Non solid blocks can be overridden by redstone

Placing redstone dust in the same block as a non solid block (eg: lever, trapdoor, torch) will cause the dust to override the block that was previously there. Any container broken in this way will drop its items. No data values are carried (unlike the famous obsidian generator) but I still thought it was worth mentioning.

EDIT

This is also a way to get inside chests with a 'Locked' tag