go through much trouble to read my texts and look at the cat pictures I
exchange with my roommate. That’s not a sexting joke, we like felines.

After a week of wearing this goofy ring, it’s pretty
hideous, I’ve decided that I would benefit from an implant enough to justify
the commitment, cost, and risk. The three biggest complaints I have about the
ring is that it is uncomfortable, it is unattractive and it doesn’t always read
properly. The first two problems are issues with the ring itself. I actually
have cuts where the sharp edges have dug into my hand. These problems would not
present themselves with an implant.

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After reading Amal's posts and seeing his videos I feel confident buying
his NFC kit and rest assured, I will have a professional put it in. You may
remember how grateful I am to my piercing artist who put my magnet in. And
stitched me up. Both places.

What other ways can people experience enhancements before
they get implants? Taping a magnet to your finger isn’t effective. I’ve combined
magnets and earplugs so that EM fields can be heard and that method can pick up
smaller signals than my finger magnet. I would like this to focus on passive components. Things like Northpaw are beyond the scope of what I'm going for here. This is intended for me to write a primer article
so that people can “test drive grinding” and maybe alleviate some fears.

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I’m horrible with titles and would appreciate
suggestions. This article is not being written for any specific publication,
just to have a nice neat piece curious people can print, share, and try at home.

Comments

  • edited June 2014

  • I too have been curious of this. I am bulk ordering a bunch of nfc stickers if you want some to play with to explore the possibilities. i am going to see how they bend an maintain function. But the stickers are really versatile. more so than that ring i think. hit me up in pm if you are interested. i am getting them for under a dollar each.
  • Great point! I've had a number of friends interested in grinding, but were put off that [my] first steps included surgery and implanting things in my body. Finding happy halfway measures are a great way to get people interested or to learn more, either about biohacking or a specific implant, before making any decisions.
  • im all about research before mod. Just because when i pick infrastructure for work or hardware for something at my house i get the best i can at that current level of tech so i dont have to upgrade. this is especially important when talking about implants because its an operation. i dont want to put something in me that is going to suck or be replaced soon. 
  • I have actually had success taping a magnet to my finger. I never thought to do it before I got my implants, but figured it out for showing other people what I feel.

    To give a bit of background on how I do it, i usually use a neodymium disk, generally about 2mm thick and 8mm in diameter or so, and then just stick that to the middle of a piece of tape, (normal scotch tape works well, but anything light will work,) and I then have the person stick it to their finger such that the magnet rests on the pad of the finger, and so that it is just barely in contact with the finger, with no pressure. If it is not in contact with the finger, or if there is pressure, it won't work. But once it is positioned right, I'll usually use the power brick to a set of desktop speakers and they can feel that almost as well as if they had implants (using my own experience with it and comparing it to my magnets.)
  • @rpka, that's great news! You said that you do this demonstration with a 2x8mm disc and it compares to your implanted magnet. What are the dimensions of your implanted magnet?
  • Magnet Ring, Implant Alternative by LXDickman http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13741
  • @McSTUFF I should correct myself, it was more like 1.5x6mm. I was a little tired at the time of writing that last post, and didn't quite have my measurements right. I would usually use that one, but i have had success with 1x4mm, too. I think the disks work best for being easy to tape to the finger right, but whatever small neodymium magnet I've had lying around at the time has usually worked. I have 3x5mm cylinders under the pad of each ring finger.
  • I've finished the first draft.
    Let me know what changes you would like to see. I want something you can hand to someone and they can get an idea of what makes grinders tick and something they can read in a minute or two.
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  • I would suggest editing for generality. For example, "Grinders have implanted glass tags" might be changed to "Grinders may have implanted glass (coated) tags..."

    The tag itself is the rfid, and is only coated in glass and not everyone has them. These distinctions makes it more difficult for people to generalize and make blanket statements that may not be correct.

    I would also remove the part about medical permissions and make it just common people, like you have later in that paragraph. Nothing pushes buttons and makes things more difficult to get across to the layperson than waving the "we cut on ourselves and we're not doctors" flag.
  • Good thinking, glims. I also took off the image of the 3D printed ring, not that it wasn't a pretty neat idea, but I didn't want any names on the article. I want this to look like a statement from the community, not just some guy, which is why I want to keep getting input.

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  • Nice work McStuff :) I'm going to make a set of ear plugs with magnets inside this weekend!
  • They're really neat. The way the magnet-sound overlaps the regular sound is pretty surreal. Earplugs are tricky to drill. It may be easier to heat a metal rod and melt the earplug. Let me know how your earplugs turn out!
  • Cool idea! I'd love to try it out. What sorts of magnetic fields did you find produced interesting sounds? How powerful did a field have to be for you to hear it?
  • I was surprised to hear microwaves. They're noisy to begin with, even with earplugs in, but you start to hear a second noise pattern when your ear is close to the transformer. Power drills are the same deal.
    I don't think I found a big enough wall transformer but something like a laptop power supply might sound interesting. You'll probably the same thing with each, a 60Hz sine wave.
  • This is great awesome work @mcstuff. I'd love the earplugs. I do have to disagree about your review of the NFC ring. I've had one since they left alpha. Yours looks like an original. They have come ALONG way since the first version. Mine was very rounded and much more sleek then yours so it wasn't as awful to look at.

    Mine is also very effective to read on my phone (Galaxy s7) but have noticed it being worse on others I've tested on.

    I will say the coating on it does eventually fail like mine so one of the rages is partially exposed now.
  • the ear plugs are a genius temporary idea if you dont have immediate access to coated magnets, thank you so much @mcstuff !
  • I tried the magnetic ear plug idea when I first saw this post but used a very tiny magnet and couldn't hear anything with it including moving a permanent magnet near it.  Somehow I missed the idea of putting the magnet on the end of the ear plug.  I'll try that again as soon as I find my pack of foam ear plugs.  - I tried it again and still couldn't hear anything.  I guess it takes a bigger magnet than the tiny ones I have tried -

    As far as taping a magnet to my finger, I could never really get a good sense from doing that.  What did work was gluing one on my finger using rubber cement or even white glue.  Obviously the glued on magnet doesn't stay on very long but I could sense some wall wort type power supplies like the one powering the computer router.  The only electric cord I could sense at all was a large cable powering an air conditioner.

    No special high powered, implant safe magnet was needed either.  I broke some chips off a big refrigerator magnet and glued a tiny chip onto my finger and it worked too.  Waving my hand over other magnets was a fun experiment but sometimes pulled the little magnet off my finger or pulled it out of the glue.  Surprisingly, the tiny slivers of magnet often worked better than the larger one.
  • I too tried using glue (attack) to stick the magnet to my finger and it worked quite well.
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