Ants Invade iBook

xkranda writes "Seriously ... this is off the Apple Discussions site. Apparently some poor sap's iBook became infested with ants. All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!"

That's funny.

Funny because a colony of Ants is kind of like Mother Nature's Beowulf Cluster.

Also, please don't mod me into oblivion for making a lame joke =)

Re:That's funny.

I've been telling those mac weirdos the whole time that apple was buggy. Never believed me.

isn't it obvious?

I think it's pretty obvious why the ants went for the iBook. Whenever i go on a picnic, the ants always go after the fruit first, especially APPLES. I'm going to get modded off the board for this.

I knew it all along...

OS X is full of bugs.

Re:not all that funny

Maybe they were stealing his time?

Re:I knew it all along...

thank you for explaining that to me Mr. SmartyMan. you're deffinately smarter than me, cause i didn't know that. teach me more about teh computar.

So are they called...

iAnts? *rimshot*

What would Ellen Feiss say?

I looked down and saw the ants on my computer.

I was like... hnuh...

The ants de-voured my computer.

It was a really good computer.

---

Ellen, once you feel the ants crawling on your skin, darling, it's time to seek help.

Re:What would Ellen Feiss say?

It was kind of a...

...

(wait for it...)

...bummer...

Re:for anybody wondering who ellen feiss is

I don't get it. What's so funny about a button that says "Get Quicktime" on it?

Ants and electronics

Ants are supposed to have a strange sense of magnetic fields and electric fields. Electronics give off a lot of stuff, animals are especially attuned to it. They have been known to short out traffic lights etc., by crawling inside and bridging connections. They use these fields for navigation and stuff. They are pretty precise.

Re:Ants and electronics

Not to mention that to some insects, the materials used to laminate circuit boards and some plastics that compose the electronics, are amazingly tasty... There was/is a lot of problems, for example, with cockroaches eating the plastic in wiring and circuitry...

Re:Ants and electronics

From time to time I've found myself chewing on anything I can find. Pen lids and pencils are one thing, and I caught myself nibbling the corner of a NIC a few months ago. I can't exactly describe the flavour. It wasn't offensive, more "interesting". "Interesting" might just be enough to sucker ants in. -b.

Re:Ants and electronics

Never open a burglar alarm panel box in any food establishment if you're the slightest bit squeamish.

Re:Ants and electronics

I have a hub that apparently runs at the ideal temperature for incubating ant eggs. At least 3 times ants have come in and tried to build an ant-nursery underneath this hub, which is just sitting on the floor.

Maybe they were feeding the babies my lost packets?

Re:Ants and electronics

Report [tamu.edu] Has a report from the department of Engineering Technology at Texas Tech about ways to stop fire ant damage. The first few pages discuss the problem: Basically it says that the alternating magnetic fields generated by and within the electronic equipment attract the ants from short distances. When the ant dies the electricity causes strange reactions, including the release of pheromones which attract other ants. And it seems that in some places this is a serious problem as was said with some figures quoted. However this report is about fire ants and I am too lazy to research more to see if it generalizes to all aunt species so good luck :)

ants are seekers

Now.. I want to know what they were seeking that they ended up in this guy's laptop.

uhhh.. maybe not, come to think of it.

Re:ants are seekers

it was all that damn cocoa

Ants like Apples . . .

big deal. What's next in the news: Birds fly into Windows server?

Re:Ants like Apples . . .

Not until recently--it wasn't so very long ago that windows finally got transparency in windows :] Only MS could get away with selling windows that weren't transparent for as long as they did ;]

-1 Redundant

Come on, editors, watch those duplicate posts [slashdot.org].

Someone needs to calm down

All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!

It's ok, you can get down off of the chair now, Daisy.

Dude!

You're getting an infestation!

Alternative explanation

Maybe the iBook was just on acid.

damn

Thats one rotten apple!

Beats roaches

True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.

Re:Beats roaches

I once had a Beige G3 300, and a spider of some description decided that the ethernet port seemed like a pretty attractive living space.

One day, I could not for the life of me figure out why the ethernet port wasn't working. I got round the back of the computer, and noticed a little bit of what appeared to be plastic thread hanging out. I pulled, and pulled and pulled, and I swear I pulled out the longest fucking piece of spider web you'll ever see.

-- james

Re:Beats roaches

You think you were surprised -- I'm envisioning the world's most alarmed spider as you pull thread out of its ass as fast as it can produce it. Now there's an image for ya.

Something like this...

I heard once about a problem like this before. A few cities in the southern US were having. Apparently, red ants would get into traffic lights' circuitry and completely destroy the stuff, costing a great deal of money.

It turns out that a few ants had got in there and fried. Upon their deaths, their bodies released pheremones, attracted more ants, who promptly got fried, releasing even more pheremones, attracting more ants... You get the idea.

Re:Something like this...

So traffic lights support genocide? I'll use that next time I go through one on red

Killed my pentium.

I use to keep a P133 out in the garage workbench. I One day, I went out and the screen was black. I powered down for a hard reboot and got a few odd beeps and nothing else. I live in the middle of the Arizona desert and expected dust would eventually kill the machine. Turns out a fat ass black widow spider decided to melt her fat self on my processor.

The original post

from the apple discussion board:

Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs! I knew this was bad. I took the computer out to the garage and completely disassembled the thing layer by layer . My stomach turned when I exposed the main circuit board and saw thousand of ant and eggs (and a queen or two), writhing across every inch! Argh! After several hours with a vacuum and a can of air I finally got the thing clean. I put it back together (only a few extra screws) and luckily it works fine. Any theories on why ants would decide to move an entire colony into an ibook? Warmth? Sweet circuit boards? I think they were attempting to colonize the ultimate frontier: cyberspace.

Re:Plastics?

Oooo! I know the answer to this one, because it happens to some kinds of dolls, too.

The answer many common plastics make use of "food" components, including corn solids and syrup. Here's a list [state.ia.us]of things made with corn, including plastics.

Plastics "separate" over time, with components migrating to the surface. It's the organic parts of plastic that cause problems like mold/fungus on plastics, as well as make them tasty for bugs.

Re:Plastics?

Mice are also attracted to aging plastics, probably for the same reason -- after a certain stage, the plastic smells like "food" again.

One guy on the Apple forum was wondering if he should remove the ants or just kill 'em in place (by freezing or whatever) -- definitely remove them. Ants are quite acidic, and a pile of dead decomposing ants WILL corrode susceptible components. I've also seen computer cases pretty well rusted from accumulations of dead cockroaches.

Re:The original post

Does anyone find the irony of this and Pixar producing "A Bug's Life"

If they get together with The guys from Mainframe [mainframe.ca], I think we might have a hit.

Bob! Bob! We've got

bugs in Mainfraime!
Slow down mike. How many of them are there?
Millions! And some of them all over the diner. -- I can just see the headlines now:
"Bugs slash Dot's." It'll be the biggest scandal in miliseconds!

Apple Discussion Boards slashdotted

Heh, I was browsing the apple discussion boards when things slowed down to a halt... So I thought, hell, I'll just read slashdot while I'm waiting for this to clear up... Lo and behold, I found the reason. ;)

Re:Apple Discussion Boards slashdotted

You and me both - looks like /. are running their own 'Switch' campaign.

Re:Apple Discussion Boards slashdotted

It seems like the ants are the ones running their own 'Switch' campaign.

better than roaches.

i used to have a 7200/120 that housed a roach family. that was pretty fucking gross.

i eventually had to take everything in my house and shake it out over a plastic tarp that i ringed with roach killer. some stuff had to be submerged.

moral of the story: never pay $180 a month in rent, anywhere.

Re:better than roaches.

Well, when I was younger, I left a coke can on my dresser. The next day, I had another coke, put it down somewhere, got the two confused. Next thing I knew I had a mouthful of ants. Ew.

Could be worse...

Imagine if it were infested with nmake!

Seen it before...

I had something like this happen once before to me to a cordless phone charging stand that was in my kitchen. Something with sugar in it got underneath the charger and the ants made the charger their home. I'd guess someone left something sweet was around the computer. I haven't seen the comment since Apple's site isn't responding.

I just take the charger apart. Sprayed it with Lysol (yes this will kill ants). Put it in a plastic bag and left it. Next morning lots of dead ants. Then came cleanup followed by lots of drying. I also had to keep spraying for ants
until eventually they quit coming back.

However the charger is still working nicely for me. :)

Instant Karma!

I just remembered, the second (or was it third?) big game released by Maxis on the Mac, long before the PC, was "Sim Ant"...

Revenge is a dish best served with mandibles and insect appendages...

A theory!

Maybe the ants were in fact PC enthusiasts, set out to destroy every Mac in sight. Thank god this guy was able to stop the invasion in time, or this would have been the end of Apple.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

Re:you obviously don't live in southern CA

Napalm, daisy cutters, nukes, bio and chem weapons have no effect on Fire Ants. You can't kill them, you can just make them move. It's almost like they are natures version of lawyers.

Reminds me of a movie

Anybody see the independent movie PI? The mathematician's "super computer" gets infested with ants in the beginning and prompts him to make a deal with someone for the best chip out there in return for research into the magic number (sort of like the unified theory but different).

Pi?

Was this guy looking for order in chaos? Did it spit out a 216-digit number before the ants infested it? Does he have intense migraine headaches?

Obviously...

the ants saw the Switch ads.

and I was building a new colony in this Thinkpad, and, uh, like someone put a floppy disk in and it was like, beep boop bop, and our colony was, like, gone...

They're not bugs...

they're features.

They're not bugs...

They're undocumented creatures.

Better than ...

Better than finding a worm in your Apple.

Or half a worm for that matter.

Ba bum bump

A first

Probably the first time a bug-induced crash was fixed just by turning on the Raid, rather than vice versa.

Come on, it's funny. I hear you snurfling...

What are the odds?

Another Steve Jobs company attacked by Antz.

Is Dreamworks responsible?

What are the odds?

xbox roaches

the first shippments of xboxes had roaches in them. my girlfriend works at funcoland, and when they cut into the boxes to unpack them roaches came skittering out and scared the shit out of them.

I can beat all the insect/reptile takeover stories

I had a buddy of mine ask me to take a look at his computer. It had begun to make thumping/ticking noises when he would turn it on, and would not stop till he turned it off. I cracked the case, to find a quite dead and petrified rat inside his case, that thumped against his cpu fan. fuckin sick.. how it got in, and died in such a way to not stink to high heaven, I will never know, though I suspect someone put it there..

Saw it on Saturday Night Live

Mike Myers was introducing another segment of "Germany's most disturbing home videos" when his computer was found inoperable, lying on the ground. He turned it over to find....Ants!

How about Omniview switchboxes?

Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:07:26 -0800
From: TechSupp
To: ...
Subject: RE: ants in omniview switchboxes

Thanks for the feedback. This is a new one to us. If you have any problems
down the road let us know and we will replace them. I have forwarded this
info to the President of Belkin and the Product Managers.

Technical Support Manager
Belkin Components

-----Original Message-----
From: ...
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: ants in omniview switchboxes

came back to work from the holiday weekend. noticed a stream of ants
going up the cables in the back of a rack in the server room. oddly, this
stream of ants was carring larva up the omniview cables, and appeared to
be entering the omniview via the dip switch hole, and then exiting withot
the larve. I traced the stream out of the building, then traced a smaller
stream down a hallway and to another room with another system with an
omniview. here as well ants were streaming in from outside with larve,
depositing them in the omniview, and exiting. I took both omniviews
outside and opened them. hundreds of ants and hundreds of tiny white ant
larve were in each omniview, apparently storing and guarding the ants
under the bottom circut board. nothing was hurt, so I shook/knocked/blew
the ants out, dissasembled the omniview, coated the case with ant spray,
let dry, reassembled, reinstalled, everything works fine.

it dosen't appear the ants were after food in either case. I think
something about the omniview gave them a home they felt compelled to store
their larva in. I just can't explain why they would pick those, and how
the so effectivley found the only two omniviews on that side of our
building. the omniviews involved are both SE 4 port, and are still
working fine.

-J.R.

Webs and nests collect moisture.

Back when I was a Mac hardware repair guy, this person came in with an SE30 that would fail "only in the mornings". We thought it might be an odd time-sensitive extension like an anti-virus app, but we opened it up, and it had some big bug habitat in there. Even though the bugs seemed absent, their nests would collect the morning dew and short out the board.

Ive had worse...

So, I was doing my time, paying my dues and doing what I could to bring quality to the lifeless void that is a Best Buy black shirt technician (well, we became black shirts while I worked there). Anyhoo, this "woman" brought in a very old packard bell that was covered in yellow dust. A smoker. Some of the worse shit comes from smokers. As soon as she walked in the door, the AV tech told me to tell her to go away. My manager heard this and got pissy. She later recanted.

She brought her computer up and slapped down her PSP that had 20 or so days left and demanded a new computer because this one would no longer turn on. So I said okay, checked it in and put it in the back. When we opened it, a whole cock-a-roach family came running out. I almost vommited right then and there. It took WEEKs to get rid of those fuckers, adn even then we knew they were not gone.

Aparently about two months earlier this same nasty lady came in to the av area with a vcr for a "cleaning." When the AV tech opened it he found a dead mouse and silverfish. To this day you can find silver fish in that best buy :

That's what happens...

when you leave an apple laying around.

"Ants Ate My Hub!" from Paul Lujan

This reminds me of the November 4th [blogspot.com] entry (scroll down a bit) on Paul Lujan's site entitled, "Ants Ate My Hub!". Pretty funny(?)...

Simple Extermination Procedure

1) Power on laptop
2) Wait for smoke and insect screams to die down
3) Ventilate Area

You think ants are a gross thing for an iBook..

I fix iBooks in the computer store for Brown Uni and we had someone bring in an iBook that apparently had been vomited on copiously at some party. ALL over the keyboard, and inside the circuits. For some reason, it wasn't working! And they brought it in about 3 days after it happened....

How about Roaches in an IBM

When I was doing my time as a bench tech, a guy brought in his IBM desktop, complaining that it had turned itself on, smoked and will not work anymore. We figured lightening. When he brought it in, it had the yellow staines of a smoker, but nothing else to tip us off. I opened the box and dozens of roaches came pooring out. We had to bag it up and call the guy, telling him that we couldn't work on his PC under warranty because IBM refused to pay for bug bomb! The roaches had curled up in his power supply, nested there and started eating the cables. To this day my skin still crawls when I see one of those IBM desktops.

This is what happens...

When you ask a Mac user to set up a "honeypot" machine.

I've seen the like before.

A friend's old Powerbook (500 series) became a hive. They didn't know it, but all of the ants that had been infesting their kitchen were roosting in their laptop set up on the kitchen counter. When the machine finally died from the generations of life that had lived in their machine, they had another friend open it up and discovered that it was packed full of ant-hive. The ants themselves had moved on by the time they had the machine looked at, as it had been turned off since it began to malfunction.

Further, I myself have a power supply for my speaker system that from time to time becomes infested with the tenacious little bastards. This thing is packed with them, I tell you. To get rid of them, I always just unplug the power supply for a few days.

Sprockets flashback

[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!

[Cowboy Neal] [jt.org]
Now that's an ant farm of a different color!