Not The Intended Use / Other

• Under Australian consumer law, you are entitled to a refund or replacement if an item you purchased is not fit for its intended purpose. This obviously means the task it was originally designed for, but also, if you conveyed a different purpose to the person you bought it from, and it's not suitable for that purpose, you are still entitled to a refund/replacement. This is why many products on Australian shelves, particularly dangerous ones such as poisonous cleaners, weed killer, and pest control items include usage and safety directions on the packaging, along with "Not to be used in any manner or for any purpose contrary to this label without authorization."
• Game engines such as Unity are obviously meant to be used for games, but they have also been used in non-gaming contexts, such as mobile device interfaces.
  • In the same vein, Unreal Engine was created with the main purpose of being used to develop 3D games. However TV production houses found that they could just use it to create virtual sets and composite their actors into it, saving them a ton of money and time in the process. One notable example of this was the children's TV series LazyTown where it was used to render the virtual sets alongside a framework called XRGen4. Epic later went on to incorporate workflows for film and television productions in subsequent incarnations of the Unreal Engine and planning to charge the non-gaming industry with its own subscription plan.
• As is expected with the business model of product segmentation, Intel and AMD developed and released chipsets intended for different markets, from enthusiast or server-grade X-series, to the gamer-centric Z-series, all the way down to the lowly H-series chips and business-oriented B or Q-series chipsets on the Intel side, and the equivalent X, B and A-series chips for enthusiast, mainstream and entry-level markets on the AMD side (at least with Ryzen that is). The aforementioned cheapo or enterprise-grade chips are by and large made for the markets they serve, with Intel's B-series sporting features that gamers or the average home user would care little about. And yet for some reason these H or B-series chipsets wind up in gaming motherboards of all things, even if they don't support pro-level stuff like overclocking; a number of vendors did manage to weasel around the no-overclocking mandate though, despite efforts from Intel to curb unofficial overclocking support.^note Even if they did manage to add overclocking support through the BIOS, users are still limited to adjusting the base clock (BCLK) multiplier. Not to mention that you have to keep Windows from pushing that dreaded microcode update as well; have it installed on an OC'd system and you're screwed.
• Cars have long come with a built-in cigarette lighter, intended to light cigarettes. The 12-volt socket the lighter plugs into was designed specifically for it — but inventors soon realized it could be used to power other convenient gadgets. Now, between the success of these gadgets and the decline of smoking, many cars come with several 12-volt sockets and no lighter at all!
• Patent laws were meant to protect the creators and inventors from having their creative endeavors exploited and stolen, ensuring they would be compensated. Due to loopholes in the law, they do nothing to stop businesses from buying up patents and suing others for using it (at least in the U.S.), often under vague interpretations of use. Given that fighting lawsuits is more expensive than settling, entire companies have been set up to do just this (often called Patent Trolls).
  • Averted with an older "misuse" of patents: while owning a patent entitles you to protection from copying for some time, the documents typically must include relevant production details or chemical components, meaning once the patent expires anyone who wants to copy your product can do it pretty easily. This was, in fact, precisely the originally-intended use of patents: granting exclusive rights to the invention for a limited time in exchange for revealing its secrets publicly so that it can be easily copied after that time expires. Some companies, like the lubricant maker WD-40, have deliberately avoided filing for patents to keep their trade secrets, well, secret.
• Quite a few popular drugs started life as treatment for something else, but the side-effect was so interesting that it soon became almost exclusively known for the non-intended use.
  • Heroin was originally used to treat morphine addictions. Then people ended up getting addicted to heroin.
  • Viagra and Cialis were created to treat pulmonary hypertension and angina pectoris. It turned out that the tissue responsible for erections responded in the same way as the original target for the drugs, so both drugs were rebranded and distributed as a drug for erectile dysfunction before being tested and approved for the intended use.
  • Rogaine (a topical treatment for baldness) was also originally developed to treat hypertension.
  • Some over-the-counter cold medicines use the active ingredient diphenhydramine (better known as Benadryl), which is an antihistamine meant to help with allergies by drying up your sinuses. However, side effect number one with a bullet for diphenhydramine is that it causes drowsiness. So drug companies started marketing the side effect of diphenhydramine as a primary effect, saying that it would help you fall asleep when you were feeling sick by making you drowsy. Many over-the-counter sleeping pills are just diphenhydramine by itself.
    • In addition, diphenhydramine/Benadryl was originally developed as an antipsychotic drug. Turns out that it also dries up your sinuses and makes you sleepy. So diphenhydramine managed to get this effect twice when cold medicines started including it.
    • And in a third example of this trope, benadryl taken in high doses leads to vivid hallucinations, which has lead to use as a recreational drug.
  • Cough medicine works not by soothing your throat, but by shutting down the cough reflex in your brain. Taking cough syrup in excessive doses produces a psychoactive effect on par with illegal street drugs. The reason cough syrup isn't illegal in spite of this is because there's no other known way to medically treat a cough. Plus, the taste is downright nasty, being bitter enough to make some people vomit from it. Though neither the taste nor its price stopped it from being hailed as a status symbol by some in the Hip-Hop community, specifically for the psychoactive effect. The cocktail known as "purple drank", "lean", etc. is a mixture of codeine cough syrup mixed into Sprite with hard candy to dull the bitter flavour. Though due to restrictions on the sale of codeine, other substances such as Dextromethorphan (DXM) have been used as they can produce psychoactive effects similar to codeine but are not as restricted at least in some jurisdictions.
  • As famously described in The Wolf of Wall Street, Qualuudes began their life as a sleep aid. However, users noticed that after taking them, if they resisted the urge to sleep, it would have a very powerful psychoactive effect. The popularity of the secondary use eventually led to Qualuudes being banned.
  • Spironolactone is an inexpensive diuretic treatment for high blood pressure and/or fluid buildup, but it also has the side effect of blocking masculizing hormones such as testosterone, leading to it being prescribed primarily to women. While it's still commonly used for its intended effect, the side effect has led to spironolactone being used by a large number of transgender women in order to deliberately block masculine hormones.
  • Accutane was originally developed as a skin cancer treatment, but was found to have the interesting side effect of completely eliminating acne at the same time. Nowadays, accutane is the nuclear option for acne when all conventional treatments fails.
  • Some students take the stimulants used to treat ADHD to pull off all nighters. The problem with ADHD is a lack of ability to focus on any one topic at a time, so the medication treats that. However, some students abuse this effect to stay awake well past the point they should have gone to sleep. And just like with Qualuudes, resisting the urge to sleep while on these drugs produces a psychoactive effect. Sadly, this has led to people with ADHD diagnoses having a harder time getting the drug because of how it's been abused.
  • Botulism toxin was initially used in small amounts to treat disorders of the eye muscles (such as having an eyelid that was twitching nonstop; paralyzing the muscle responsible for the facial tic with the toxin was the only way for the patient to get relief). Then a plastic surgeon, Richard Clark, documented a use for the toxin cosmetically — by relaxing the muscles of the face with the toxin for one of his patients, it dramatically reduced the wrinkles of the face. Now "Botox" is the most common cosmetic operation, with nearly seven and a half million procedures done annually in the United States alone.
  • Without delving too deeply into the ideologies behind it, a lot of modern day alternative and holistic medicine practices and fad healthcare trends revolve around this principal by using medicines for ailments outside of their common application such as using the appetite reducing and insulin stimulating effects of Diabetes medication to stimulate weight loss or using diuretics and water pills to assist with body toning by reducing water weight. Given these practices are often done without or even in spite of consultation with a medical professional, it's unclear how beneficial these techniques actually are versus the risk involved.
• In a similar vein to drugs being used recreationally, certain non-drug substances have gained notoriety for being used far outside its intended purpose, such as rubber contact cements and roof sealants made from toluene, acetone found in nail polish remover, and nitrous oxide used as propellant in whipped cream. Such was the problem with the so-called "Rugby boys" in the Philippines that the local DEA mandated bitterants to be added to contact cement in order to discourage intentional misuse; though this didn't keep desperate street kids from still huffing them, apparently.
• Magazines for several weapons like the AK-47 make excellent bottle openers. So do the iron sights of several missile launchers. People have used them for this purpose (and damaged the feed lips on them) so much that some later weapons, such as the IMI Galil rifle, included actual bottle openers as part of their decorations^note in the Galil's case, the ferrule at the back of the handguard which normally retains the bipod when it's not deployed to prevent loss of combat efficiency.
• Kleenex Tissues were originally marketed as make-up removers until the company noticed the majority of people buying them were women and men using them to blow their noses instead.
  • Similarly, cotton swabs (AKA Q-tips) are theoretically intended for applying makeup or antiseptics. Everyone and their mother uses them to clean their ears out, even though the package says you're not supposed to use them to do that.
• USB ports, which were originally intended to allow peripherals to interface with computers, have the added feature of a 4.5-volt power line. There are AC adapters that completely ignore the data lines to provide power for charging or running portable devices, and they are fast becoming the standard for things like cars, and airplane and bus seats, where a low-voltage DC power supply is desired. You can now even buy receptacles with built-in USB ports specifically for charging your devices without an adapter right at home.
• Graphics cards are designed to perform certain types of operations on lots of data very quickly. This means that if you have a problem that can be reduced to one of those operations and a lot of data to do it on, you can co-opt the graphics processor to do it. It turns out that certain kinds of physics computations fall into this category, so early "graphics workstations" were extremely popular with physics and chemistry departments for reasons the designers never expected. More recently, the heavy parallelized architecture in modern high-performance graphics cards make them ideal for applications that take advantage of parallel programming, such as machine learning or cryptocurrency mining.
  • Outside of PC graphics cards, video game consoles such as the Xbox contained powerful processors and were being sold at a loss to recoup the pricing in games. Predictably, people wanting raw processing power bought up the consoles to make use of that hardware for calculations. The US Air Force has one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world right now, capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), making it the fastest interactive computer in the entire US Defense Department. It's made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles.
• In the early days of skiing (and still sometimes on more rural areas), old cars had their drive wheels hooked up to rope pulleys. With another pulley mounted on the top of a slope, the wheels lifted from the ground, and the car in forward idle, a makeshift rope tow ski lift would be created.
• Changing your web browser's user agent string, which among a few other minor details tells a website which browser you're using for the purposes of compatibility, isn't something an everyday web user would ever have to worry about. That is, until people realized they could use the old style of Google (as well as other sites) which some people prefer by using a plugin to tell the site they're using a browser incompatible with the new style of Google.
• As the name implies, the Fender Jazzmaster was a guitar designed with jazz music in mind. Ironically, it was largely ignored by jazz musicians and instead it quickly became a hit with Surf Rock guitarists. The guitar was popularized once again by a number of Alternative Rock bands and artists from The '80s onward.
• Iron bombs are designed to hit ground targets—the only guidance they have is gravity, after all. However, a particularly creative USAF pilot found himself having to deal with enemy MiG fighters while in his relatively slow and somewhat ungainly F-105 fighter-bomber, and elected to fly higher than the enemy fighter and eject a rack of bombs he had been carrying. The MiG pilot hadn't expected that move for fairly obvious reasons, and may go down in history as one of a very few fighter craft to have been bombed in mid-flight.
  • This wasn't the first time iron bombs had been used that way, either. Faced with streams of very durable American B-17 and B-24 bombers flying over Germany, German interceptors would on occasion fly over the bomber stream and release bombs onto the bombers, easily destroying them if they hit. Regardless, the above feat is more impressive for being used on a jet fighter rather than a slow-moving propeller bomber.
  • More advanced modern bombs with their own guidance systems make it easier, but it's still not expected or common for many of the same reasons as with regular unguided bombs, which is why it's so distinctive that the F-15E, a strike fighter variant of the F-15 Eagle, made its only air-to-air kill with a laser-guided bomb against a helicopter gunship. Even then, it only happened because they were intending to hit the gunship on the ground and were fully ready to switch to an air-to-air missile when it took off before the bomb hit, but decided to hold the guidance laser on it as it lifted off just to see if it would work anyway.
• Microsoft Excel may have been designed as an accounting and spreadsheet program, but it can be used to classify and organize all kinds of things. As just one example, historians may use Excel to organize, classify and summarize research materials. One Tumblr user's grandmother used it to design knitting patterns◊.
  • Microsoft Excel may just be the software king of this trope, it has been used for everything from letter-writing (why instead of Microsoft Word? Because the grids make it easier to align the text!) to filing taxes (screw Quicken!) to even being used as a game engine, and another person wrote a whole 16-bit fantasy system emulator in Excel!
  • Speaking of games, Microsoft Excel has Flash support. What is written in Flash? Games. Work in an office that has computers rigged to not allow .exe files and game sites blocked? Swing by here or make your own, save it as "Meetings.xlsx", and play at work. Take that, Corporate America!
• Microsoft PowerPoint is a software designed to create visual (and sometimes audio) aides for presentations. Some clever users, however, found that they could use the program's built-in hyperlink support and animation programming to create a fully-functional Turing machine.
  Commenter: Powerpoint can't run on Linux? Run Linux on Powerpoint then!
  • Some college students have also found that it can make a great hypercard^note a GUI programming language created by Apple, and most famously for being the engine Myst was built on substitute, again thanks to the hyperlink support. Yes, you can create entire point and click adventure games in PowerPoint!
• Anti-materiel rifles are named as such because they are effective at destroying military equipment. However, their high caliber and high precision also made them very effective at dispatching combatants from a very long range. Many of the longest recorded sniper kills have been made with rifles that would have been considered anti-materiel rifles rather than general sniper rifles.
  • The predecessor of the anti-materiel rifle was the anti-tank rifle which itself was descended from the elephant gun. During World War I, Britain and Germany employed elephant guns from their African colonies to try and break up the stalemate. German snipers got a nasty surprise when the large protective plates they used to advance towards the allied lines (10mm thick steel that was virtually immune to all small arms at the time, including rifles) were being punched through by British counter-snipers. And when the Mark I tank began appearing, Germany deployed the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr, the first dedicated anti-tank rifle, specifically to counter it.
  • One also notes that there are fewer differences between a sniper rifle and a machine gun than one would expect, as both are heavy weapons with long barrels. A few countries even adopted what were intended as machine guns and use them as designated marksman's rifles instead, including Britain's L86 (a long-barreled variant of the L85 assault rifle^note meant for squad support, its bullpup layout restricts its ability to use magazines with higher capacities than the standard 30 - but it also means they could fit it with almost half a foot of extra barrel over the L85 and still have a weapon that's only about as long as, say, the M16) and Germany's G8A1 (a mag-fed version of the HK21 machine gun^note even the fact that machine guns are expected to have quick-change barrels works in its favor here: they issue it with a more standard barrel for automatic fire or a match-grade bull barrel for precision shooting), and there's also the famous story of US Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock and his scoped M2HB, with which he made what was the longest-distance kill ever made for 35 years before his record was broken by Canadian snipers at the start of the War on Terror - who, it should be noted, were using sniper rifles with very large bullets designed precisely because snipers like Hathcock showed that large and heavy anti-materiel bullets like .50 BMG were perfect for sniping at extremely long ranges.
• Speaking of, before dedicated anti-tank weapons, soldiers improvised with weapons intended for other purposes, like aiming mortars to direct-fire on tanks close to them. The Russians and Germans wrapped multiple grenades or explosive filler heads from their grenades around a single grenade to create a larger explosive when the main grenade went off.
  • During WWII, soldiers found other uses of anti-tank rifles when improvements in tank technology rendered them ineffective for their intended use, such as using their massive rounds to shoot through walls. In particular, the PIAT launcher had such a large explosion that some users attacked houses or bunkers with them (this was even mentioned in the official manual a year after it was first produced), and a few even managed to jury rig it to fire indirectly like a mortar. This might also be the reason modern anti-tank weaponry tends to also have a wide variety of different ammunition available for other non-anti-tank purposes - the famous Carl Gustav recoilless rifle has ammunition for everything from shredding personnel and destroying buildings to laying out smokescreens and firing off flares that can illuminate an area of roughly half a kilometer.
• Soldiers in modern-day militaries are masters of this:
  • Closet organizers, those cloth ones that hang from the clothes bar? Instant and easily packable shelf to hang from the frame of a tent beside your bunk.
  • Game controllers are cheap, easy to use and are familiar to younger generations. This is precisely the reason why the US military uses them for controlling things like UAV drones as it would be easier to train rookie soldiers using something they already had experience with. Even veteran operators of bomb disposal robots prefer USB controllers to the ones that come with the device, as these controllers tend to be more responsive and have finer control than the somewhat janky built-in controls on the laptop that operates them. In 2023 it has been pointed out that the Titan submersible involved in an incident where they went missing whilst attempting to explore the remains of the RMS Titanic used an off-the-shelf Logitech G F710 game controller, a $40 joypad they might have snatched off GameStop or some other electronics store and modified for submersible use.
  • The heat of the engine of armored personnel carriers are often used to heat up military rations, so they can be eaten hot instantly rather than having to waste time cooking them.
  • Q-Tips are the single most popular "tool" for cleaning and oiling rifles.
  • Bayonets are rarely used as weapons, and are most commonly used for prying or cutting. The modern-day M9 and CAN 2000 bayonets even have a nut on the scabbard and a hole in the blade, to be used as an impromptu pair of scissors for cutting wire.
  • Floss is very popular for stitching cut or torn clothing or fabrics in the field owing to its durability, its low cost, and the nice little dispenser it comes in.
  • Military electricians commonly use sunscreen as wire lubricant to assemble high-power wire connectors like the HBL400MBK and HBLS330P6W, since it's readily available and works well enough.
• MRI scanners were originally produced out of the magnetic ring technology used in particle physics.
• GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is pretty much what it sounds like, if you read the acronym out of the gutter: a distributed computing project to find new Mersenne primes. This effort puts severe strain on a computer's hardware — making it popular for people looking to stress test said hardware, to the point that GIMPS now has alternate settings just for that purpose.
• The Hitachi Magic Wand was designed and marketed as a back massager, only for women to discover it could be used as a vibrator. It is now one of the most popular sex toys in the world, much to Hitachi's chagrin. The company even tried to cease production since they did not want to be associated with sex toys, only to be persuaded to continue to sell them with the company's name removed once they saw how much money they were making from the things.
• Tracer bullets have phosphorous burning at the base, allowing shooters to easily see where their bullets are landing. During World War I, the British found that the incendiary nature of tracers meant they could be easily repurposed to shoot down German zeppelins by igniting the hydrogen inside.
• A desktop-based web filter has a button that allows the user to reconnect to the filter's network. However, there's a brief disconnection period before the reconnect, even if the filter was connected. This can lead to the user spam-clicking the "Reconnect" button to access the restricted sites!
• Cyanoacrylate glue (aka "Super" or "Krazy" glue) makes for a pretty nice wood finish. It works best for small objects (pens, jewelry, etc), being tricky and having horrible fumes, but it bonds to most wood species, resists damage, polishes to a high gloss, and really brings out the grain.
  • It's also popular with piano technicians for its ability to shore up loose tuning pins. The glue reinforces the wood around the pin and adds enough friction that the pin will stay put after turning, thus extending the life of many an old piano.
  • It also gets used in forensic labs. Workers in a glue factory noticed that it adhered to skin oils, making fingerprints visible on surfaces where conventional methods of obtaining prints wouldn't work, like plastic bags and fabric. They shared this with forensic scientists working crime scenes. Now, they lock the object in a case, heat up some krazy glue, and wait for a bit. If there's a fingerprint, it'll show.
  • By sprinkling some baking soda (or other fine powder) on this glue freshly from the tube, one can turn it into a hard and easily treatable, but brittle polymer. This made it popular among luthiers, since it can be easily used to fill the cuts in a guitar bridge if they are too deep.
  • Although the kind intended for medical use is less toxic, superglue can be (and was, in WWII) used to repair minor cuts in a pinch.
• Likewise, a silicone substance that was used for making casts of teeth in a dentist's office got some use in a ballistics lab when trying to analyze a suspect gun that had been tampered with. The crook shoved a screwdriver in the barrel and twisted it to damage the interior to make it near-impossible to match to the bullet after the fact, but the screwdriver method didn't get all the way down the barrel. Using the dental mold, the lab was able to match the bullet to the undamaged part of the barrel.
• When Procter & Gamble put Dawn dishwashing soap on the market, they weren't expecting it to become the go-to product for saving wildlife from oil spills. But it cut through the oil while being gentle enough to not hurt the animals, making it ideal for getting toxic oil out of feathers and fur. When P&G found this out, they started explicitly showing footage of their soap being used for its unintended purpose in their commercials, which helped them score a ton of positive PR points.
• #4-8 x 7/8 inch plastic wall anchors are designed to be used in light construction work by preventing damage to drywall or wood when tightening screws. As it turns out, however, these little plastic anchors are also the perfect size to fit inside a .22 Long Rifle firearm's chamber, and many gun owners buy these anchors for use as snap caps so that they can safely dry fire their guns without damaging the firing pin. Many of the reviews for this product on the link above aren't even construction related, but are actually from gun owners attesting how great they work as snap caps.^noteEspecially since the wall anchors are less than four dollars for 100 of them, which can take more firing pin strikes before becoming damaged to uselessness, while actual .22 LR snap caps can cost around twenty times that much and tend to deform after only one to four strikes.
• Scripts like WordPress were originally intended to power blogs, but over time website developers used it for purposes beyond blogging, like online stores and portals, thanks to its extensive plugin system. Unfortunately, this is also its Achilles' Heel, as the script's immense popularity also made it a prime target for hackers. Don't be surprised if your WordPress site has been peppered with spammy ads for phony Ray-Bans and "Canadian" pharmacies.
• Subverted in the Ford Model T, in that whilst the Tin Lizzie is indeed intended to be used as an automobile, Henry Ford intentionally had the car be used for purposes beyond transport, since mechanisation and power tools were scarce back in the day, and Ford designed the Model T with rugged simplicity and flexibility in mind. Aftermarket companies produced tractor conversion kits for existing Model Ts in rural areas, and one minister even turned his car into a mobile church, complete with an organ.
• Speaking of tractors, they were originally an example of this trope. The earliest steam-powered "traction engines" were more like portable generators, with the ability to move under their own power being secondary; you'd drive it into position next to your threshing machine (or whatever), then hook it up to the machine using a drive chain, so that the engine is powering the machine instead of the wheels. When you were done, you'd disconnect the drive chain and drive away to the next thing that needs power. Using them to pull things was a later development, which eventually became their primary purpose.
• Another modern substance was accidentally discovered by researchers trying to develop a rubber plant sap called chicle into a type of tyre. It turned out to be too malleable for use in tyres - but the researchers had gotten into the habit of chewing the stuff, much like the ancient Mayans and Aztecs who did the same thing with the stuff, which never seemed to wear down...
• A top level domain refers to the part of a URL that identifies what type of site it is and where it's based, such as .com or .uk. A number of people, however, have realised they can try to create words with it, usually for reasons such as ease of memory, catchiness, or Rule of Cool. Some examples include:
  • .be : Meant for Belgian sites. Also used by YouTube (youtu.be).
  • .fm : Meant for Micronesian sites. Also used for musical websites (calling back to FM radio), e.g. anchor.fm.
  • .gl : Meant for Greenlandic sites. Also used by Google (goo.gl).
  • .io : Meant for British Indian Ocean sites. Also used by various IO Games.
  • .is : Meant for Icelandic sites. Also used to mean the word 'is', eg. time.is .
  • .me : Meant for Montenegrin sites. Also used to mean the word 'me', eg. telegram.me.
  • .tv : Meant for Tuvaluan sites. Also used as an acronym for TV, eg. twitch.tv.
  • .am : Meant for Armenian sites, but has also seen use as a domain hack e.g. with instagr.am and with American rapper and Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am, whose stage name serves as the domain name itself.
  • .cat : Meant for Catalan sites, both geographically and linguistically, and has some fairly strict requirements to ensure this. Despite the requirements, it has been occasionally used for feline-related sites instead.
• Venom and poison produced by animals and plants is typically meant as a defensive mechanism to prevent or deter attackers, but certain animals are able to use the venoms and poisons of other organisms for their own purposes. Monarch butterfly larvae eat poisonous milkweed to render their bodies inedible to predators, some sea slugs hunt jellyfish and use the jellyfish's venomous tendrils to hunt other prey, and countless humans love eating plants that contain the toxic capsaicin as a food sensitization method, or even because they like the taste of it. Psychoactive compounds are much the same — theoretically an animal unfortunate enough to eat the wrong mushroom will be horribly disoriented and never eat one again... or do it again, on purpose, for fun.
• Bounce Fabric Softener sheets will repel gnats and mosquitoes. They contain Linalool and β-Citronellol purely for the scent, both of which also happen to repel flying insects.
• Discord:
  • This chat service was originally created to be a lightweight program that could be used while playing video games. As it turned out, it was lightweight enough that it could also fill the role of a general-purpose chat service, especially when compared to data-guzzlers like Skype. Nowadays, the majority of its users use it for that very purpose.
  • The Discord app has an option to mark channels as Not Safe for Work, which makes it so you have to first enter the channel, then click a button to gain access to the actual chat area to read and send messages. Many servers instead use this as a blockade for channels that contain spoilers, so that someone who clicks or tabs onto the channel by accident doesn't get greeted by spoilers immediately.
  • Speaking of spoilers, spoiler-tagging (surrounding text with "||" marks, causing the text to be masked until clicked on) is used not just for spoilers, but also accompanied with trigger/squick/other-sensitive-content warnings so that other users don't expose themselves to such text by mistake.
• YouTube began life as a simple video sharing site for users to upload their own videos onto — at least, until people figured out "their own videos" could also mean copyrighted material that they happened to have a compatible video file of, as well as still-framed or lyric videos intended to show off the audio instead. While there still is a lot of user-generated videos on the site, a good chunk of them are more for collecting the same user's content on other user-generated content sites and compiling them on YouTube as backup. YouTube would later release the side app YouTube Music that allows users to play music-uploaded-as-video (as well as pure audio files of music) without needing the video to be playing back.
• The Coventry Climax engine, which went on to win three F1 World Championships, was designed out of a government-issue pump for fire engines. Various factors such as its unique arrangement of components and slightly improved air intake led to it performing very well, and it ran on a flatplane crankshaft which no-one else had realised yet was better than a crossplane one.
• Virtual private networks, or VPNs, were originally developed so that people could have a way to securely access their workplaces' networks while working remotely (such as from home, from a coffee shop, or while on a business trip). They've also gained popularity amongst privacy- and security-minded users who want to be able to use the Internet for everyday purposes without fear of network administrators (especially on unsecured Wi-Fi networks, which are common at the aforementioned coffee shops), Internet service providers, or governments snooping on their activities, as well as to get around region- and network-based blocks (Is a YouTube video blocked in your country "on copyright grounds"? No problem, just pick a server based in another country!). Naturally, some networks and websites will block the use of VPNs precisely because of those reasons, though most allow it as blocking a VPN is tantamount to telling a section of their user base— and potential customers/clients— to go elsewhere.
• In 2007 Clarks introduced a line of children's shoes with a hidden compartment containing a small toy inside the heel. While BBC News reported it as a term-time distraction, the Daisy and Jack Nano shoes could, at least in theory, be used for something even less savoury, e.g. hide small slips of paper containing answers and other contraband for the purposes of cheating in exams. One Twitter user even jokingly suggested hiding cannabis in the compartment, and wished for adult sizes be made for the purpose.^note They were actually available in sizes as large as EU 37 or UK 4.5, something a teenager or a young adult could wear if not for the rather juvenile designs. Clarks later revisited the toy-in-a-shoe concept with the "Find-Its" line of school shoes which came with miniature insect-based robot toys each with their own implement built in.
• As seen in American Girl's Kit Kittredge story arc, housewives repurposed flour sack fabric into articles of clothing since the early 20th century. This led George P. Plant Milling Company and other firms to sell flour and feed packaged in dress-quality sacks especially during the Great Depression and World War II when fabric was in such short supply.
• Maglite brand flashlights have been known to be used as makeshift batons by both police officers and criminals alike, such as the Hells Angels outlaw biker club. Indeed, there has been incidents involving said Angels bludgeoning their rivals with a Maglite or some similarly hefty implement, especially if a brawl took place in an area where guns aren't allowed, such as casinos and other public places. Their use by law enforcement officers would eventually be discontinued in some jurisdictions though, after an incident in 2007 where a suspect was beaten to pulp by an officer using a Maglite prompted the LAPD to issue smaller and lighter LED flashlights which cannot be used as a baton. That being said, simply flashing a Maglite (or any other sufficiently powerful flashlight for that matter) at an assailant's face could be useful in a self-defense scenario anyway, so as long as you either escape from a disorientated perp who got blinded by the beam or manage to incapacitate him somewhat through other means.
• The Willys MB Jeep was originally intended to be a rugged and reliable non-combat transport vehicle during World War II, having been an iconic fixture of the war, and was subject to various field modifications in ways far beyond the original designers intended, such as "a power plant, light source, improvised stove for field rations, or a hot water source for shaving", though given the conditions it was subjected to, it is to no surprise that troops would MacGyver their jeeps to their needs. And then there was a bunch of Filipinos who, faced with the fact that their transport infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the war, took those surplus Jeeps, modified and stretched them to accommodate several passengers, and decorated these ex-military vehicles in the most campy way imaginable, giving rise to the Jeepney. Japanese scale model firm Tamiya would later commemorate them in 2019 with the "Dyipne", a Mini 4WD kit inspired by the vehicle.
• A variation that had several growing pains before it worked: the MIM-104 Patriot, which entered service in 1981 as a long-range anti-air missile, was used in 1991 as an anti-ballistic missile. This decision went terribly to the point that the Patriot's early reputation is still marred by controversy. For starters, the Patriot was strictly meant for destroying aircraft. But the Scud missiles they were intended to intercept in the Gulf War were traveling at higher speeds than manned aircraft, often causing the Patriot to completely miss or detonate harmlessly behind the tail of the Scuds. Second, ballistic missile defense was a completely unproven concept at the time, which meant that the U.S. military was literally reaching blindly with absolutely no experience or guarantees of success, which was not helped by the fact that the Patriot was also unproven in combat. And lastly, the Patriot's radar system had defective software which led to phantom targets being detected and fired on or incoming tracks being detected and lost because, as a result of a flaw in the internal clock and 24-bit programming being incapable of handling very minute numbers like one-third, the radar routinely looked in the wrong area unless it was reset once every 24 hours or so. The defective software resulted in the Dhahran barracks being successfully hit by a Scud, killing 28 American soldiers, and still stands as a black mark on the Patriot's service record. Today, the Patriot is capable of fulfilling its role as an anti-ballistic missile but only because of the lessons learned from its mistakes and failures.
• A major patent in modern Wi-Fi was reportedly developed out of a failed experiment in black hole research.
• Dishwashers are meant for washing dishes. However, they are also perfectly capable of cooking a steak sous vide, as demonstrated here.
• On This Very Wiki, the AC markup is intended for headers. However, some folks, noticing that it uses "small caps" formatting, used it for some stylistic purposes. This was put to an end when the AC markup was modified to force linebreaks before and after the formatted text.
• Raw cookie dough. This has actually come up in the news, when there was a case of people eating packaged cookie dough raw - and getting food poisoning from it, despite the package containing a warning regarding the consumption of raw eggs (which the packaged cookie dough contained). The resulted in a more strongly worded warning on future packages. Other companies, upon seeing a demand for cookie dough intended to be eaten raw, have created eggless cookie dough intended to be eaten as such.
• In biology there is a term known as "preadaptation" or exaptation, where a feature that originally evolved to serve a certain primary function in an organism is later modified to serve a different function for its descendants. For example, feathers are believed to have originally evolved in early dinosaurs for thermoregulation purposes, but as they became more complex, they allowed the later birds to fly using them, or the semi-aquatic ancestors of elephants that originally evolved their trunk for use as a snorkel, but when they reverted back to a land-based existence, it was repurposed as a grasping organ. Perhaps the most extreme case, however, is the internal skeleton's original purpose as calcium storage rather than keeping a vertebrate's shape intact.
• Tablet mice peripherals for PC sold by companies such as Wacom and Huion are meant to be used for illustration work, but they also get a lot of mileage as an alternative to conventional computer mice due to being much more precise and more comfortable for complex movements. In fact, they're very popular amongst osu! players; many people who don't do any serious drawing buy a tablet just so they can have an edge in the game.
• The Lisp programming language was invented by John McCarthy, a professor at MIT, as a pseudocode language. Its strength was that it completely ignored the machine state and simply mapped the input of a function to its output. It was so perfectly developed that almost all of the core functions were written in Lisp itself. McCarthy's TA Stephen Russell (who is more famous for creating the first computer game, Space War), looked at the paper pre-publication and said "You know, if you wrote the eval function in machine code, you'd have a lisp interpreter." McCarthy informed him that Lisp wasn't a real language, it was just an abstraction used to express algorithms. Russell went off and wrote the eval function (and a few other functions he discovered couldn't be written in lisp) and one of the greatest languages of all time was born.
• Acrylate polymers are sometimes used in skincare products as a thickener, but will ball up if you use too much. Peeling gels are exfoliants that use this tendency to ball up as a selling point. The clumps of acrylate are very gentle physical exfoliants, and acrylate is an eco friendlier alternative to microbeads.
• Metal spoons are an easily available item than can just as easily be hidden in one's underwear. Why would anyone want to do that? So they are taken aside at the airport security check and can explain that their relatives are trying to spirit them out of the country for a forced marriage or worse.
• Professional Video Monitors, or PVMs for short, were originally meant to be professional equivalents to television sets, most often found in broadcast control rooms and on video editing setups. These had significantly more crisp displays than a standard consumer TV and could natively accept an RGB signal instead of the usual composite or RF signal, allowing for the best possible picture clarity and removing the color inconsistencies and limited depth that a composite or S-video cable came with. This was an essential part in ensuring the master copy you were editing was producing the correct colors. Following the demise of CRT technology and the rise of HD, the need for these in the professional realm fell quickly, but the displays found a second lease on life in the retro gaming community thanks to the fact that RGB-capable displays never caught on in the US. In addition, many retro consoles look better on a CRT screen than they do on a modern HD TV, and the PVM outclasses a standard CRT TV from the same era, and thanks to the fact that many old consoles can be modified to output RGB, they have become quite popular and sought after for this purpose.
• Speaking of, Custom Desktop Logo is a modest bit of freeware that allows you to superimpose a logo over your screen. It's intended to put a logo or slogan over a presentation or the like, but there's no limit to how much of your screen is covered and you can use any PNG or SVG file you like. Since a decent hardware-based scanline generator is expensive and it's next to impossible to find a decent software-based utility to do only this, people in the retro emulation community have taken to using it to add a scanline filter over their screens by simply creating a facsimile of a CRT shadowmask and overlaying it using Custom Desktop Logo.
• Sparklers are easy to light, safe to handle and use, and can be cheaply acquired even from dollar stores. This makes them an attractive choice for igniting thermite, and a much easier and safer alternative to magnesium strips that are normally used for this purpose.
• It's not easy to design a car with aerodynamics for 200mph. So, after World War II, some brilliant hotrodders decided to make such cars out of aircraft drop tanks, which had all the necessary calculations done for them already, and were dirt-cheap ever since the war ended. Meanwhile, after The Vietnam War, some peasants would use the same tanks left around their territory by cutting them lengthwise - made for very good boats.
• Pirated repacks of computer games, e.g. those from FitGirl and DODI, are a convenient avenue for those wanting to pirate the latest titles without having to wait so much due to less-than-ideal internet connections as they are compressed to at least half or a third of the game's original install size, though they do take significantly longer to install due to aggressive use of compression. While downloading them is still not without its risk due to their less-than-legal nature, some people buy games from services like Steam or the Epic Games Store but, being hampered by slow or limited connections, choose to actually download the repacks and unpack their contents into the folder where the legitimate copy would be installed, thereby rendering them as legal copies. Indeed, FitGirl opined that while they^note It is unknown if the person is actually female or is merely using a feminine persona are well-aware of the risks involved in their unofficial game distributions, game publishers could learn a lesson or two in how to properly update games without having to re-download large portions of them.
  • It was also found out that the reason Adobe’s wares won’t run on Wine (on Linux) was due to its aggressive DRM. The pirate repacks of Adobe’s wares however were found to run fine on Linux. Cue people with an active Adobe subscription but no longer wanting to use Windows anymore switching to using Linux with pirated versions of Adobe running on Wine despite its legally questionable status.
• A lot of Python programmers use the interactive mode as a desk calculator, so much so that it's become a running joke in the developer community. This usage is even mentioned in the official tutorial. It's also true to an extent with other interactive interpreters.
• The curb cut effect refers to a feature that was originally meant to improve accessibility for those with disabilities, but which ends up being appreciated by other people as well. Once abled people notice the benefits, the feature ends up becoming more common and normalized, which is a win for both disabled and abled people.
  • The name comes from curb cuts, dips and slants in the sidewalk which were originally meant to help wheelchair-bound people get in or out of the street, but ended up also being used by cyclists, skateboarders, parents pushing their child in a stroller, and many other able-bodied people. Since then, curb cuts have become much more common, to the point where not everyone even realizes they were originally intended as an accessibility feature.
  • Even those who aren't hearing-impaired may appreciate subtitles. No matter how sharp your hearing is, having dialogue spelled out on-screen can really be a boon, especially when The Unintelligible is talking or a scene has a lot of background noise drowning out the dialogue. Nowadays, most TV shows, movies, and games are available with subtitles, which are enjoyed by many people regardless of hearing ability.
  • Weighted blankets were invented to help calm down autistic children when they panicked, especially those who Hate Being Touched and wouldn't respond positively to a Cooldown Hug. Once non-autistic folks realized that lying down underneath a weighted blanket just plain feels good, more and more companies started manufacturing them, making them cheaper and more accessible for autistic and neurotypical people alike. Fidget toys, meant to help autistic people with stimming, have also become much more widely available and affordable once neurotypicals learned how fun they can be.
  • In the past, people suffering from celiac disease (which causes violent reactions to foods containing gluten) did not have many options when it came to restaurants, snacks, and pre-made meals. Then gluten-free became a fad diet. Although the scientific validity of the gluten-free diet for people without celiac disease is debated, coeliac people certainly appreciate how many restaurants and companies now offer gluten-free options in response to the sudden spike in demand, though cross-contamination with gluten in restaurants remains a problem for people who actually do have celiac disease.
• Porn. The great majority of it is simply intended to titillate the viewer, but many artists suggest watching/browsing porn galleries for pose reference and anatomy practice. As long as you can focus on the drawing/painting etc, of course.
• Tire irons make an ideal weapon for self-defense to be carried in a vehicle in jurisdictions where carrying a self-defense weapon is illegal or can cause you legal trouble. Since a tire iron's intended use is for swapping a flat tire you have a perfectly valid excuse to carry such a thing in your vehicle at all times, and a perfect excuse for why you were able to brandish such a thing against a threat, just as long as you incapacitate your attacker reasonably and not bludgeon the hell out of them in cold blood, that is.
  • In a similar vein, umbrellas can be kept in a vehicle (or in wetter climes, a day-bag or backpack) without restriction or suspicion, and even the cheapest one is good for at least one block or swing. Point-tipped umbrellas can also serve as a thrusting weapon in a pinch, and any umbrella with a curved handle is an excellent triphook. Umbrellas have even proven themselves effective against aggressive dogs.
  • For those without much storage space on their person, keyrings can also be a viable last-ditch defensive effort. Carabiner keyrings are very popular, inexpensive, ubiquitous, and generally beneath notice. Even an aluminum carabiner keyring can be had for as little as $1US in discount stores. However, in a pinch, a smaller carabiner can reinforce the fist's structure in a punch, and a larger one can have the fingers inserted into the loop and become a discount brass knuckle.
  • A roll of coins similarly makes for a very effective fist-filler, and can be every bit as devastating and damaging to an opponent as actual brass knuckles. Keep in mind that, while brass knuckles range from legally dodgy to outright illegal, a roll of pennies costs half a buck, can be found anywhere, would raise no eyebrows if you had one in your pocket, and actually puts more metal in your fist than a set of brass knuckles.
• Computers designed to be gaming machines have a focus on rendering graphics quickly and processing large amounts of data with ease. For this reason, gaming PCs are often sought after by design companies — architects, graphic designers, manufacturers, et cetera — who need the extra processing power for their various modeling softwares.
• Incandescent and halogen light bulbs are incredibly inefficient, wasting anywhere between 85% to 90% of their consumed energy as heat rather than light. While this makes them incredibly poor wasters of electricity (and are terrible for the environment), it also allowed them to be used as simple mini-heaters for devices like Lava Lamps and the Easy Bake Oven that use both the light and heat. Even traffic lights profited from this, as after the mass switch to LED there were a few instances of them freezing over and becoming useless, necessitating the use of built-in heaters or specially-designed hoods to deflect snow and ice from them.
• Twitter:
  • You can add image captions, which are meant to be aids for visually impaired users as well as users whose devices cannot display images for some reason. However, some users instead use them to effectively get around the 280-character limit and add up to 1,000 additional characters.
  • You can flag media in your tweets as containing sensitive content. However, many users also use this feature to hide spoilers so that their followers don't see them by mistake.
• Speech Synthesis systems are generally made to help disabled people - such as providing a voice to people who cannot speak or allowing the visually impaired to "hear" text. For a number of people, especially children, it's a very good source of comedy because of odd mispronunciations, the bizarre sounds, and the fact a lot of them do not have any kind of blacklist.
• Related, GoAnimate was intended to serve as a way for people to make animations for things like advertisement or education - with schools even teaching kids how to animate using it. Of course, one look at its page on this wiki will show just how kids actually used it...
• The Roland TB-303 Bass Line was a sequencer/synthesizer combo meant to replace the bass guitar in mainstream rock bands, which it did a terrible job of with its weird, squelchy sound that's closer to a mouth harp than any string instrument. After it commercially bombed and was quickly discontinued, cheap second-hand units found their way to musicians who realized you could make it sound even more weird and squelchy by tweaking its knobs while it was playing a sequence, which sounded very distinct from any other instrument or synthesizer. This sound was the basis for Phusion's Acid Tracks in 1987, which lead to the birth of the Acid House genre, and made the TB-303 a staple of Electronic Dance Music.
• Apple's Face ID feature of their iPhones is intended as a biometric system lock. However, it's also one of the most effective pieces of software on the market for identifying and tracking facial features, and buying a secondhand iPhone is a lot cheaper than licensing standalone software and the hardware to run it. This makes Face ID de rigueur for many a Virtual YouTuber to translate their expressions and movements to their on-screen avatars. This does have one drawback, though: since the incredibly sophisticated facial recognition was intended to only be used for a few seconds at a time it guzzles battery power with abandon, depending on their setup some VTubers have to cap their stream length as the phone slowly goes flat even while plugged in.
• Car headrests are intended to keep the occupants' heads from getting whiplash during a collision, but their metal prongs holding them onto the seat have been useful for breaking open a window for an emergency escape, such as in the event of a fire or sinking underwater.
• Paintball guns are called "markers" because they were intended to put markings on things out of reach or too dangerous to touch. Then someone realized you could simulate a gunfight by marking a person, and say that "a splotch bigger than a quarter coin is a 'kill.'"
• Guided Access is a feature for iOS devices that disables features that can switch the device's focus out of the current app until Guided Access is deliberately ended by the user, and which also disables notifications. This is meant as an accessibility feature for disabled users as well as for public-use devices like restaurant kiosks, but it is also used by people who play action-intensive games (such as Rhythm Games) to avoid being disrupted by notifications and avoid stepping out of the app by mistake.
• Poster putty is normally used for, well, hanging up posters, and thusly is cheap, widely available everywhere, adheres to most surfaces, peels off clean, and comes in a variety of colors. This also makes it an ideal crack-filler / window sealant for putting up a window air-conditioner, particularly for people who only mount them in the hot months, since it allows you to completely fill the voids around it and keep out bugs, without resorting to more permanent solutions like caulk or downright butt-fugly temporary solutions like duct tape.
• Despite its reputation among artists, Adobe Photoshop was never intended to be used for digital art. At its core, it was made for retouching photographs. Many of its features even reference traditional photo development techniques, burn and dodge for example.
• Blender is a free 3D modeling program that could also be used as a free video editor.
• The german-made Flakpanzer Gepard is a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) that was originally designed in the 1960s to protect ground troops against attack aircraft and attack helicopters. Eventually, they were phased out in the 1990s and 2000s in favor of modern systems that used anti-air missiles with much greater range. A number of them were sent by NATO to Ukraine in 2022 after Russia invaded the country, and they proved extremely successful in fighting cheaply made drones and loitering munitions that could not be fought effectively by modern missiles because their low costs meant that the drones were much cheaper than the missiles that were supposed to intercept them.
• Because toothpaste is designed to clean the delicate enamel of teeth, it needs to be abrasive yet incredibly gentle. These two qualities make it ideal for cleaning small scratches on CDs, DVDs, and really any glass or plastic surface. It works wonders on a glass-top stove as well, and will buff that thing right back to as scratch-free as the day you bought it. Not bad for something that costs a buck at the dollar store, leaves no chemical residues, and smells nice and minty instead of like cleaning agents.
• This tactic is often weaponized by companies to sell what would be illegal if used for its obviously intended purpose, by claiming it is designed for a different and legal purpose. The most common are "Tobacco Water Pipes" (which are obviously bongs for weed), "Tire Thumpers" (which are obviously bludgeoning weapons), "Fuel Filters" (which are obviously firearm suppressors), "Grape Bricks" (sold during Prohibition with a warning not to dissolve them in water and leave them in the cupboard for 20 days so they wouldn't turn into wine), and of course the various kinds of swords and bladed weapons which would be illegal if they weren't claimed to be props or decorations. More often than not this works since laws are often written so specifically as to avoid Loophole Abuse that they inadvertently allow it instead, and because they don't protect the user: don't think for one second that you won't be charged for using a firearm suppressor just because you bought a "fuel filter" to attach to your firearm.