 |  | The Stuff Page: Things that ended up tossed but that seem like they have another life ahead of them.
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| | The Stuff Page: Things that ended up tossed but that seem like they have another life ahead of them.
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This Schwinn Varsity bike has a huge frame, which is apparently in demand in certain circles. We shall see if some long legged hipster snaps it up. It needed a new gear cable, new tyres, a few other random things and some tweaking and tuning. Overall it has cleaned up nicely and is pretty nice to ride.
This bike looks in a pretty sorry state and is missing the chainrings and possibly some other small pieces. Some of the parts on it are really nice though and it may be worth saving, we will see.
This coffee machine, though slightly too feature-laden for our taste, seems to work fine and be all present and correct. It will tentatively become the reserve Z pot.
This table turned up with no top and looking a little rusty and forlorn. It was pretty simple to clean it up and the new wooden top was made up of wood we salvaged last year from a different table top. This might become our outdoor cafe style table, depending on how it turns out. The picture show it in mock-up mode prior to actually committing to a final design.
A pretty classic Schwinn Varsity road bike in the strange light green colour, somewhat spiffy but in need of a fair bit of tuneup and attention.
This was in part trade for the Gary Fisher. Kind of counts?
We rescued a Gary Fisher hybrid bike from stagnant imminent discard a while ago, here it is:
It needed numerous new parts and fixing but with what we had in stock we did not have to buy much. This then makes a really nice ridable bike for our friend. In return he gave us the two bikes he had that were not really being used and destined for some form of future discard. Those are also here somewhere.
The first is a Centurion Le Mans mixte. It is pretty junky but is in nice shape, just needed a flat fix and some general tuning.
A murky brown Ross Eurotour bike in much neglected but not abused state. It may actually have never been ridden, certainly not discernably. The tyres are dried out and there is some surface rust but apart from that it is but a small amount of work from being a hipster's dream transportation device.
Update: Sold to a happy hipster within hours of being put on sale. In a slightly cleaned cleaned up state of course.
A random kiddie bike procured upon request for some friends. It had a genuine reason for discard, something along the lines of "we reversed over it with the SUV". This is a pretty common cause of death for strollers and bikes these days. Fortunately the damage was limited to the front wheel so we replaced that and voila, ready to ride (or fall off).
A random eMac 1.25 Ghz, 768M RAM, 40G HD, all in good shape, boots fine. The picture shows it undergoing upgrade to 10.4 for the purposes of use or trade or sale. The previous owner had some real estate related documents on it and some pictures that seemed to be documenting an insurance claim, otherwise uninteresting.
This is a pretty junky AMF Roadmaster bike but it is cleaning up nicely and will go to make some hipster happy in their newfound bike-trendiness. It needed air in the tyres and one spoke replaced. The reason for discard may have been the fatal error inducing install of some bracket on the seat mount, that is all cleaned away now and it is more or less ready for sale.
We are not sure exactly which roads this thing is supposed to be the master of, but we definitely do not wish to travel them. Update: Sold to a hipster and a basket installed on the front.
A friend had this spiffy little Schwinn Suburban for years in his garage, it was his childhood bike or some such. Given a choice between near/long term tossing and us he discarded it our way. We cleaned it up to it's present state and it will go to satisfy a hipster's urge. The proceeds will be (partly) spent on a keg of beer from our friendly local brewer for a party of some form.
Update: Sold and the proceeds earmarked for a keg of beer or some such.
This Fuji Suncrest was a little dirty and had two flat tyres when found. Either of those factors may have been the reason for discard but both were remedied in about five minutes leaving a pretty functional bike ready for the next owner. This person shall be introduced to us by the list of craig.
Update: Sold, after some dithering by flakey customers to a nice chap. Certain CLers are really a pain in the butt.
This Lotus Viking mountain bike was partly stripped and not very happy at all when we found it. A bunch of spare parts made it rideable and pretty nice but we will see what occurs with it.
B>Update: Sold to a nice Dutchman for use as a random round-town bike.
This is a nice Phillips 3 speed English bike in OK condition. It was made in 1959, the year before Raleigh bought the company. It had 4 missing spokes but that seems to be all the real problems. The Sturmey Archer hub was dry and wedged in neutral but upon refilling with oil and some mechanism working it was fine. The tyres and tubes are original (or at least very old) and in fine shape. The pic shows it after some cleaning, front wheel, cable sheaths and some small details yet to do.
The quality on the Phillips was slightly below Raleigh but this is an astounding piece of technology. It has lasted 50 years with very low maintainance and after some lube and air and such it is now a great pleasure to ride. Dear reader, how many items do you own that exhibit these properties?
A Hilift Jack with a slightly rusty mechanism. We are betting there is nothing really wrong with it and that a quick "canadian rebuild" will put it in order. These things have a habit of sticking unless you keep them slathered in oil so I bet the previous owner encountered that condition in the dim and distant past. Then they neglected it for a few years before tossing it. We will see when we inspect it more closely.
Update: Just need a bunch of oil and it now works fine.
A random suitcase that will be handy for giving away to somebody who needs one at some point.
This random Baby Jogger only had one wheel when we found it, but luckily the spares department was able to supply a full set in nice condition. The rear ones are larger than intended but that will be heralded as a feature for rolling smoothly over extreme jogging territory, or some such. Off to the list of craig with it.
Update: Sold on CL a day or so after listing.
This is a mostly stripped down Baby Jogger. It is missing all the accessories but usaable as is, hence will be sent to seek its fortune on the list of craig.
A random but pretty fine double jogging stroller, it may or may not be missing the hood. A sticky strip has come unstuck at the bottom but that will be glued back on at some point. Shown here after a quick wash.
A random iBook G4 that will be good for spares/parts etc. Pieces of it may end up on ebay.
A random Trek 800 ladies model bike that seems in OK shape. Some scavenger had just pulled wheels off it when we got to it but it seems in OK shape so we pulled a couple fo stock to rebuild it. Previous owner had put on a new front gear cable and wired it up wrong, probably the reason for discard.
A small cast iron radiator set up for steam heating. This will be made aavailable on the list of craig soon.
A random piece of limestone cut to be a large step, we think. This will be used to make some form of little bench in the garden at some point. It is quite nice.
An X41 thinkpad tablet machine in pretty rough shape. Somebody had beat it up but we took it for spares etc. HD was full of evidence of a drugs company sales rep who use match.com but not much else. The 60G super mini HD and the 1G RAM stick are pretty handy, everything is pretty much scrap thinkpad material.
This middling crappy mountain bike had two flat tyres upon pickup but after insertion of compressed air into same it seems fine. It is barely ridden though a few years old and pretty fine bike for pootling around town, it has mountain bike slicks on it. Going up onto the list of craig.
Update: Sold to a nice chap for use as a station bike, a good choice on his part we feel.
A random jogger in OK shape, nothing special but handy if you need one of these. This will be quickly destined for the list of craig. It needed air in the tyres and a quick clean, pic shows it rinsed before getting a light scrub.
Yet another Dell GX270 Pentium 4 PC machine, this one is pretty dirty inside and is also missing memory and HD. It is a 2.4Ghz and seems like it should be fine after a spot of cleanup and a few parts from the pile. It seems like this came from the same previous owner as the others but the dirt profile inside is very different.
Having examined the rather large inventory of Pentium 4 PC machines at our disposal we decided to offload a batch of complete but non-booting machines in exchange for cash. The two Dell machines you may recognise from the sketchy picture below but the Compaq and the Gateway probably did not make it onto this page when they were picked up. All are between 1.4 and 1.8 Mhz and kind of junky but perfectly useful for basic computing needs. Coincidentally (or not) they are all case designs that annoy us, hence maybe better to have somebody else do the serious fiddling.
This is probably an update entry and a new stuff entry.
We found three Dell Pentium 4 GX270 PC machines, all three were missing their memory and hard drives. We took two, a 3 Ghz and a 2.4Ghz model. We have access to some memory with which to resurrect these, and random hard drives are easy to come by. The pics show them baring their guts with new drives and an OS installed but awaiting their longer term memory (borrowed sticks were used for the install process). These will be sold or traded.
A bumper crop of computing machinary all in more or less the same state, missing HD but complete with RAM. This seems to indicate that somebody just closed down an office and was wise enough to secure their data before tossing out a whole bunch of perfectly good machines.
First up a Dell dual 3Ghz PC machine with no HD, 1G RAM and a super fancy graphics card. A test with knoppix indicate two happy little penguins and everything seems to work.
Next in line is a HP Pavillion dual 2.8Ghz, again plenty of RAM but missing the HD. Again tests fine but needs a quick clean out before it settles into what ever use we find for it.
Also present were 2 1.4Ghz Dell Pentium 4 machines, obviously less fancy and such but still pretty functional machines. The missing cover is out of shot, not actually missing. Pic is fuzzy but you get the idea:
Last an not least were two Dell Pentium 3 laptops, presumably from the same source but they both still had their hard drives but were missing the power supplies. Both booted XP and ran slowly due to all the anti-virus junk. We investigated the yellow trimmed one and once all the anti-virus stuff was taken off it ran surprisingly well for a 500Mhz with XP on it. Fortunately we sold them both off before we could play with them any more.
A random Macally USB keyboard, these are always handy to have if only to give away to friends in need.
This KitchenAid mixer was unfortunately missing the stainless steel bowl, we suspect that the scummy scrapmetal guys took that. On the plus side it works fine and even looks very fine now that is cleaned up, the pic shows it still all covered in special previous owner dust.
Update: Snapped up by a friend, they call him "the Donald.". Well, we do anyway.
A somewhat ornate cast iron radiator in nice condition. We have no need for this and none of our steam powerred friends are in needs of units so this will be sent to heat another home via the list of craig.
Update: Sold to a nice chap who introduced himself to us via the list of craig.
This Ross started out a while ago as a silver 10 speed Gran Tour II and ended up being converted to a painfully hip flip-flop singlespeed. Various parts were purchased in the process but the frame and some other stuff came from the original discarded Ross. The paint job is the tar-like bumpy undercoating for cars, probably this one.
This Dell was picked up a while ago but we only really got to grips with it today. It is a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 PC, so plenty useful enough for most people.
After some parts shuffling (cdrom was working but slow) we attempted a clean OS install but it failed with a big fat bluescreen. It seemed like a memory failure so we used knoppix to conduct a memtest. That failed hugely so we pulled one memory card out and tried again, hence success! After the install we threw in a new piece of memory into the empty slot and failure again, oh no! Maybe the slot was bad? A few false starts and then close inspection revealed dust bunnies in the RAM slot. Shopvac action and all is fine. This presumably explains the reason for discard, previous owner put extra memory in some time after original purchase, in doing so crushed accumulated clumps of dust into the slot rendering the machine nebulously useless, hence to discard.
Update: Sold on the list of craig.
This was attached to the Gary Fisher bike. It is probably better to try and sell them seperately rather than together so we unscrewed it. After a quick wash this will be off to the list of craig, complete with the suitable rack under it.
This fine bike is Gary Fisher Big Sur, which is apparently something halfway fancy. It had been dropped in the scrap metal with the Topeak seat attached. The bucket loader had grabbed it by the front wheel and tossed it in the big can, ruining the front wheel. We rescued it, put on a new wheel (and tube) and will sell it on the list of craig forthwith. Reason for discard appeared to have been a flat front tyre, the tube was missing and the tyre was off the rim. It had a weird junky seat with it but we tossed this Trek seat on for the pic and will throw on a spare Gary Fisher seat later.
Update: Sold within 12 hours of being salvaged. In other news we have available one Gary Fisher front mountain bike hub.
Yet another Trail-a-bike, this one slightly more used, or at least older, than the last. This is also missing the little coupling hitch on the front but after a clean and some new (old) handlebar grips it is ready for the list of craig.
The traffic cone is nothing to do with the bike, it is just allowing it to pose in the rough orientation it is intended to be used in.
A 12 inch iBook G3 missing battery and power supply. Upon testing absolutely nothing occurs when attempting to boot. This will probbaly be parted out for ebay at some stage.
An IBM dual 3Ghz Pentium 4 in nice shape except missing memory and hard drive. Some memory from inventory allowed us to test it using knoppix and it seems fine. The addition of a HD will make this a fine element in a certain distributed computing task. Pic shows the scavenged memory installed.
A pretty fancy Fuji Saratoga touring bike with triple chainring, spare spokes mounted on the frame, and lots of lugs. It is really rather nice but we have no use for it. It is already on the list of craig but super special deep discount available to readers of this page if they should want it.
Update: Sold within 12 hours of initial pickup.
A Lodge cast iron griddle with ridges on one side and smooth on the other. We do not really need this so it may be available. Two pics, one showing each side.
This may already have been snapped up.
It started snowing again today so of course we are on the lookout for snow clearing tools. Most conveniently we found this Snapper Snowblower. With the choke on and a couple of pumps on the fuel bulb it started first time. It has half a tank of fuel. The reason for discard seems to be the fact that the drive belt to the snow chomper on the front seems to have stretched and does not engage properly anymore. A quick adjustment on the moving idler pulley that engages said drive and it works fine.
The previous owner seems to have kept it well serviced, the oil was clean, the plug is new and the joints had fresh grease on them. But maybe we will throw it away once we have finished the fuel in it...
An Xbox 360 in undamanged physical state but missing the special power and A/V stuff required to actually use it. We will borrow some cables to try this out and see what happens.
This stainless steel catering style table is brand new and seemingly never been assembled. That must be sufficient reason to discard it we suppose. Pic soon, maybe?
A selection of wireless phones and other mobile gadgetry, notably five Palm Treo devices. We picked these up for somebody who needs a new phone thinking we would get one of them working and indeed that proved to be the case. Two shown working in the pic that will accept the relevent sim card, various chargers and USB thingies present. Also a palm and lots of random adaptors and gear in the bag.
Some cheesy pics present on the phone from the previous owners, nothing too exciting though.
This Nishiki Cresta was partly stripped by the time we got to it, which is a shame as it is a really nice classic bike. We have the wheels for it and it came with bars etc, just lots of little parts were missing.
Update: Sold with the Fuji to a nice chap who was sent by the list of craig.
A small form factor Dell Pentium 4 PC, missing the HD. It has 2.7Ghz, 512M RAM, boots knoppix fine and runs very quietly. How nice.
Update: Refurbished and a huge hit on the list of craig. It seems these small machines are in quite some demand.
A small chair we acquired some time ago turns out to be moderatly nice and made of maple. It had a nasty thick coat of dark finish on it and was loose and rickety. After liberal applications of sandpaper, glue, clamps and varnish it looks like this. It does not fit to the maple desk but it is useful nevertherless for the offspring.
A friend bought a house and this desk was left in the basement by the previous owners. It did not, of course, look like this at the time we came into possession of it. It had a thick layer of ugly stained varnish on it and the drawers were all falling apart at the backs. The liberal application of sandpaper, glue, varnish and such rendered it into this state. The centre drawer is not yet finished (in more ways than one) but will make it in there eventually. The desk is now deployed in service of the offspring.
A white KitchenAid mixer in used but perfectly working usable shape. Comes with two mixer blades, stainless bowl, pouring thingy. This is available to anybody who wants it.
Update: snapped up by some vegans.
A set of 3 Victorinox luggage pieces. We are quite sure the swiss army don't use these. Two large cases and a rolling suit bag. All three seem lightly used and in excellent condition. We have no idea what to do with these at present as we pretty much never travel with anything this large. We will see.
BMX bikes are really not bikes in the sense of being a useful conveyance and so we do not generally deal with them, but this Kawasaki seems quite new and complete, hence we may be able to hook it up with a new owner at some stage.
Update. While the bike seemed eminently fixable the previous owner had got sand in all the bearings and bent the rear wheel. Too much effort for us so we stripped some useful parts to help another bike live.
A selection of pots and pans. We left several cheaper (but technically usable) items behind and cherry-picked the good stuff. First a couple of Calphalon items that both have a very good reaason for warranty return and hence may end up being returned.
Next an Ikea collander, sort of useful. Not sure if we will keep this yet.
Also in this batch were a large Le Creuset lid, a steamer and some stainless steel bowls. The lid fits a nice cast iron pan that previously featured here so we may deploy it in that role. The bowls are available and the steamer has yet to be tested for fit and effectiveness.
Update: Several items found homes already with various friends. The Le Creuset lid fit one of our pans so it gets to find a home here.
A Vaio Pentium 4 laptop with a broken screen. It seems in good shape otherwise but we have no power supply for it. No worries, we were able to make a handy backup of the previous owners data and see what was there. Lots of pics of suburban club culture, a bunch of mp3s reflecting the same taste and almost nothing else. The browser cache was entirely what one might expect for the relevent demographic.
Some of the pics seem like they could appear here, except that the parties involved are only respectively douchie or hot to a moderate degree, nothing worthy of widespread publication on the interwebs. Sorry, no pics for you here.
Update: Turns out that the fine users of ebay seems to find this enticing. Smashing, entertainment and cash value in one easy to ship package.
Somebody took some nice cleaned up up cast iron pans from us a while ago and they got all excited and made pizza with them. Turned out pretty well, according to the reports, and here is the pic they sent of the results.
Seems like pizza might be a great way of building up the cure on pans that have a young cure on them.
A Stanley No 72 chamfer plane, in pretty good shape and still sharp. The pic shows it after a quick cleanup. If the crazy tool collectors of our acquaintance do not want this it will be sent to make its fortune on ebay, where apparently they are rather sought after.
This is the working guts from a parking meter. Who knows what it was doing in the scrap metal but it is a nice piece of machinery for generally playing with etc. It may find a home in the z-dudes' museum of computing.
We got this Schwinn Varsity road bike a while ago and it sat around until we cleaned it up. Lots of attention with the chromezall and some new bar tape and it is off to be sold to an eager hipster. Pic shows the new bar tape and the super cool Schwinn head badge.
A Mac G4 cube, missing the power supply. Pity, the power supply is worth more than the cube, testing will commence once we borrow a spare power supply. Also present the keyboards pictured, a 1st generation 450Mhz iMac and a mac flatscreen. A competing scavenger got the screen and those iMacs are too slow for us to bother with now.
Update The thing works fine though now but the IDE ribbon was pulled out of the HD. Was this a primitive attempt at data security by the previous owners we wonder? Probably was considering the tricky nature of the mounting. Contents of the HD:
Two small strip lights. One came a few days ago and is shown installed under some cabinets in the pic below. The other also works but is as yet hanging around and not illuminating anything.
Note the toaster appeared on this page in the past.
Two bikes, all very wibbly and spiffy. First a Kona Hahanna, whatever that is. It is not the best bike in the world but certainly not the worst. Somebody will want this. When found it was missing a seat and the two quick release skewers for the wheels, but otherwise in fine shape. A seat and skewers from the pile and it rides OK. Look for it on the list of craig or snag it before it gets there.
Also a Lotus Excelle, which seems to have been a halfway fancy road bike at some time. The bars were badly bent by some collision/crushing type event but we tossed another pair on. It is very tight and smooth to ride, needs bar tape then off to feed the rabid hipster market for drop bar bikes. There is a good chance that some hipster might want this to be a single speed, the frame has a certain elegance to it. We don't care as long as they hand over the cash.
Update: The new bar tape is on and the thing is ready for the list of craig, pic updated also.
A small Krate bike in middling condition. This may clean up nice and find a home, we are not sure. Bikes of this ilk seem to be recently trendy and commanding absurd prices so it is worth a try.
Update: Cleaned up and sent away to amuse the offspring of certain relatives.
Due to coffee pot issues in certain circles we frequent, we resolved to collect a stash of spare coffee pots. Shortly thereafter a friend dropped his and hence was able to take advantage of said (small) stash. Shown in his kitchen ready for deployment in wakeup duties.
A brass lamp in the form factor of a candle stick. The pic shows it stripped of most of the junk that came on it. We originally picked this up for the considerable scrap brass value but it seems like it might make an OK lamp to actually deploy somewhere, so we will put a new cable and fitting on it and find a shade for it. We have already used it as a candlestick.
A random bike minus the wheels and seat, we picked it up for the rear derailleur to fix the slightly stricken Fuji. Here then is the part installed and all happy. The rest went back into scrap metal as it was pretty junky and beat up.
A Dell 866 Mhz Pentium 3 laptop with 128M RAM and 20G HD. It lacks the horsepower to really run the XP installed on it but there was nothing physically wrong with it. Even the battery seems to hold a charge.
In the cdrom was a CD full of 500M of powerpoint stuff, all very important sounding business deals and such. On the machine were two users. One had a selection (on the order of hundreds) of cheesy soft-core porn in IE cache, the other had this image cached:
Errr, duh!
It turns out that the second user also had 5000+ mixed hard-core porn images in cache. Wow, a deceptive popup thingy actually turns out to be accurate! Nothing else on this machine but the porn and the powerpoint, not even regular surfing (that we could find). There were some RTFs with birthday invites and house construction info etc but they were standard issue for this demographic of computer user. Polarized porn and powerpoint 'puter.
Also found a small case Dell Pentium 4, partially stripped but useful for parts and the G-wireless PCI card that was in it.
We do not use these cards but we know people who do.
A Fuji Odessa mountain bike. This one is in OK shape except a broken derailleur hanger. That is a easy fix. It was also missing the front skewer as some guy had just taken it off rather than taking the whole bike. What a moron. We like these bikes as they make great city beater bikes, not fancy enough to be stolen, robust enough to use and reliable enough to just ride without ever doing maintainance again after the first tuneup.
A very nice All-Clad stainless pan. When found it had traces of sauce on the outside and some burnt food on the inside. We suppose that yes, it may actually be easier in some sense to toss a pan rather than clean it, but no, it is not the correct thing to do. And this pan was not difficult to clean, maybe 5 minutes scrubbing.
In the periphery of the pic you can see four items that previously appeared on this page.
Update: Pan snapped up by some friends along with a suitable lid that turned up a couple of weeks ago and did not merit a mention here on its own. Voila, a new home for a fine piece of cookware.
A Pentium 4 Dell 2.4Ghz PC with 250G HD and 256M of RAM. All seems present and correct with the machine including the data from the previous owners, a mother and daughter. Salient points:
A somewhat funky but pretty fine Maclaren pushchair in fine shape. The picture here tends to emphasize the random things that get in the way of the flash but it is nice and will be sent to a new owner by way of the list of craig. Shown sitting on a table that should have appeared on this page at some stage in the past.
It may shock you to see us installing windows for our own use, but yes we did. We have some replacement windows to put in various area of the house and these basement ones called for some 2x6 type stuff. We found some very nice 2x8 that we cut down and used to frame the hole for some of the windows. Spiffy, much better than buying the stuff, it was very solid old wood that is far denser than the modern stuff. Shown here framing out the window, no internal trim yet applied. Finished but unfinished, so to speak.
The Volvo of strollers, for those in the know, an Emmaljunga in pretty fine shape. This is all present and correct and this model has a niche following in our area so we will introduce it to its niche via the list of craig. All very nice.
Incidentally if you are in the market for a pushchair this is a pretty nice machine if you have the space for it. It is very high quality with various adjustments and has modular replaceable tops. The old style chic it exhibits might be seen as a plus or a minus, depending who you are.
A Fuji cruiser bike in very nice condition. This is almost found to order as a possibly buyer for the Huffy wanted something a little different and this might be it. Has a leather saddle, 5 or so gears, chrome mudgards etc etc. All very nice, only needed air in the tyres.
A random Schwinn kids bike, stunt nuts all round, works fine, just needed air in the tyres.
A Nishiki road bike in nice shape that has been converted from drop bars and had a cushy seat put on. The rear wheel looked like it has been driven over by a minivan, but we tossed on a new one from stock. Curiously the idle flexing of the damaged rear wheels snapped it back into shape afterwards, certainly good enough to ride on. Further investigation required.
A nice bike to ride.
A crappo Murray Redwing mountain bike that had some issues. We replaced the gear shift and fixed a flat and put new hand grips on. It still has issues, being a Murray, but is now a usable bike. It will either go to meet an owner on the list of craig or be saved for summer intern transportation.
A Mongoose Stormer mountain bike type thing. With full gears, brakes etc. It needed air in the tyres and one or two things being adjusted, otherwise looks almost new.
Just don't tell people you use it daily.
This random little side table cabinet thing seems ideal to store the ongoing booklist by the bed and hold anomalous drinks and lights and things. It is not the highest quality but certainly is better the the items it replaces (came with the house). Note that several of the books in shot and the lamp have previously appeared on this page, and if not then they should have.
A Mothercare pushchair modelled on the Maclaren umbrella design. It is in fine shape and actually might work better than the Maclaren. This may be deployed in the near future for a while before we sell it off.
A Lentek Mosquito Trap, see here for specs etc. Some scummy bottom feeder had cut the cable off this before we got to it for the 2 cents worth of copper. Other than that the thing looks unused with absolutely no reason for discard, even comes with the optional extra bug baggie. The pic shows it hiding out in the bushes, as you can see the previous owners were not considerate enough to include the propane tank, unlike those of the previous mosquito trap.
Two super cushy and pretty nice sun-lounger cushions. They have some stuff on them that may have fallen off trees but should clean up nicely. We are guessing that their apparent need of a clean is the reason for discard.
A Instep single jogging stroller in OK shape, previous owners had some strange zip-tie bodge instead of using the supplied seat adjustment. We tossed that away and shall send it to the list of craig after a quick clean. The handlbar grip is missing on one side but otherwise it seems fine. Shown displaying the fine reflective safety strips for nighttime use.
A Ikea kids' bed that can be deployed in a variety of height configurations, again check out the specs here. The one we found come with the optional extra tent sky thing. All very fine, but in its flat-packed state does not make for an interesting picture.
Next, a Trek 820 juvenile model. It had a rusty chain, which was soon remedied. Otherwise rides fine, has a few dings in the paint and no apparent reason for discard, presumably the juvenile that rode it is slightly less juvenile now, they grew out of it. Pic soon.
A Huffy Savannah. When we picked it up it had flat tyres and some flecks of rust on the chrome parts but no real reason for discard. It was also pretty dusty and likely had been passed over by those with a less appreciative eye prior to our arrival. Huffys are generally crap but when cleaned up this now looks like a cross between a sensible round-town hybrid and a hipster city bike. Amazingly it rides really nicely. Seeking new owner.
The cleanup procedure consisted of some strategic application of metal polish for the rust flecks and a squirt with the hosepipe. Wow, tricky stuff.
A Bialetti stovetop latte maker. We got one of these before and it is a fine device for certain types of coffee. This new one has the cool cow pattern on it but is missing the dingle that goes on the top. Well, we just pulled the dingle off the old one and pressed this new one into service. The previous owners seem to have used it approximately once and tossed it, I guess they just do not get it.
A mixture of books, mostly gathered by certain folks tagging along with us. First no idea why they picked up this partial Shakespeare, but at least it comes with a handy set of instructions. We would never have thought of anything so sensible.
Also an assortment of the usual suspects, Harry Potter and The Nanny Diaries etc. All very canonical, for certain canons.
A few Compaq Pentium 4 machines in various states of having been scavenged. We grabbed one nice machine and a disk to look at. Salient points:
A Kettler pedal powered car thingy to amuse offspring by making them power their own locomotion. The chain is off (easy fix) and one of the wheels may have some issues but we will see about that.
A Schwinn Cross-Fit hybrid bike. It is a fair few years old but has not been ridden to any significant degree. No real reason for discard. A puff of air in the tyres and a quick squirt with the hose leaves it all happy and ready for a new home, possibly via the list of craig. Unless that is one of you avid readers wants it at the special discount rate?
Update: Sold to a friend at a special discount rate.
A Cannondale H400 is pretty fine shape except one or two items. The rear wheel was off and the tyre and tube were missing, hence the reason for discard is probably foreign object penetration of said rubber devices. A puncture, in layman's terms. New tyre and tube from stock and it rides fine. Front tyre needed a puff of air also, presumably even if they had not had the puncture in the rear they would have tossed it anyway due to the front being slightly low. Who can tell?
The change visible on the table behind and to the right of the growler was in the little Cannondale pouch.
A delicious selection of cast iron cookware. First off a 12 inch skillet. This is for Jeff, for those who know him. Pic shows it cleaned up and cured, in fact it has already been used to cook parsnips and suchlike.
Next up a nice little cast iron pot with lid. It is in very good condition but needs a quick brush and cure. This is available.
The rest are pictured here getting a light rinse in a rainstorm. They will be dried and stored until somebody wants them. They are not as crazily rusted as the light portrays them in this picture.
An ice scraper thingy. At least that is what we think it is, it has a distinctly spade-like essence but has a flat blade with a crude edge on it. It is pretty much new and if you are lazy enough to not get your driveway cleared before the evening then this is what you need. Probably being taken by a friend.
An Instep brand bike trailer suitable for hauling two horrible offspring. This is in near new perfect condition but is missing the hitch part that bolts to the bike. Fortunately that can be obtained from the manufacturer for the quite reasonable sum of 8.99.
A Baby Trend jogging stroller in OK shape. It needs air in the tyres, a quick wash and a starring appearance on the list of craig.
Update: Sold via the list of craig.
A random Cosco car seat, nothing particularly special, but we seem to be encountering sufficient people who need one such as this so we squirreled it away for stock.
A single speed Sears bike, not the highest quality and a little beat up but this will clean up fine. That rear mudguard will straighten out also. Hipster special.
Also, this bike was acquired a while ago and was spruced up today for a chance encounter sale. Flogged off for some cash and a sixpack of beer.
The bike shop that was closing has tossed out more stuff, this time a load of tools and more spares. Here are some pics shown after initial sorting, first a large box full of inner tubes, some handlebars (davek) and bottle cages.
Some large number of BMX chains, we suspect these may be donated to an artist type or some such.
A bunch of derailleur and other associated parts.
A metric buttload of bike cables, handy as our current mode of fixing a broken cable is to pull one off a bike that is past fixing in other ways.
Finally a huge pile of bike tools, mostly Park Tools brand. Some pics of them sorted maybe later.
Today a guest entry from far flung parts, a green folding toolbox. Our correspondant was in need of such a device so checked out the prices in the hardware store. These being too high he proceded to the local used items outlets with no satisfactory outcome. Shortly afterwards this nice green model appeared in some local refuse. No apparant reason for discard. The chair under also.
A meat grinder attachment for a Kitchen-Aid mixer. This is in fine shape apart from being missing one small part. This has been offered to, and claimed by a friend with such a kitchen device.
A child safety seat identical to one we already have. This is convenient as a friend had just requested such, specifially the one we already have, and we had pledged ours. Now we give them the fresh one and keep ours as a spare.
A bike shop, going out of business, decided to toss a bunch of stuff. Some of it is only faintly interesting but there are some pretty handy things present also. A box full of BMX parts, some of which are scap alu, and some special bike tools:
Next was a large pile of new bike tyres being tossed. Some will be happy on ebay and others will be handy for fixing bikes for usage or sale. Super spiffy haul.
A 700Mhz iMac with 128M RAM, complete and in working condition. Possible reason for discard was the missing spacebar on the (slightly grubby) keyboard. It boots OK and yields an interesting insight into the life of the previous owner. Salient points include:
6 Andrea Griminelli
13 Compilations
16 George Winston 
Some random bike parts useful for fixing stuff. Some of the random ones are not so exciting (assorted pedals and such) but we did get a pair of pretty fancy wheels, Mavic rims, that were basically new old stock, seemingly never used. These are now deployed on a nice Trek we found a while ago to give a pretty nice bike. Davek, last chance before it gets sold....
Dell Pentium 4 laptop, 1.6Ghz, 256M RAM. It had a bad optical drive and bad HD but otherwise works fine. Available or will be bartered/sold for parts.
A screwpull type wine opener mounted in a "convenient" tower. We have the real Screwpull without the tower and we far prefer it to this, but somebody we know may like this for their basement bar or some other party location. Apply to us if you want it.
This is a the bottom half of a Wagner number 5 skillet set. The lid half is like a very shallow skillet and it fits neatly into the strangly shaped handle. The discarder of this unfortunately forgot to leave us the lid. Not sure what this is destined for but at the very least it will make a nice skillet for somebody when cleaned up.
A random Kawasaki mountain bike in a pretty sorry state. It was missing the front wheel, one brake pad and various cable parts. The forks were facing backwards and the cluster was not actually screwed on, it all fell off when we removed the rear wheel. All that was left of the pedals were the spindles. So, two shiny new wheels from stock, an adjustment of π radians to the steering, a tuneup for the brakes, new pedals (scavenged from a junk BMX) and it works fine. Hal?
Update: Traded to a friend for some pesto and beer and such like. All very sociable.
A Joovy Caboose Sit-n-stand stoller with seat attachment. It is in perfect, nearly new condition except the hand grip padding coming off. This is all very handy but not something we use so it is going on the list of craig forthwith.
Update:Sold to a nice lady with two offspring.
A natty little cast iron radiator set up for steam. This style sort of matches our house but as we are replete with radiators at present we shall be exposing this to other people in need of heating devices via the list of craig.
Update: Sold to a nice chap who had a leaky radiator.
Some handy dandy bike parts selected for their possible usefulness on imminent projects, davek.
A splitting maul of moderate weight with a fibreglass handle. It was a little rusty and blunt when we found it but that was soon fixed by applications of abrasive techniques of various types. Cleaned up and given to a friend. Hopefully they will use it to split lots of firewood and have nice fires in the winter, around which we can congregate and set light to booze etc.
A pretty substantial set of plastic boxes for storing one's offspring's amusement devices. One of the the blue towers was broken so we left that but a friend has taken the rest of it. All well and good.
A pretty old but sturdy Hobart meat slicer. This is the old vertical blade model (as opposed to the angled models) but it still works and looks pretty handy. We will cast around for a home for this, ultimately the list of craig may get a peek into the action. Note the stainless cart it is shown sitting on appeared on this page some time ago.
A small cast iron skillet, having been obtained some time ago, was requested by a friend. It was then exposed to the cleaning and curing process and was made ready for transit to their home cooking environment. Prior to said cleansing process it was significantly crusty and rusty.
Some small amount of bluestone for a friend to make a small area for a fire thingy. No big deal.
A nice green Schwinn Breeze bike. It has flat (but new) tyres, perfect chrome mudguards, fine seat, good paint. Some rust in various places but all that will come off nicely. The gear cable is a little shy of its proper connected state but that should fix up easily. Some hipster is hunting for this bike with cash in hand, not literally as hipsters don't carry cash, but nevertheless they will come back four days later with that money. It should also provide entertainment for us riding it around until it is sold, these bikes can be quite relaxing to ride for a while.
The special romantic photographic effects are just what an iPhone does in this particular light.
Yet another Topeak bike seat for kids. We have sold a few of these recently and this one is in near perfect condition so it should sell well also.
A Trail-a-bike device for pretending that your offspring are contributing to the general familial propulsion effort. This is in perfect shape except for being missing the attachment point. It will probably go on the list of craig neverthlessas said attachments are available seperately from reputable outlets. Shown below in the folded position.
A corner of Egbert is just about visible in the top of the picture. Some horrible offspring seems to have drawn on his leg.
Update: Bought by a very pleasant and with-it couple who had even already got the missing attachment device. What a refreshing change.
A super fancy Kelty rucksack for carrying one's offspring. This is in really nice shape and is a pretty fine example of its type. Cleaned and ready for the list of craig.
Two single jogging strollers, same brand, different conditions. The blue one is near perfect, pretty much never been used and good to go. The little rubbers hairs have not even worn off the tyres. The purple one had some brake issues and rusty poppers but cleaned up nicely enough for the list of craig, at a discouinted price iof course relative to the blue one.
Update: Blue one sold quickly. Purple still waiting for a home.
This was picked up a few weeks ago but for some reason got neglected in issues of documentation. A mosquito killer thingy complete with full cannister of gas. It starts right up and seems to run so all is well there. We have no idea what the reason for discard was on this, it is in excellent condition modulo some dust etc. We gave it to a friend who likes such things, but only after we deployed it for a party at a different friend's house (yes, you may infer that we have more than one friend!). The only thing it might need is a the little attractant smelly thing, it being a consumable. Pic shows it in dismantled state for transport.
Yet another clown bike. This one is smaller than the previous one and will be used in the lab as a procrastination device or job candidate filter. Pic soon.
A bike trailer suitable for dragging a brace of offspring around. Seems in OK shape and seems to amuse offspring mightily when deployed. Despite its great entertainment value we will be letting it entertain somebody else's offspring via the list of craig.
A map filing cabinet in pretty fine shape and all ready to file maps in. A pity we have none worth filing. This will hit the list of craig in an attempt to find a new owner.
Update: Sold on the list of craig within a day or so, a nice lady wanted it for her offsprings' art. Hmmmm.
A Baby Trend double Jogger that seems brand new and never used. The brakes were not set up even and it did not need a wash. This will be sent to meet its purchasers on the list of craig.
Further, a single Baby Trend Jogger double in similar condition. It needed air in the tyres and may actually have been used once or twice. This also will be sold.
Further, a Graco random newish stroller. All present and correct and barely needs a clean before going to the list of craig. Quite a haul of indistinguishable-from-new strollers today.
Update: The two singles sold within a few days, the double will have to wait for the next crest of the IVF twins wave, so next month maybe.
A brace of Dell Pentium 4 PC machines. First one a 2.66Ghz, 75G HD, missing the memory. On the HD was a completely fresh install of XP waiting for first boot config etc.
Next a Pentium 4 Dell, very similar but better motherboard ( more ram slots and better graphics setup). Some Notes:
254 CMJ New Music Monthly
135 Chris Whitley
132 Various Artists
114 Compilations
106 Aesop Rock
101 Jazz Artists
100 25 Jazz Greats
97 The Beatles
95 Neko Case
84 Led Zeppelin
80 David Bowie
75 The Roots
75 Cocteau Twins
74 Sea Songs
70 Jill Scott
69 The Beastie Boys
66 Irish Artists
66 Edith Piaf
66 Bruce Springsteen
66 80's Artists
63 PJ Harvey
63 Paste
62 Indigo Girls
61 Badly Drawn Boy
60 Beck
57 Jack Johnson
55 Prince
54 Gipsy Kings
50 Dave Matthews Band
50 Country Artists
49 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
47 Blues Artists
46 Peter Gabriel
46 Fleetwood Mac
44 We Love New York
44 Virgin Recommends
44 Iron And Wine
A Babytrend double jogger in near perfect condition. It needed air in the tyres and a further application of compressed air to blow the dust off. It does not even have the sticky folding mechanism that is so common on these models, though we oiled it up anyway so as to be ready for several years service after we sell it to the nice people shortly to be introduced to us by the list of craig. It seems it had never been set up correctly as the brake quick release was in the open position and was not closable without cable adjustment. Fixed now.
Further, a Babyjogger double in fine shape. This one is more of a pain to fold but has aluminium wheels and frame etc. The air was still in the tyres so it just needed a wash to be ready for its new owner. Horror film style pic here for now, check back soon for a better one?
Update from the future: Obviously we never fixed the picture
A green Schwinn bike that, once cleaned up, looks respectable enough for a hipster. This was pulled from curbside by a friend who will be wined and dined at our expense once we sell this. See, reuse of garbage is a social catalyst as well as the correct thing to do.
Random kiddy trike in perfect shape and all too ready to go into the breach that is offspring entertainment.
A Golf bag, possibly of use to some friends of ours. We shall see next time they come over for Kasseler, maybe they will want this.
A random plastic chair that happens to match those of friends of ours, hence it was acquired and dispatched off to their house. The fact that said friends we along for the ride helped of course.
A veritable array of Britax kid seats for usage in newfangled automobiles. Those in the know will know what there is to know about Britax, i.e. they are pretty good. One has damaged insert, that will have the cover scavenged. A couple more are sort of too old, we may pull covers of them likewise. So far 3 have cleaned up to near perfect condition, ready for the list of craig or other usage. Note, not all of them are shown in this pic, the bench under the back row previously appeared on this page and is now rehabilitated enough to put into regular usage. No name yet.
An offspring containment bouncer thingy. Comes with built in amusement plastic things. This again for aforementioned friend.
Some random Sit-n-stand stroller in OK shape. It is actually also a regular dual seated stroller so all very flexible etc. Destined for the list of craig we feel.
A random Huffy kids bike in pretty fine condition. The chain guard had embrittled so we broke that off and threw it away. Awaiting an appropriatly sized kid to come and draw blood on it.
A plastic garbage can full of tools. Including sockets, ratchets, spanners (Craftsman), spark tester, hole saws, screwdrivers, marking bob, some files, brace, old stanley level, and all sorts of extra goodies.
Apart from all the loose hand tools there was also a Craftsman power sander, the pic is pretty self explanatory. Works fine.
Well, somebody actually wanted to buy the Sting Ray and it was most convenient to meet nearby for handover. The journey there being mostly downhill it was actually feasible to ride the thing there. The new owner was very shaky on the bike (natural, bearing in mind its preposterous geometry) so we left her practising and took the money and ran.
A Maclaren Techno XT single pushchair in excellent condition but with sand in the crevices. Found nearby were winter covers for another Maclaren, probably a double.
A Maclaren Vogue single pushchair in good shape but dusty. It will be subjected to cleaning procedures and sold off via the list of craig.
An Instep jogger in OK condition. Entirely unremarkable and it will hopefully find a new home in a routine manner via the list of craig.
Also a Safety First pushchair in fancy modern form factor. It has some issues folding but we expect to be able to fix that. Otherwise in pristine condition. No pic yet.
An entirely typical pack and play, also the extra accessories for another including hood, hammock thingy and changing table. The list of craig for the lot of it, unless you happen to need them dear reader?
A piece of maple butcher block about 3 ft by 4 ft by 2 inches thick. It is very nice, no cracks etc. The finish on it is pretty thick and nasty but that will have protected the wood nicely. Previously was configured as a single legged table. It this were 4ft by 10 ft we would use it as a dining table but alas no. It may become a coffee table or some addition to a kitchen. We will see.....
Two luxury Peg Perego High chairs in fine shape. They both have the fake leather cover on them, both need a clean but are otherwise ready for deployment under some messy offspring's butt. Fine examples of their type, note that Martinelli is just rebadged Peg Perego for these purposes.
A Britax car seat for year old offspring and up. It has a luxury cover and is in good shape modulo the clean it requires. This may be used for a while and then sold, barterd or whatever. This has the less annoying buckling arrangement.
A Peg Perego Venezia pushchair in dark blue and nice shape. It is all very spiffy and in fact was sold before it got a chance to appear here or on the list of craig, luckily we grabbed a pic of it at some stage.
A Peg Perego Milano, similarly in nice shape and dark blue.This one has the full insulated winter cover and hood, all very nice. It has on adjustor button that is problematic, we will work on that. Going on the list of craig if no readers of this page snap it up.
A random cheapo jogger that needed a couple of tweaks and some oil. All is well with it now , brakes adjusted, tyres pumped up and it is on the list of craig waiting for a new owner.
A pretty fancy modern Snap-and-go, it is constrained in its usefulnes in that it only take Graco infant seats but somebody will want it on the list of craig for some amount of money. Egbert visible again through the leaves!
A hydraulic lifting table very similar to this one apart from the diamond-plate top. It was covered in a fine dust and the let-down valve was disconnected. A quick clean and a new bolt later it seems in fine shape and works, the rubber mat that goes on top is not present in the pic, it is being cleaned elsewhere.
A SanDisk 256M CF card. While this size is not as useful as it might once have been, it has the entertainment value of the pictures on it. We have gained a disposable CF card and the elevation of our artistic souls though pics such as this:
I think you have to agree that whatever the (de)merits of this particular image, it is superior to a picture of the CF card itself. Unless maybe we edited the card into this pic...... Hint: check the exif headers, or just save it to your Mac desktop and look.
An Emmaljunga pushchair/pram thing. This is a Swedish super fancy offspring portability mechnism which allows you to swap the top part from pram to pushchair arrangement and has full recline and loads of stuff even on the regular pushchair mode. Rolls nicely, looks great. Probably the bext price for this will come from selling it on the list of craig to some crazy scando dog owner, but we will see.
This random Nishiki has been floating around quite some time, we have no idea where we got it from but we definitely got it from some discard arrangement, hence it is elligable here. Anyway, an acquaintance wants a real beater bike for city usage and this may well be it. Missing front derailleur but some scavenged tyres and a flat fix make it into an unexpectedly pleasant ride.
Update: Bike now has a front derailleur installed and is now seeing regular use as city beater. Fine stuff, with friends like us who needs the craigslist?
First, another bike off that pile shown the other day is a Trek 800. Upon acquisition it looked a bit sorry, the tyres were off the rims and the tubes hanging out. However; once they were popped back on and given a puff of compressed air they seemed fine. In fact in this pic it seems pretty damn shiny! Seems like the previous owner was just plain stupid, or some such. This has been given a squirt with the hose, a wipe with an oily rag and is now proudly advertised of the list of craig. Pic shows it posing with the ever-present recently acquired chair. This chair has appeared so much here that maybe we ought to give it a name? Suggestions? We propose Egbert.
This is a Roadmaster Mt. Fury (??) in almost brand new condition. Such a pity that is a complete piece of junk that should never have been manufactured in the first place. One wheel nut was missing from the front wheel but we soon found a replacement kicking around for that. Again, this will be sold pronto, if there is any bike we wish to get rid of this is it. Well this and the idiotic Schwinn from a few days ago.
An offspring amusement tube in brand new perfect condition. You might well ask how an offspring amusement tube works in its designated capacity, but empirically we find that the offspring in question have an excellent innate knowledge of how to make it work.
A pretty shiny Graco Pack and Play, all present and correct and in perfect condition. We may use this for offspring containment purposes as it is so spiffy. Then maybe later sell it on the list of craig.
A Sears Craftsman jigsaw. This has the steerable blade thing and a nice fence. When found it had the plug cut off but it was the work of but a moment to wire one on for testing purposes. Voila, it worked. Already claimed by tk we think.
A pretty fancy folding golf bag trolley that we think might be useful for a friend. That or scrap aluminium. Rotate your vision -π/2 for the pic:
An Instep Safari TT double jogger in fine usable shape. Comes with 5 point harness, seat liners (not shown in pic), folds easily, peek-a-boo window, locking front wheel swivel etc etc. Some sun damage, a couple of screws loose and air required in the pneumatic road contact devices. No real reason for discard. Available or destined for the list of craig.
Some rags to hang on the offspring as they grow, mostly just for legal reasons as we see no reason to demand they wear clothes. Note they are draped over the chair recently featured here, said chair has entered arduous service in the outdoor zone quite sucessfully.
A Peg Perego Venezia pushchair that seems to be in very nice condition and has loads of features. A quick cleanup and it is good for the list of craig or other outlets.
A pretty nice single jogger, InStep brand, 5k model. It has a digital odometer/speedometer and is in near perfect condition with hood and all that stuff. This will be sold off as we do not need it.
A Graco Duo glider stroller in nice shape. These are a reliable commodity around here so it will be turned into ale and victuals via the intermediate step of cash from a person introduced to us via the list of craig.
A little patio fireplace thingy. This has some potential usefulness to us so we may well try it out in the bottom of the garden in the late night patio area.
The first one examined from that large pile of bikes is a Trek 820, it has been used, needed some air in the tyres and a clean but seems fine. It will be a great the list of craig station bike sale, of maybe for JP? JPR not JPL.
A selection of random mountain bikes in need of some tuneup etc. They all look complete. The two Treks at the back are the best but all will make fine station bikes for some happy commuters. More info later on these as we investigate.
Update: See other entries more recently for details on the actual bikes but three are sold and the other is out to a summer student. Fine stuff.
A Schwinn Stingray badged Orange County Choppers. It is amazing how somebody could take something as useful as a bike and turn it into something as pointless and crap as this. It is pretty hard to ride, at least for people of our build and sensibilities, but is otherwise in OK shape modulo the rust spots on the chrome.
A big nonstick Calphalon frying pan, or omelet skillet as they like to call it. This has the non-stick coming off so we are going to return this for a new one and who knows what we will do with that one. Present your worthy cause....
A large brass lamp that is remarkable for its size but not especially for its form. This is for a friend who values such things, we hope.
A Kool-Stride double jogger in OK shape and delicious purple colouring. It needed only air in the tyres and it is ready to be off to the list of craig.
A Stainless steel slop sink that seems in pretty fine condtion. Obviously somebody had it in a garage sale and nobody wanted it for the advertised price of ten currency units, how sad. This may be deployed in the rennovation of our basement washing area, we will see. Previously we had been looking for large double deep stone or ceramic slop sink for this area but now who knows what we will do.
Now we have that sinking feeling.
The chair was glued and screwed and cleaned and oiled. It seems too red to be teak, it may be mahogany or some such. But here it is so you can see for yourself:
Update: This chairs seems to have been named Egbert. It needs a name as it seems to appear in the background of so many subsequent pictures on this page.
We cleaned the rusty Wagner from yesterday but then got sidetracked by a prior find, a slant logo Griswold with heat ring, and the other no-name pan from yesterday. Here they are after a good clean and an initial cure. Both are sort of available if you convince us you are a good cause.
Meantime the Wagner has to wait a while.
A tennis ball floinking machine. We had one of these that we sold on the list of craig but this one has a power cord and AC power and hence is more conducive to immediate fun. It works fine and can function as garden artillery.
A hardwood chair and small table for outdoor usage. We get the feeling that the damage they seem to have sustained occurred upon discard. Attempts will be made to fix them as they seem worth it. A spot of glue, some clampage and some nailgun action should suffice. Pic shows the chair being glued and screwed, note the clamps all appeared on this page at some time.
A Compaq 2.8Ghz Celeron machine with a 40G HD and 256 M RAM. Boots XP, for what it is worth. This is a HP compaq and it still seems to have crappo Compaq issues, once stable it may have some cycles to offer. It has been converted to a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (using a CPU from the trash). CDrom issues holding us up on the forensics front. Watch this space......
Update: Bartered for a bunch of beer, the social kind of beer of course. Not just a bunch of beer, that would be crass.
Yet more cast iron pans, a Wagner with heat ring and some random no-name but "Made in USA" thing. Wagner is rusty but we aim to fix that, pic shows the crusty rusty Wagner hanging out on the stove.
A Giant ladies' mountain bike. Before you ask, no, not the bike that this woman rides:
...but in fact a Giant brand Acapulco model bike that is marketed towards females. It is of not so great quality. It seems functional after a couple of tweaks, one of which involved a large hammer and a vise. We already have a possible taker for this, people want simple ridable bikes for some reason.
An offspring amusement device that shows much promise. We will see what occurs when the offspring returns from overseas and checks it out.
A friend had his rear tyre slashed on his beater bike, and rather than fixing the tube and getting a new tyre it is much easier just to get a whole new rear wheel. Shown here with a random seat and pole that came with.
Attending an event involving the cooking of numerous things outdoors, we took a bunch of random cast iron, some of which has been featured on this page, some not yet. We found recipients for some of it, then we cured the whole lot on the large open cooking fire and used some of it for actual cooking. An excellent scaled cleanup.
An Acer table/laptop thingy with XP installed and sort of working fine, the only problem seens to be an intermittant connection in the powersupply connector. Despite its many claimed features we have no use for it.
A Dell XPS gaming laptop with hyperthreaded 3.4 GHz cpu, 1G RAM etc. It booted but had a bad GPU which was part of the motherboard and hence not easily fixable, that was probably the reason for discard. It also had a chewed power cable that had been bodge fixed with some tape. We sold the carcass off to somebody who has the time and inclination to care. The pic does not do it justice, it is boat anchor in laptop form factor.
A stainless steel restaurant food prep table that appeared to have been discarded in curbside garbage by a well known (but not good) restaurant. It had some skanky tape on the top and a bunch of scratches but there is no apparent reason for discard. Shown here after a good clean and a light sanding to take out some scratches from the surface. Prospective future uses include the sushi bar at an outdoor wedding and some form of useful loadbearing function in an art thingy?
It is bloody heavy, in case you are thinking of borrowing it.
A Brother Sewing machine complete in the box. It has been lightly used, if at all, and so far tests OK. This was a request by a friend, and sure enough within a week we had found a nice one. This posting is also belated, we got it a while ago but only got the pic from the new owner recently.
A twin Baby Jogger Q series. This is a pretty fancy jogging stroller, the folding action is well worth the price and complexity. It had been run over by its previous owner but it was very simple to fix the broken frame piece. Despite all its features, it is however, too wide for our local railway station door, hence off it goes on the list of craig.
A Dell Pentium 4 1.7Ghz PC with 256M RAM and no HD. Previous owners had a clue we guess. Works fine, boots Knoppix fine so there is no apparent reason for discard except possibly that they had too many infections on that HD we did not see.
Update: Refurbished with a HD and some extra memory from stock and sold on the list of craig because we have way too many Pentium 4 machines lying around at present. Pic is actually the pic used to sell.
A random Jamis mountain bike, pretty nice condition, still had air in the tyres etc. Quickly cleaned up ready for presentation to its new owner on the list of craig.
Also a slightly junkier and more primative model, a Redline (whoever they are) with a nasty paint job. It had a bent front wheels and some issues but a spare from stock and some tuning and it is good to go. Would make a good "station bike".
Update: The Jamis sold on the list of craig and spawned inquiries that sold the Royce Union and the blue Trek. Handy dandy.
A G5 iMac 1.8GHz with some issues. One issue is that it does not power up but the other is that somebody has made some weird USB modification on it involving drilling a hole in the case. Investigation will ensue.
Update: The weird USB mod was a Troll Touch touch screen modification. We opened up the machine and observed various things upon attempted boot. After disconnecting the HD it booted fine. Upon reconnecting the HD it booted fine. Take it apart and put it together again, our favourite problem solving method. The machine was used as a kids' machine we think. A few iTunes on it (Julie Andrews, Johnny Cash, Peter Paul and Mary etc) but not much else.
A WMF cocktail set. Complete except for the jigger stick thingy. Some of the implements are quite nice so we may use them at some stage. We do not use measures anyway so we do not care about the missing piece. Shown on top of the stainless BBQ that made an appearance here but recently got cleaned up(it had some nasty gunk on the top).
In the same box were these glasses. Not the finest in the world but given the breakage rate in our service a welcome addition to the random glass cupboard.
A nice Trek mountain bike of middling quality. The shifters were a little sticky in p[laces, that seems to have been the reason for discard. Pretty much ready for a new owner now.
A very similar but slightly lighter Royce Union. Nothing wrong with this at all except for some rust spots on some components. It has super cheapo brake caliper thingies but the bike rides nicely.
Update: Sold by the Jamis ad on the list of craig.
Shown in the pics below a small assortment of handy things. One strange cast iron pan suitable for donation to friends, one tap wrench that seems very nice, one random crude chisel, a bike chain (required for the Peugeot) and the floor wand from a Miele vacuum cleaner. All of it fairly useful.
Update: Pan donated to people who cook, the tap wrench is really nice to use, and some relatives just happened to need the floor wand for a Miele.
A high chair in good condition suitable for positioning the offspring for food ingestion. This will be for a friend who has need of such.
Not a particularly special device but somewhat handy, a Graco Duo Glider stroller. All present and correct and just needs a quick clean. Somebody will want this, craisglist may introduce us to them in due course.
A selection of 2x6 wood, excellent material for our next replacement window project. You know what a 2x6 looks like, if not see prior 2x4 pics and extrapolate.
A chunky and not so inelegant cast iron radiator for use with steam or water. Pretty fine, about 27x27x7 inches.
A lamp thingy that seems to be for photo studio use. It is very bright and seem to have uses beyond those it was intended for.
A Dell Pentium 4 1.4GHz laptop with 256M RAM, 20G HD in fine condition. When powered on it turned out to have a BIOS password, which is hard to get around. After consulting the interwebs we found the chip on the motherboard containing said password and flashed it with a paper clip as instructed. This involved a moderate amount of dismantlement and a painful period of reading chip IDs. Once flashed we were able to boot the installed XP then a more useful knoppix CD for the purposes of investigation. Machine works fine, though the fan is both loud and often on. Salient points on HD (which was not obviously not encrypted):
311 Compilations
119 Dave Matthews Band
62 The Beatles
28 Pearl Jam
25 Led Zeppelin
18 U2
16 James Taylor
14 Weezer
14 Dave Matthews
13 Alanis Morissette
12 Billy Joel
11 Sarah McLachlan
9 Janet Jackson
8 Metallica
8 Jessica Simpson
8 Fiona Apple
7 TLC
7 Phish
7 Mariah Carey
6 Vanessa Carlton
A scrap yard full of cast iron pans of various types. One super nice Griswold with italic logo and heat ring, some nice Wagners and some no-names. All in all some good functional stuff. Some already promised but siome still available.
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An iMac 800Mhz in fine shape, obviously used by the offspring of a household. Disk contains:
342 Compilations
97 Blink-182
64 Unknown Artist
34 The Ataris
33 David Tao
32 Jock Jams
29 the get up kids
29 Counting Crows
28 Original Broadway Cast Recording
28 Less Than Jake
25 Orishas
24 Elephant Man
23 Hall & Oates
23 Good Charlotte
22 James Taylor
22 Green Day
21 Red Hot Chili Peppers
21 Queen
21 Living Colour
21 John Mayer
114 Compilations
26 Pink Floyd
20 James Taylor
20 Frank Sinatra
18 Queen
18 Elvis Presley
16 Red Hot Chili Peppers
15 Jimi Hendrix
13 Van Halen
11 Led Zeppelin
11 Guess Who
10 Lynyrd Skynyrd
Knowing we have more framing and stuff to fiddle with, these seems to be most handy. Four 2x4 planks that are seemingly quite new.
A tool case, specifically the case for a Ryobi circular saw. This seems to house a stray router quite nicely so it will be pressed into service.
A couple of pristine Radio Flyer wheeled offspring amusement devices. First the little truck thingy:
Also a classic trike with tassels. Certain nearby offspring found these quite attractive.
8 legs for a common and useful shelving system, we took the best four. They had some fancy castors on them but no sign of the shelves or the little collets you need to hang the shlves on the legs. These are for a friend with storage needs.
A cast iron thingy that allows one to bake things in the shapes of various animals. Wow! It has seemingly never been used. This will be donated to somebody who might have a use for it.
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A bunch of brass switch covers, mostly of them OK and one ornately ugly. These are for a neighbour who may have need for such.
This is a cheapo junky pipe wrench but will be handy to keep in a car or some such place where it might provie of crucial usefullness one day.
A Mac G4 tower missing HD but full of memory. THis will be invesitgated for its usefuless but we suspect it is getting a bit old to be anything but fanboy fodder.
A random travelling bag that has a couple of rips but is otherwise in very usable shape. This will be stored for the next visiting European to use to take all their swag home with. Now the US really does have monopoly money we expect more surgical shopping strikes to pass through and require extra bags for homeward transportation.
A tie down that presumably literally fell off the back of a lorry. It will come in handy for our trailor. Note this is genuine "stuff" because even though the owner lost it they threw it away by not coming back for it.
We got a modern Schwinn racing style bike a while ago and recently found the parts to fix it up. The handlebars were rusty and drop style, not popular and not nice. We put on some straight bars and old schwinn sparkly grips and gave the thing a clean up and voila. This may already have a home waiting for it.
A Griswold No9 skillet in excellent condition. This one is nicer than ours in certain details so we will use this and pass our existing Griswold No9 on. Shown here after cleaning and a light cure at 450F.
An anonymous cast iron skillet marked only "8" on the handle and "8-" underneath". It has a nicely shaped handle, very nice interior and a heat ring so this will displace our prior skillet of this size, a Wagner. Again the Wagner will find a home with a worthy kitchen, after all we have been breaking it in for a few years now.....
A Griswold baster dutch oven with wire handle. The lid has the handle broken off, such a shame. This is a possible donation as we are not sure we need this. Pic shows it in gloriously unrestored state, though note that the previous two looked like this a short while before their pictures were taken. Most of the appearance problems stem from a weird dusty coating. The lid on this is a beautiful casting.
Some bike stuff, we need to replenish stock to that we can sell to the hipsters for the spring bike awakening. No pics yet.
A Kelty Jogging Stroller in fine condition. This is an interesting artifact in that is a full jogging stroller, with better standard features than most but it folds like a Maclaren stroller. It is way superior on features to almost every other jogger out there. Surplus to our requirements but it will make a blazing appearance on craigslist.
Small form-factor DVD player that also plays endless other alphabet soup formats. Complete with manual and remote. This is of course pretty useless to us but is a standing request from somebody in need of one. (Yours Russ, just get it out of our house!).
A pile of books, nothing too thrilling but some OK stuff there. Mythology book for anthro-prof friend, Linux book for the next noob that asks me about Linux, wine book for some vinophilic friends, some of them to read and some for reference.
A fancy shiny Peg Perego baby seat for use in those newfangled automobiles. This is a good seat in excellent condition and it arrives just in time, sort of. It was not even very dirty but it got a good wash anyway. It came with the base but that is not shown in the pic:
Small cast iron radiator, usable for water or steam. Available until it sells on the list of craig.
A nice shiny green jogging stroller, all complete and ready to go. It is a bit of a strange shape in the area that is in immediate contact with the offspring's butt, but there you go. It does seem to work though and no apparent reason for discard. Craigslist for this.
A Gateway 40 inch TV/monitor. It has some issues, often there is fuzzy ghosting all over it especially at startup, but this pic shows it perfectly clear. We will probe its precise deficiencies and see if it can be used.
A colleague found some RAID arrays being tossed, and inside were 60 or so seemingly good 120G Western Digital hard drives. Now we would not want to use these in a RAID type application now, much easier just to go buy 7 1TB drives. But for random machines that need a new HD or an extra 120G or sneaker drives, they seem just fine. We will test them as we use them, you may also if you need one.
No investigation of drive content here for several obvious reasons. Sorry.
A wooden FAO Schwarz rocking horse in OK shape. It seems to function quite well as an offspring amuser so it will be deployed in the offspring amusement device zone.
A roll of plastic drop cloth. Super handy!
Three Dell Pentium 4 PC machines all seemingly complete and in good order, they were all dumped off by the same guy. Jumping ahead, they all seem to come from the office of a "fund of funds manager".
First one is a hyperthreading 2.8Ghz 512M RAM with an 80G HD. No reason for discard, boots to XP fine. The following summarizes their computer usage:
28 disturbed
14 blue october
12 nickelback
11 vertical horizon
10 pink
10 maroon 5
10 concrete blonde
9 vast
9 queen
9 pm dawn
9 my chemical romance
9 house of pain
9 him
9 fall out boy
8 toad the wet sprocket
8 korn
8 blake lewis
The next one is also a Dell hyperthreading machine, 2.6Ghz, 512M RAM, 80G HD. It seems to function well with no apparent reason for discard. Only 15G or so of the disk used. Salient points include:
Next machine is a Dell Pentium 4 1.6Ghz 384M RAM with a 20G HD. No apparent reason for discard, seems to work fine. Though obviously if you are going to toss the above machines this one is going to go also.
The 2.8 benchmarked 12300 secs vs an existing machine's 15600 secs, and hence will be pressed into service.
A Calphalon 8.5 qt dutch oven. Missing the lid and the finish on the inside so this is set for a warranty return. It might even be a keeper as we do not have one quite like this.
A cast iron Griswold Oval Roaster, number 3. This will be just fine for roasting ornithological specimens of a certain size that happen to fall into our food chain, namely chickens and ducks. We had chicken last night in fact and though the thing was nicely roasted in the deep cast iron chicken fryer we were wishing for a proper oven roaster. Well, here it is. The more astute amoung you will have already recognized the pans in the background from their prior starring appearances on this page. Note that the roaster has only had one initial cure after its clean, it will soon turn black like the others.
This is not really available, if you want one they are hard to find but there is one here, at least at the time of writing.
Two nice cast iron radiators, set up for steam but usable for water. People we know often need these things and if nobody we know happens to right now, the interwebs are usually kind enough to introduce us to new people who need them. How nice.
Update: Sold on craigslist to some guy who bought a repossessed house from a bank which had had all its radiators removed. Cheeky.
A Peg Perego Pliko folding stroller in good shape. It has been used but is certainly fine enough to make its way up onto the list of craig. This model was our stroller of choice for a while, especially while travelling. It folds in two dimensions, had reclining seat back, 5 point harness etc etc. Also it is not junky, the earlier Peg Peregos tended to get very brittle after a while but this generation seem to age better.
A Dell pizza box style PC, 128M RAM 700Mhz celeron, 10G HD, seemingly in good order, 1st Grade maths CD still in the drive. In keeping with first impression the machine had nothing but kids software on it. No evidence of having been connected to the net, no surfing detritus etc. Oh well, I guess this was a valid use for a machine, just not very interesting for us. Available if you have a use for such, it runs quietly and could be used for some appliance task.
A couple of Pentium 4 PC seemingly complete. First one is HP and has a pretty randomized HD, good job previous owner on wiping. People are learning, upon booting the CDrom makes funny noises and we get a "hot dust" smell. It may need attention.
Second one is a small form factor Dell, 2.4 Ghz, 256M RAM, 40G HD. Bob, you want this? Here is a list of salient data from the HD:
My Documents% xl2txt Passwords.xls | cut -f 1 -d"|" SHEET:Sheet1 Numbers / Passwords Smith Barney Vanguard Chaseonline American Express Fidelity.com Fidelity ATP Yahoo Fin IBD AIM Modem WSJ Pension/ Hewitt Verizon Wireless Verizon Wireless/DSL Verizon.com Wireless sync HP Tech Support Compusa Support M
10 Annie Lennox
13 Beat Positive
12 BeBe & CeCe Winans
9 Black Box
11 Bonnie Raitt
13 Collective Soul
113 Compilations
10 Crosby, Stills & Nash
11 Dave Matthews Band
12 Deee-Lite
7 Eric Clapton
45 James Taylor
11 Natalie Merchant
17 Red Hot Chili Peppers
13 Shawn Mullins
10 Stephen Stills
15 Steve Winwood
12 Susan Tedeschi
8 The Allman Brothers Band
13 The Pretenders
12 U2
13 Young MC
A bedside lamp with a remotely steampunk air to it. It had no bulb in it but one was procured and inserted and it worked. This is now fulfilling its purpose next to a new bed.
A substantial roll of folded drop plastic for curtaining off areas under construction, and other such tasks. Convenient really, this will be used for the next set of replacement windows we put in. The roll is only 14 inches wide or so but the plastic folds out into a larger sheet.
A small piece of brass that is the perfect size to make a new striker plate for a door that happens to be in need of one. No pic, you know what a small piece of brass looks like. Same door that got the mahogany earlier.
A couple of pieces of mahogany showed up just as we were working on our front entranceway. The step/saddle/threshhold was junk so we tossed it and some form of custom made thing seemed in order. Voila, the materials (or most of them) showed up. From pickup time to install was less then three hours, a good turnaround.
A Tivo Series 2. This is untested and uninvestigated, watch this space. We have had several requests for these so if it works this should find a home pretty quickly.
Update: Tivo seems to work but does not have lifetime subscription on it (booo!) and we do not have the remote. All boring, sorry, no screenshots yet. It will be used by the Z dudes in some capacity we suspect.
A selection of laptop accessories including two base stations and some power supplies and such. A nice USB wheelmouse also. Shown, the two docking stations, which may end up on ebay as people seem to like these things there.
A Kenwood 5CD and DVD changer, supports MP3 etc. This is more potential fodder for the record store dudes, initial testing seems good. There were alas no CDs in the tray, we love found music! Grainy pic shot during dodgy testing with Jesus Jones, Doubt. Not an especially good CD to test a CD player but the first we had to hand. Damn, going back to this whole physical media thing is tricky!
A double Jeep Wrangler stroller. These are not as nice as the Maclaren equivalents but other people seem to like them. This has a cupholder and little bag thingy and is in perfect condition so it will be hitting Craigslist soon.
A Garmin Streetpilot III or some such, seemingly new in the box with all the accesories. Previous owner had some token effort at use but it looks very shiny etc. More investigation required on this one, we would love to salvage the tracks data from it to see where the previous owners drove but the preliminary powerup suggests it has never been used in anger.
A cast iron steam radiator, in OK shape. Two nicer ones were present but they were BOD (broken upon discard). It is so sad to see some really nice thing in perfect shape be tossed away only to break upon impact with the hard surface it falls on. Craigslist for one this unless any readers want to trade a few beers for it.
Update: Sold within 24 hours. Fine stuff.
An Xport bike rack suitable for a 2 inch receiver. Seems in perfect shape and will be sold as such on craigslist.
First a double jogger with super large wheels and in very nice shape. A puff of air all round and a quick clean and this is ready to go. The hood is missing, sad.
Next a single Maclaren, all very nice and functional. Needed a clean as the seat area was full of crumbs and hair (used for a dog maybe?).
What seems like an early Peg Perego Pliko. If you have used a Pliko you will know that these are pretty nice contraptions for general purpose offspring carriage. The fundamental design seem to be the same as later models so this may find a home somewhere.
An iBook 14inch. Seems in sort of OK shape, may boot but had screen problem. Either way it awaits HD inspection and overall evaulation. Looks for parts of this on eBay next month I suspect.
Two batteries for a 12inch iBook aluminium, seemingly in good shape and one of which having a full charge in it. These will be tested and sent to handy iBook users who happen to require them.
A Dell Pentium 4 PC with speed around 1.5Ghz, missing memory and some plastic. will probably be used for parts or in the making of a chimera. No pics for now, you know what a Dell computing machine looks like.
A not so high quality Trek mountain bike. It is serviceable enough to be sold anyway, it will be going to craigslist. No apparent reason for discard, the tyres even had air in them. It gave us great entertainment riding around in the snow in the middle of the night already, great value for money.
Update: Sold as a commute bike to a happy guy who found it on the list of craig. We were almost sad to see it go as it had provided some amusement riding around in the snow in the meantime.
Some teak outdoor furniture. A bench, two chairs and one armed chair all matching in a modern-ish style. The bench has some discard damage (i.e. something that seems have have occurred as it was thrown away) but that is easily fixable, we think. Otherwise they are all solid and just need a clean and maybe some teak oil. We could use these but we have a bunch of this type of stuff already so these may become available after some consideration.
A Peg Perego Prima Pappa rocking high chair. What a stupid idea! Rocking one's small offspring while they are eating seems like a recipe for a mess. Chair is in OK shape but has a hole in the fabric seat liner. We shall see what occurs here, probably will be sold on the list of craig, to some people the rocking element is a premium feature or some such.
A Gateway Pentium 4 with WinME installed, all present and correct on the initial physical inspection at least. Machine belonged to an adolescent male, here are some humdrum google searches, after having removed the ego driven self-searches to protect the former owner from your specific (as opposed to non-specific) ridicule.
1 aladdin
1 aladdin music
1 Amitai Etzioni
1 APA format
3 ballericons
1 brittany spears mexico gave the finger
1 chopin
1 clean ocean action
2 drums percussion premier drum workshop dw paiste sabian zildjian maple birch tama ludwig
1 dvojak
1 dvorak
2 first union bank
2 free online english dictionary
1 garden state
1 garfunkle
1 gloria steinem and the women's rights movement
1 grieg
1 guitar tabs doobie brothers
1 guitar tabs stone sour
1 IM Icons
2 instant messenger icons ultimate
1 johnson and johnson corporate law office
1 johnson and johson
1 journal of memory and language
3 Karate Kid
1 koepi xvid
1 Laetrile
1 meister german hard liquor yager
1 Michael Novak
1 minnesota test
1 monkey bowl ultimate frisbee tournament
1 mozart
1 nashville
1 nashville maps
2 nashville maps
1 nashville shop zippo lighters
3 nebuchanezzar
1 new jersey garden state
4 nfl draft players
2 official site garden state
1 off shore dumping
1 paul simon and garfunkel
1 paul simon and garfunkle
1 phone directory site
4 photos drums percussion premier drum workshop dw paiste sabian zildjian maple birch tama ludwig
2 point to wrist point to crotch bathroom
2 premier drums
1 "baby names" origins
2 "johnson and johnson" corporate law office
1 "Sextus Empiricus" Chrysippus dog
1 rec.sports.disc
1 sci
1 ssci
1 state map
1 tennessean
1 tennessean newspaper
6 tennessee tour guide
1 the ebola virus
1 the new york times
1 the world is not enough
1 Thomas Anderson
2 ultimate frisbee summer league cleveland ohio
1 university of rochester
1 upa
1 USGS
1 wax museum nashville tennessee
2 wax museum tennessee
1 web of knowledge
1 yager meister
1 yagermeister
1 yeagermeister
2 yellow pages
1 zanies
1 zion bible
Not sure about reason for discard yet but the disk seems to have some not-quite-fatal-yet issues. Closer inspection of the Recycled dir shows a discarded Morpheus install with a bunch of music, images and porn movies, notably several Jenna Jameson offerings. Evidence of stuff no longer present is also plentiful in db files.
Some random PVR, not a tivo. It seemed to have issues coming up properly but when we pulled the 80G HD inside that seemed to work fine. OK then, the rest of it is junk and we prepare to see what can be found in terms of cool TV programming on this thing. Exactly one recording was present, and it was 250 seconds of TV snow. Of course it is not even well encoded snow because no PVR manufacturer sets up their mpeg2 parameters to be useful for snow. Download the 150M file here, if you are really curious. Play it directly from your command line with:
mplayer http://user-agent.org/stuff/images/pvr_snow.vob
A jogging stroller with ripped fabric in two critical places we fear. Oh no, a genuine reason for discard! Never mind, we have another in stock that has a cracked aluminium wheel mount area. We were going to weld that up but it seems a lot faster to take the (almost new) fabric from that one and put it on this frame. The new chimera stroller is now on the list of craig, trying to feed the family. Fine and dandy.
The VIA server from the other day has no graphics on it so I resolved to find a PCI graphics card for it (no AGP on the board). Seek and ye shall receive. Pic may come soon.
A Cosco Alpha-Omega car seat for young offspring that is in perfect shape and feature laden, in a good way. We really have no use for it though so we will be floinking it off on the list of craig. Available at heavy discount to readers of this page.
This is thoroughly obselete but we picked it up for our friends who own a CD store, and yes they seem to be thriving. They are pretty much series-of-tubo-phobic. They do like CD changers though for the store and requested such from us. It even being a DVD changer and they being in the process of expanding into more DVDs I bet they will want a TV from us next....
A 1U short server with a Via twin CPU motherboard in it. This seems like a pretty nice machine so we may make it into a nice little backup server or some such in the basement. It is not fully tested as yet but so far we have great hopes for this particular piece of garbage.
A Babytrend double stroller in perfect condition apart from a 1.5 in hole in the fabric in the side of one the of the seats. It sort of looks like a cleaned up cigarette burn but larger. Who knows what the modern parents of today allow their horrible offspring to do.......
Today a bumper crop of german language books, always useful. No pic for now.
A Trek cheapo hybrid bike. Cheapo but quite useful if you actually want to ride somewhere. Flat fix and a quick clean and it is off to meet up with craigslist.
Update Sold on the list of craig rather quickly, fine effort
A pretty large cast iron steam heating radiator. This is a available to anybody that might want it (Monica?). Failing that it will be making an appearance on craigslist. It is a pretty good size and weighs probably more than 200 lbs.
Update: Sold on the list of craig to some happy fresh first time homeowners. They seemed a bit sketchy on the whole concept of steam heating but hopefully this is what they need.
First up a super fancy double jogging stroller in near perfect shape. Tyres needed a little air, and in fact the tyres seem to imply that this had never been used. The blue on in the background is a complete and very similar double jogger but it has a bend in it. Its fate is uncertain but the red one will be a craigslist special very soon.
Next a super fancy Maclaren double. This needed nothing but a clean as it had obviously sat in a garage or some such and got dusty. All very spiffy, it is sitting up on the table to catch some wind to assist in the drying process after the quick hose down.
A single mesh seat Maclaren pushchair with seat liner in it. Again perfect condition and all ready for some usage.
A Peg Perego highchair, offspring food induction for the use of. It is in excellent shape, including the padded seat. This will be sold as we have one identical.
Some random pieces of drumkit hardware. Not useful to use but we know people who may use such things. Bob?
These two are for some acquaintances that run a record store. They value the cd changer functionality for in-store use. The Sony works (despite its sketchy appearance in the pic) and is a very common discard these days, what with the advent of these newfangled music media. The JVC is actually a DVD changer and seems pretty fancy, not sure if it works yet.
Yet another record player, no pretence at ever needing one of these but it will go happily on ebay. Unless you, the reader, wants one? The last one was a big hit with its new owner.
A Baby Jogger jogging stroller in OK shape. Some rust on wheels and fittings, tyres needed air. It will find a home somewhere.
A Dell Pentium 4 PC, as yet uninvestigated so watch this space for more details. Pic of it opened up with all the guts showing, seems complete and not even very dusty. Came with ostensibly working flat screen and wireless keyboard and mouse. Yum.
This will be straight off to ebay to help somebody fix their laptop. Stripped, missing HD, memory, battery, charger etc. Otherwise in OK shape.
An Eddie Bauer branded Cosco child seat and booster combination device. This is in excellent condition and not at all old. We acquired it because a friend has guests coming with young offspring and she specifically asked us for a booster or seat for them to use while here. Well, we got her the AND rather than the OR version of the request but that should be fine.
A Carvin Profresssional Power Amplifier. We are pretty sure somebody we know will have a use for one of these, and failing that we will introduce outselves to somebody who needs one via craiglist or some such. Very dusty but otherwise in good shape, untested as yet.
A kids tagalong trailer bike (or some such). You bolt this thing onto the back of your bike and your offpspring gets dragged along helplessly as you cycle but simultaneously gets the feeling that they are empowered or contributing or some such. Already sold on craigslist.
A random late Raleigh 3-speed bike in OK shape. It has the usual Raleigh stuff, plus a couple of rust spots that do not really show up because the paint is rusty coloured to start with. Fine stuff. It has a Brooks leather saddle on it but that is pretty past it unfortunately. Destined for craigslist.
A device for carrying one's offspring behind oneself. This is a mediocre brand, the device itself is in tip top perfect condition but when we tested it the comfort levels for both carryer and carryee were not so good. Hence soon to be available to those with a small wad of cash in their hand.
A somewhat random but really rather nice Miyata road bike. Clip pedals, nice saddle, rides very nicely. All in all a wonderful bike that we have no use for, hence craigslist at some point for this.
A trashed Trek bike, carbon fibre frame and fancy dura-ace components. Lots of titanium. It seems to have been squished by some heavier vehicle and what is left was tossed. There are several quite expensive components on this thing that are usable, it has been offered up to the Z dudes for scavenging. If you don't know who they are it means you are not sociable enough and do not spend enough time hanging out with us drinking beer and eating dead animals.
A relative asked, "Can you find me a kiddie swing in the garbage...?". We were of course happy to oblige and ended up with three in one day. One happy customer, they only need a clean and something to swing from.
A pretty damn fancy jogging stroller that has a slight crack in the frame near a rear wheel. Some welding will be applied to that (alu frame) and it may then become whole again, at least enough to be sold. Silly Bouncy thing found at the same time.
Some random carry-cot thing that can be mounted to a pram frame or some such. Pretty fancy, OK quality. hence it will be seeking a home out there in craigslist or ebay land.
Giant floor puzzle, 'nuff said? Is it a puzzle for giant floors, or a very large puzzle to be used on the floor. It might not matter.
Some quite nice chunky mahogany pieces and some white oak. They will be useful for some little project down the road, just as the last batch of mahogany was. No pic, you know what wood looks like.
A Craftsman Radial Arm Saw in fine working condition. It is a somewhat old, in a good way, it feels very solid. The blade is a little blunt, at least when tested on some scrap oak. It will be pressed into service I think, should such an opportunity arise.
A selection of cookware including a large calphalon skillet, a ridged base cast iron thingy and a bunch of cuisinart. Some weird German thingy in there also. Mostly pretty good quality and not worn enough for any warranty returns, available-ish. Apply with beer tokens in hand.
A wooden folding chair that is rather comfortable. The finish is still OK and the thing works fine, though seems fairly old. This will employed in various places as needed. It has great appeal dur to its curved seat, hence making it quite comfy. This is rare in a modern chair.
A large box of Lehmann Gross Bahn. Included were many different track sections and accessories. We also missed out narrowly on another box to some guy who wanted it for the scrap brass value. Idiot. The stuff we got is feeding us pretty well via its appearance on ebay.
A Maclaren double stroller. It is pretty faded and a little beat up but somebody may want this so we will make it available to those who might. Pic soon.
First a Dell scanner/printer that is brand new and comes with two extras ink cartridges. Previous owner says this was purchased bundled with a Windows Vista machine but seemed to not work at all with Vista. Hence he tossed it. We will give it a try as we try to remain Windows free, especially Vista free.
A HP printer that according to the previous owner works fine, but his daughter did not like it anymore or something so they tossed it. Investigations to proceed.
A brand new pipe-based clamp. Not much to say about this apart from the fact that it may come in handy.
A shiny new sankey keg complete with small pump. It is half full of Bud light with a born on date of one year ago. We suspect that the Bud is no worse than when it went into the keg. Upon inspection, as shown in the pic, we find that the Bud light seems to have transmogrified into a select and peculiar Belgian style beer with piquant overtones. Look for this from Anheuser-Busch soon....
A pretty chunky chunk of some fairly hard and heavy wood. We are not sure what this will be used for but it seems to have some promise so we will put it in stock.
An old and quite industrial Porter Cable belt sander. When we plugged it in the results were shocking. This may be worth fixing for somebody though as some of the flooring guys tend to like the se super old and grungy tools.
A Dell Pentium 4 PC, 1.4Ghz, 2x 40G HD, 256M RAM, dual boot RedHat and WinME. Former owner was an (technical) employee of a very large computing machinary corporaton. He scrubbed /home /var and numerous other things from the linux install so that it booted but pretty much had nothing of interest on it. Quite slick actually, needlessly so as he really should have zeroed the drives. It seems that he really wanted the machine to boot after it left his possession. The Windows ME install has IE caches chock full of strange windows tutorials and porn. The porn varied from vanilla to kitchen implements (yes, seriously, see . Below we show a image from the cache of great importance to those (like ourselves) who have trouble copying and pasting in Windows ME.
We still have trouble copying and pasting in Windows anything but at least we have now seen the tutorial! No media on machine, no P2P, no digital pics. Sad.
Numerous toys, mostly of the sit in or ride on variety. These were acquired due to the sudden influx of numerous remote relatives and their horrible offspring. First a pedal tow truck thingy. It is all metal and quite nice quality for a toy. We may keep this for a while.
A Peg Perego plastic tractor, this is nominally a high ticket item so once the horrible offspring have finished with it we will be tossing this on the list of craig.
A friend requested some good cookware for targeted donation purposes. Well, these fit the bill, some vaguely nice cast iron. After he has cured them they will hopefully cook some nice dinners somewhere.
Ross, shiny bike with super slim saddle and collapsable pannier. It is OK, sort of qualifies as hipster material, will be sold on the list of craig, we think. The folding basket is rather handy, we suspect that the targeted hipster purchasers of this machine will not appreciate such devices.
A more junky Ross, with wiggly frame. Not sure if this has any value but we are prepared to test the waters with a quick cleanup etc.
A junky Huffy Kids' bike. It was promptly snapped up by a crazy old woman with a full spectrum of grandchildren, a worthy home we feel.
The spiffy sink we found complete with faucets was scavenged. We donated the faucets to somebody who is rebuilding a bathroom and they are installed, albeit in a temporary fashion. Note in the pic that there are no walls and the drain leads via a Montego Diesel radiator hose into a bucket. But they are putting the taps we found to good use, and will do so more in future! They live again.
All the keyboards and mice plus two more keyboards were stacked up. The mice were still plugged in indicating that somebody was tossing an entire lab of macs, but we have not seen those macs yet. What will we do with all those hockey pucks, most useless mouse ever. One of them has been marked up as a special vision impaired model. The missing two were already donated to a serial spiller of drinks on keyboards for use as hot spares. The Dell sneaked in there as we needed one to complete a pc + extras package for somebody.
A quick grip clamp, has some surface rust which was promptly removed with a trip to Mr Bench Grinder. It does not have infinite length as the picture might suggest. It will join the array of clamps on the wall in the basement that are poised to help out at a moment's notice.
After the reasonable success of our bench rehabilitation somebody requested some similar bench ends for their own project. Well, ask and you shall receive, sometimes. The ends are now stripped of the wood and ready for pickup but here is the bench before we went crazy with the sawzall. Lots of layers of nasty paint.
A faintly interesting hammer and a wooden plane, these acquired for us to pass on to the rabid tool collectors in our genetic neighbourhood. They were in a huge bin of stuff, most of which has rusted away far too much to be interesting. A shame.
A fairly nifty canonndale saddle bag thingy. It was pig to pull of the wrecked seat it was attached to but we have it now. It is pretty nice.
A Radio flyer red truck. As our offspring holds a US passport it is probably approriate that she has one of these things. This one is miraculously in excellent shape, they tend to rust quite quickly. It may have something to do with it apparently having been used not but some unwary offspring in the garden but by the staff in the offices of a major drugs company. We took the stickers off before taking the pic.
A Dell laptop carcas pretty much stripped, no HD, optical, memory etc. Somebody on ebay may want this so we will give it a shot.
Followed by a laptop docking station in seemingly good order. It is a pretty fancy one we suppose. Again, ebay fodder for whoever may want it an bid highest.
A Vaio laptop dock still in the original packing. It may or may not be unused and pristine but it seems fine. This will be paying a visit, along with the rest of the laptop garbage, to Mr and Mrs Ebay.
A stainless steel asparagus cooker, seemingly in good shape but missing the insert. No matter, this thing is useful for its stainless steel vessel-like qualities. Shown here after a quick clean with pumice for the body and in the dishwasher for the lid. No particular reason for that.
A pretty fancy stovetop espresso maker. It has some special attachment that allows one to make cappucinos direct in the stovetop device. Pretty fancy indeed! We have yet to test this extended capability but as the thing appears pretty much unused we suspect it will work to some degree.
A keg. More precisely, a half a keg, that is still keglike in topology. This has a bung but the tap fitting seems a little shonky. We will present this to the local brewer for his opinion and hopefully usage. Intense competetion for this, all the scrap metal opas wanted it for the deposit return and probably not for the couple of gallons of beer in it. What they do not know is that the gratitude of the local micro-brew-master is worth more than the cash deposit on any keg. Morons.
A slightly beat up jogging stroller by Baby Trend. Steel frame has some rust. Folding mechanism needed oil to work smoothly. Tyres need air. Fabric needed a clean. This will hit craigslist for some lowish price.
Also seen in background is a Tonka excavator thingy that seems to amuse the offspring unduly. Saves us hosting a pic here to mention that in passing.
Also found, a rather nice jogging stroller with an aluminium frame etc and no sun damage. Wheels, fabric, everything in good shape. Quick wash and it is ready for craigslist at some pretty high price, people don't value what they acquire unless you charge them accoridngly.
A whole metric butt-load of "Hooked On..." book/tape sets. Mostly these have not been filled in etc and we have no real use for this stuff but somebody we know might. Available or being got rid of.
A pair of somewhat ugly but quite functional chairs for small offspring. Small offspring in question seems to quite like them so that is fine.
A Trek bike had rusted components all over except the frame, wheels and seating gear. We took the aforementioned unrusted things and mated the rear wheel with a tyre from another bike to make yet another replacement rear wheel for the turquoise mongoose that is now a regular feature here. Pic shows just the happy rear wheel ready for install.
Also found, a pretty fancy bike for juvenile people. This will serve well in engaging and distracting the numerous cousinous people that are due to come our way next weekend. The chain shows up a trifle rusty in the pic but it works fine at present and will have received a cosmetic cleanup by the time it is pressed into service. Or maybe we will sell it on craiglist before they get here, gotta love some serendipity in one's life.
One iMac g4 800Mhz in fine shape. Mostly unremarkable stuff, lots of pics and movies shot in Central America and lots of music in spanish. Note much in the caches and little else to poke around in. Maybe more details soon.
A Pentium 4 Compaq 1.6Ghz 512 RAM that has to be one of the ugliest computers of the recent era. It has Windows XP installed on a 70G HD, does not boot and had a Windows 2000 install cd in the tray. Hmmmmm. Had kazaa installed with this lot in the "My Shared Folder"
04 - She Hangs Brightly - Mazzy Star.mp3 17 Tsunami.wma Blonde Redhead 10-Mother.mp3 Blonde Redhead-The Gentle Waves - Ballad of Lemons.mp3 Cruxshadows - Insomnia.mp3 Finch - i miss you.wma Joy Drop- All Too Well.mp3 Joydrop - Sometimes Wanna Die.mp3 Liam Lynch - My united States of Whatever.mp3 Local H - Bound For The Floor.mp3 Loudermilk- Insectica.mp3 Marylin Manson - Coma White.mp3 Mazzy Star - Before I Sleep.mp3 Nine Inch Nails - Something I Can Never Have.mp3 Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie & Roger Waters - Comfortably Nu.mp3 One True Thing - Dearest.mp3 Rasputina - Diamond Mind.mp3 Rise Against - Heaven Knows.mp3 The Get Up Kids - Out Of Reach (acoustic).mp3 The Get Up Kids - Overdue.mp3 The Get Up Kids - Stay Gone.mp3 The Rapture-Echoes-the coming of spring.mp3 The Weakerthans - Aside.mp3 The weakerthans jks- saint cecilia.mp3 at the drive-in - pickpocket.mp3 mazzy starr - Jesus and Mary Chain Cover.mp3 miranda sex garden - gush forth my tears (1).mp3 neutral milk hotel - king of carrot flowers 1.mp3 saves the day, new found glory- words unspoken-The Get Up Kids.mp3 tapping the vein - Sugarfalls.mp3 tapping the vein - crushing.mp3
Machine was probably used by a whole family, many of whom are pictured in the photos and decribed in the resumes left on the HD. One is a very accomplished resume writer. Also they are Ukrainian in origin and hence had lots of cyrillic web stuff in caches. Here are some very language-like google searches made by the teenage girl of the household, we guess that some of these are homework but some of them are not. Can you guess which are which?
how are fossils used to identify rock layers? how did avagadro come up with his number? how did avogadro come up with his number? how did the twelfth amendment change presidential election? how does lorenzo's oil work? how do humans interact with their enviorment in the state of washington? how do humans interact with their environment in the state of washington? how many chromosomes are in two new daughter cells? how many people in the world have wilson's disease? how to calculate scientific notation how to draw mouths how to feng shui a bedroom how to give oral sex how to give oral sex to a male what's gwen stefani's favorite lipstick? what are some sites that are used to start and store online diaries? what are the seven deadly sins what did colonists do to rebel the sugar act what events caused the war of 1812? what events led to the war of 1812? what events led up to the war of 1812? what is a virtual image in science? what is erucic acid what is neon light what is neon light in physics what is radioactive dating? what is the definition of a virtual image in science? what is the definition of neon light in physical science? what is the definition of neon light in science? what is the difference between d-amino acids and l-amino acids? what led to the war of 1812? what problems in india facing as a result of modernization? what problems is india facing as a result of modernization? what processes in the human body produce carbon dioxide? what was the balfour declaration? where can i start an online diary? where is amsterdam who discovered wilson's disease? who has wilson's disease who was james oglethorpe who was william penn who won the war of 1812? why are the plasma membranes of plant cells hard to see? why did jean de bueil build the chateau usse? why was palestine not granted independence from great britain?
A cross-section of teenage girl stuff I guess, especially with the search for pro anorexia websites added in. 75 unique lyrics related searches also in the mix, etc etc. To finish here is a nice picture that was on the HD, in the mother of the family's space.
Wire basket at the side of the road in curbside garbage. Shown in pic fulfilling new duties, i.e. storing hard drives. Handy Dandy.
The mahogany we found turned out to be fancy porch floor planking. Some of it has already been deployed in the construction of this essential piece of hardware.
A tool chest (rusty and crappo) filled with a selection of interesting tools. Including but not limited to the following. A Remington powder gun thingy for blasting things into other things, some surface rust. We have no use for it so it is available.
Some solder. This stuff does not go bad and we are always running out of it.
A tasty selection of fanbelts. We tossed all the dry rotted ones and kept this sub-selection. These will be donated to an individual we know who has great need for a variety of these.
A set of valves hoses and torch for oxy-acetylene usage. The hoses are super long and may be in good shape. The valves and torch and pretty beat up. We will have to sinpect these for their potential usefulness.
Also present was a bit of scrap brass and copper, always handy in the sense that it turns into cash at some point.
A rather dubiously named bike, Free Spirit indeed. It is not the most fancy thing in the world but is in pretty good condition bar the missing tube on the front wheel. It also required an air impact wrench to get the back wheel off, interesting stuff. We threw on the nice wheels from that trashed Mongoose a while ago and it is ready to deploy into the custody of some distant family member's horrible offspring.
Some time ago we found a stainless steel rubbish bin, in the rubbish of all places, it probably showed up on this page. Or if not, should have been. The pedal never really worked due to overall cheapness of the mechanism and we just lift the lid all the time. A while ago we picked up a heavy aluminium pan for the scrap value and after we had chiselled the rivets off to toss the handles, the second handle had a use suggested for it. Pic shows it in action.
Raleigh LTD-3 bicycle in blue. This a is a classic made in Nottingham English bike in good condition. It has basically never been ridden, still the original tyres with a little dry rot but perfectly ridable. Chrome is all pretty good apart from on the optional extras, the speedo and kickstand fitted are crappo quality but functional. The chainguard is slightly kinky also, somebody may have hoofed it at some point. Brooks saddle (cheap version) also fitted. Rear luggage rack very useful.
Also with it was a small bag for of duplo, shown here draining after a wash. The colander we had already.
This coffee maker is the same as the one we have in our lab so the carafe is handy to have for a spare. As suspected the coffee maker itself does not work, bad heating element, so that will be tossed and the carafe stored in the lab for that fateful day when we break the other one.
Some books, Coetzee, Le Carre and other stuff of varying quality. Saves a trip to the library.
Well, this update is not actually very big as its title might imply, it is actually regarding the aforementioned Giant bike. Specifically it seemed in a pretty sorry state but is now a pretty fine bike. It still looks a little shonky in places but that is good for the theft repellent quality. It is a good solid ride.
A Dell Pentium 3 PC and an IBM Pentium 3. These are for a friend who has a 266 Mhz Pentium 2 and said that he would welcome anything better that that for use somewhere in his home. We shall see.
A Calphalon Stainless steel skillet. This is in near perfect condition, reason for discard seems to have been a few specks of greasy dirt on one side of the thing. Not visible in this pic as I had just taken the required two minutes to clean them off. Works well and is pretty much available to anybody who wants it.
A Kitchen Aid stainless pot, sort of a milk warming pan or something. We may use this as it fills an empty cookware niche in the kitchen. Absolutely no apparent reason for discard.
A Campbell Hausfeld PowerPal compressor. It is of no great use to us due to our predominatly high CFM requirements but it may form the basis of a vehicle installed portable compressor. It works fine and just has some light rust on a couple of the steel components.
A fairly random mix of books, a mushroom taxonomy books that seems super useful, Anna Karenina and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. No spoilers here, even though it is too late for you to realistically expect me to to worry about that.
After the frantic bike (re)building effort last weekend we used up quite a few spares from the stockpile so it was good to find a few random bits today, some good tyres, tubes, wheels and quick release skewers. Also present was a beautiful old Schwinn but the rust had taken too much hold on the rims so we left that in the scrap metal.
This Schwinn bike seat was actually on a discarded exercise bike, i.e. one without wheels. It was so stylish in an un-cool way that I decided that it needed to be put on real bicycle (on which one might also obtain exercise, imagine that) so that it could see more of the world with it's campy cool logo.
This Giant carcass seems in pretty poor shape at first sight but due to our freshly replenished spares department it could probably be quite a usable beater bike pretty quickly. Some rust on chain and brake cables etc but will work fine for a long time yet with some care.
Hmm, Giant carcass, makes one think of Ender's Game, a copy of which has appeared on this page.
The mongoose that was stripped of wheels, pedals and saddle has been resurrected. The scumbag thief also cut the brake cables in order to get the wheels off. We ended up finding bits from several partial bikes in the scrap metal and assembling it all. Now it is better than before but that is in no way a silver lining on the cloud that scumbag bike thieves cast.
This rocky mountain bike was found a day or so ago, stripped amongst the scrap metal. Possibly a scumbag bike thief had been at it and the previous owners treated that as a reason for discard? Today we managed to find all the requisite parts to make it whole again to a standard suitable for sale on the list of craig or some such. Maybe the previous owner will buy it back? Also available to avid readers of this page of course, at a deep discount. It is now a pretty fancy bike but only suitable for hominids under about 5 ft 8 in height. Having small feet helps also, about the size of those of the foot model in shot are fine.
An Evenflow toddler seat in perfect condition, has barely (if ever) been used. Not nearly as desirable as equivalent Britax etc but usable nevertheless.
As if by Murphy's law, just days after we bought some hardwood to rebuild a park bench, we find some nice mahogany. It is not quite enough to finish an entire bench but will be useful for something else. Custom whiteboard frame? Hmmmmm....
A Peg Perego baby seat with two matching snap-in bases (not shown in pics) and snap-and-go chassis thingy. For those in the know Peg Perego is pretty good stuff, less of the whole seat detaching and baby plus seat flying out of car business. I guess a nearby somebody's offspring just crossed a height/weight threshold and they tossed their entire infant car safety setup. All in very good shape and will appear on the list of craig soon. Monica?
A gentleman new to the neighbourhood had obviously decided to upgrade his entire home computing infrastructure and hence was pitching his old one. Emachines 2.2Ghz athlon with 512M ram and a nice 160G HD. Also flat screen packed for transit in original box and all paperwork etc, including Geek Squad receipts. At the last minute, when he saw us coveting his hardware, he asked us to take the HD out for him. Sensible fellow. I have a HD the same as that with broken controller board so I would have quite liked that but there you go. Machine will probably be donated to a needy family at some point. Teenage son needs the learning, skills, responsibility of setting it up for younger sister, who needs a faster machine, all to benefit of parents, who need demanding offsprings' demands quieted. All of them need something.
A nice Stanley tool chest. It has super monster bearing drawers, holes drilled in the top and couple of dings but all in all is in fine functional shape. Colour is pretty nasty but there you go. This may end up used, traded or sold, not sure which yet. Put in your offers....
A Dell laptop missing everything. The last one of these that we had went well on ebay so I think this one will follow it. Missing memory, HD, optical drive etc etc. Has screen, keyboard, motherboard, power supply and most of case.
Some random books off some various bestseller lists, acquired for a youngish female relative to get through. Now she has finished HP7 she has cycles to spare......
A rather nice mountain bike. Simple but effective. The thing had a super bent front wheel so we grabbed a wheel off some crappo walmart special bike and a also the seat was better replaced with one from stock. Now, a nice machine, posibly destined introduction to its new owners via the list of craig.
Also found some fancy 24 inch wheels from on super high end mongoose kids mountain bike. The bike itself had a really nice frame and all sorts of cool stuff but was a little messed up and had bits missing. Never fear, the wheels will live to fight another day.
Also scavenged off the mongoose the brakes for sombody who needs brakes such as these for a repair job. Fine and dandy.
Ikea again and potentially not a good item to find used but it is in near perfect condition (one handle loose) and the liner is of course washable. Cool.
The old desk chair was getting a bit ratty and pieces would sort of swivel off at random times so this is a welcome addition to the household, even though it is Ikea. It is more comfy and more functional than previous chair and more or less brand new except for a few cat hairs or something.
A folding garden chair of no great notability except for the fact that is is pretty comfy.
Ikea bookshelves in perfect condition. This event is fairly astounding as these things tend to fall apart when you move house or even under normal use. They must not have been ever really used. Will be plonked in some bedroom to hold a cache of books, can never have too many bookshelves. Note of course the key advantages of picking other people's Ikea stuff out of their garbage are that we do not have to go near the nightmare swarm of people that perpetually envelope every Ikea and we do not have to do any self-assembly. Win, win, and because it is free, win again. This was found with the chair while we wsere on foot so it was most convenient to put the shelves on the chair and wheel the both home.
A somewhat monstrous stainless BBQ with side hob and cabinet and stuff. It has a few broken spot welds that we can easily re-weld, then we will convert it to charcoal from gas and proceed to press it into service. Replacement of the junky steels nuts and bolts will also occur, stainless all round now. This should last a while when finished. No real apparent reason for discard.
This is a very early calphalon I think, it has a bowed base so will be returned for a new one.
A set of rollers for when you have a bike but don't actually want to go anywhere with it. Near perfect condition, super spiffy all round. We have no use at all for this, off to Craigslist.
Update: Exchanged for liquid financial instruments via the list of craig.
A BMX bike in good shape, needed a flat fix on rear wheel and all ready to go. Available or used for distant family offspring.
Update: As expected it turns out to be coveted by some distant family offspring. Hence saved for such.
A graco duo glider double pushchair. All the stuff seems to be present, one or two little things on it are a bit ratty but otherwise seems OK.
1/4 and 1/3 cup stainless measuring thingies. I ferreted around trying to find the whole set but alas that seemed too much to ask. If we end up not using them or just getting bored of them we can send them for scrap stainless.
A pair of imposing iron fireplace thingies. They are pretty nice and simple and are available to anybody who wants them.
A pretty fancy instep brand double jogging offspring transportation contraption. It has numerous bells and whistles, as you can see from the pic. There is nothing really wrong with this but it does not push that nicely, even when empty. With two fat slobbering parasites in it I would imagine it is even more cumbersome.
A mongoose bike in spiffy red. It seems to work OK except the front shifter. Has knobbly tyres so not so good to ride on the road but all round pretty serviceable and happy. Available.
Update: Sold via the list of craig.
A panasonic bike in spiffy red. It has super nice tyres for city riding and is very like the schwinn found last week. Broken gear cables soon fixed by replacing with some some off a nearby frame. Available-ish.
A matched pair of smallish his and hers Trek mountain bike carcasses. Fairly small frames and one missing a chain. One damaged wheel had to be tossed but we have one rideable made from the pair already. Available.
A Specialized mountain bike with small frame. It looks a bit well-used but is OK under the dirt and scratches and has somewhat nice components on it. It is allocated already. Puncture in rear tyre was fixed and needed a good clean and adjust.
A really nice Schwinn mountain bike. Needed air in tyres but nothing else, this is really nice to ride and somewhat classic and hence may be kept for future usage. The only real downside to this is the supa knobbly tyres which are pretty awful on pavement. The saddle cover is a bit loose but not in any serious way.
A Ross ladies racing style bike. Uninspired except for the fact that it might have just a touch of hipster appeal in the same way a brown 1979 olds V8 would. This possibly has a home already, tentatively yours Brendan, for the swiss miss?
Update: Bike given to aforementioned swiss miss, unfortunately soon stolen by some scumbag.
A large framed Mongoose, perfect for riding in the city. This has been earmarked for exactly that purpose. Once its sadly disfunctional-by-design carrier is fixed it will be a handy thing to have access to.
Update: Used for a while in a large city, then stripped of its pedals, wheels and saddle by a scumbag bike thief. Reminder, always flay alive any bike thief you catch. Then put some salt on. Bike currently awaiting arrival of replacement parts from various garbage sources. This was a really nice rideable bike before being stripped so is worth rebuilding.
A smaller Mongoose mountain-ish bike, seemingly set up for a delivery type situation. This may become the property of some restaurant in the city for exactly that purpose. Functional, but ugly.
A random Huffy bike. It has a super cushy seat with a sprung seat pole. It is sort of comfy to ride but not very satisfactory due to ill-defined adjustment related issues or just the generally poor build quality one gets with Huffy bikes. Available.
Some form of offspring entertainment device that seems to work quite well. Not sure how long its entertainment capabilities will last though.
A rucksack for carrying offspring. It is all very fancy and in perfect condition, this may be deployed for the actual carrying of offspring or it may be sold. Maybe even both, in some order.
A hose and floor wand for a miele vacuum cleaner. This is highly fortuitous as a steam heating pipe managed to melt the hose on our miele. From this we figure that no german would be stupid enough to use steam heating etc etc because we cannot imagine that miele made an error on their hose material. But now we have a new hose should the duct tape fix applied to the old one become unsatisfactory. And a spare wand, whatever use that will be.
A kids Schwinn Pixie bike that is in pretty good condition for its age. It will be cleaned up and deployed as an offspring transportation device or sold as a "classic hipster kids toy" or some such.
This jogging stroller has 20 inch wheels and is in perfect shape now that I straightened out the bent axle it had when we found it. No idea what caused that bend. It also needed a squirt of air in the tyres but had never really been used. We, in keeping with its former owners, have no real use for it so it will be sold at some point.
Update Sold on craiglist, took a long while though. These usually go withing 24 hours but this took 5 days. Finally we can feed the family again....
A Dell Pentium 4 2.4GHz PC with 512M ram. It had a dead power supply. One from a Dell carcass found the same day was swapped in and voila, works fine. Previous owner searched web for amsterdam escort services, porn, guns, and pics of shiny expensive cars he will never own. Media on HD included fuzzy SVCD rips of Wedding Crashers (2005) and Mr and Mrs Smith (2005). Yuck. No music or personal pics at all, but some documents in wWrdperfect present, high-school or college homework style stuff, very generic subjects like Jefferson, September 11th and the Battle of the Ironclads.
Notable pieces of downloaded movie content in a Shared directory on the HD also include those prefixed by these stubs
14 ufc
9 naughty america
4 top gear
4 naughty office
4 illegal street racing
4 heather brooke
3 jenna jameson
3 ghostrider
3 latin adultery
3 american daydreams
2 my friends hot mom
2 milf hunter
2 mikes apartment
Ultimate Fighting, Fast cars and Porn. All deleted now thankfully. Even the crappo rip of Land of the Dead (2005), of which a screenshot below. Even for free, I am disappointed that somebody is prepared to watch that rip?. Just go to Schlockbuster dude!
60+ feet of curbstones. Some of them had attached cement and stuff but it chipped off very easily. They just need a quick cleanup and they can be used for edging various areas in our yard, they even match the existing curbstones on the driveway. Pic shows exemplary model.
A bathroom sink. This is in great condition (despite its appearance in the pic) and is a candidate for use in one of our bathrooms. Pity about the scalloping on it, but even with that it is nicer than the one we have. We will see, if we do not want it them somebody on craigslist will.
Update:Taps stripped off for somebody, rest is still available.
Yes, yes, enough with the silly topical toy/film jokes. This converts 110V AC to 220V AC and is pretty damn handy for any european that happens to end up on the North American continent with some of their appliances. We have 220V run throughout the house as well as the native 110V so do not need it. This is available or for sale or whatever. It can only handle 250W so think before you speak up.
And no, it does not turn into a drill press or any other useful household item. It transforms leccy. Now if it could transform into a 3-phase converter I would be happy.
Thule ski racks that seem in perfect shape apart from the missing keys. These are vagueley available.
A pile of 5 still sealed in the original package dual interface NIC, 100baseT. I think they are for some compaq server or other. Also present were a pile of new old stock 4G scsi drives in hot swap server trays. Oooooooh. You could almost extract a DVD onto one of those, but not quite. Anyway, I now have a couple of dual NICs to spare, Allan or Russell, these are probably great for making firewalls etc. One taken out of it's special wrapping for photo purposes shown in the pic:
Yet another kitchen sink, this will be bound for criaglist pretty quickly. OK condition, needs a bit more cleaning.
A telescopic thingy for fishing golf balls out of nasty places after errant shots. This will be donated to people who may have use for this type of thing. This in conjunction with a box of 100 golf balls makes for great fun in the garden. After dinner games etc.
Very handy for a friend who will be going in for ankle surgery soon, these crutches are super spiffy. When we are done with them they can become scrap Al.
Sort of artsy and wierd, we are not entirely sure of the intended use of this cast iron fish thingy. Maybe it is a planter, the inside stuffed with potting compost would allow seedlings to sprout out of the holes quite nicely. Answers on a postcard to /dev/null. Pending approval of recipient this may have a home.
An AV stack from some auditorium type place. Came in a large case with lots of stuff. First the power conditioner and console lighting unit, seems to work fine but one bulb is dead. Pic:
Next a Yamaha power amp, seems in very nice shape. We have no use for it so ebay should be seeing this soon:
A video switching unit with some number of input cards in the back. Not sure about this, it might be useful for certain things (Z boys??) or might just be out of date. Investigation followed by allocation seems to be in order.
Also present was high end professional VHS player. What garbage that was, it seems all VHS players are crap no matter how high end they are. We got rid of that plus some other peripheral junk and the case.
Some 12 ft lengths of copper tubing that were initially candidates for scrap copper but turned out to be new old stock and hence will be saved in case we need to do some plumbing at some stage. No pic, you know what copper tube looks like.
Two alloy wheels off a fancy schmancy Saab 9-3. 20 lbs of scrap aluminium alloy each or for sale on craiglist. I suspect we will get significantly more than scrap value for them from some saab owner. The rims seem to be in good shape and have no dings impairing their wheelness function. Some minor scratches on the outsides where a curb-wheel interface problem occured. We could wait and see if we can collect the rest of the saab as it is incrementally thrown out but I suspect that would not be fruitful.
Update: Sold on CL to some guy whose nephew had just driven his fancy saab into a curb and trashed the front wheel. He gets a bargain, we get to eat dinner!
An alienware PC, minus the HD. It is only an athlon 1GHz but seems to work fine. Somebody will want it for the case I would think, these things are handy if you need to pack loads of crud into a machine. They have loads of drive bays and largeish power supplies and other such features. They are rather large and ugly though.
The Tivo boots fine, batteries in the remote are good, everything is happy. The selection on the HD is the sort of thing that people really do not need a Tivo for. Apologies for the super hokey analogue hole capture, but I currently do not have a TV capture card installed in any computing machinary at the required locale, and this TV is the best I could scrounge up to use as a display with the Tivo. Honestly. The Tivo has the lifetime subscrption on it. Spiffy.
The replay does not seem to boot. The batteries and the battery compartment cover were missing from the remote. It will be fiddled with. Keep wtaching this space. Both of them needed a good cleaning, there was all sorts of fluff inside. Yes we violated the warranty on the replay in order to do this but the Tivo seemed to have no little stickers informing us of this.
Somebody really went to town and bought both a Tivo S2 and Replay. Then, some time later they apparently tossed both of them. Investigation will proceed into the gems of television culture left behind on the HDs. Both remotes are present, as shown in the pic. Tivo is only the 80G model, not sure abnout the Replay's HD size. For now, a pic, watch this space for more details later.
A set of fancy logitech surround sound speakers and suchlike. All very fancy and of little or no use for us but again exactly what a friend wanted. Straight into the arms of a happy new owner.
A fancy looking HP printer. Guy who tossed it said it worked fine so figured it was worth a look. Tests out fine, ink is low but all the vaious modes of operation seem to work.
Found at the same time but not related I think is some printer ink new in the box. One in date and one expired. Ebay for the good one.
An acquaintance asked me, "Have a you a junky machine I could put OpenBSD on to make a home firewall?". Off we went looking for such a device and we found a nice Pentium 3 Dell PC in small form factor. I loaded him up with lots of spare ethernet cards and a extra partial machine or two for even more spares and hopefully he is now firewalling away.
A firewire enclosure that looks like it was made to appeal to 1st gen iMac users. Really ugly. But that is OK because again it was just what somebody wanted, now hopefully being used by its new owner.
Some bubbles stuff, mysteriously abandoned but fully functional. Great for offspring entertainment purposes.
Graco 3-way pack and play, almost new, with changing table, net cover, canopy etc etc. Again, super fancy example of its type, almost new but no use to us. Already sold.
Combi dual stroller in almost new condition, a very recent model, if not still a current model. We never knew these things came with so many features:
This thing has more features and special thingies than our cars. No way we need all that stuff or any dual so off this goes to craigslist.
Dell Pentium 4 1.7Ghz PC with 256M RAM and a 40G HD. Has the funky paired memory with blanks required for unused slots. Bit of a pain. Machine had Windows XP install and hung for no real reason late in boot process, seemingly just prior to login. Eh, who cares, Knoppix is the answer. (But then also note that for some rather large set of computing machinary related questions or problems, Knoppix is the answer). Points to note on contents of HD:
Pic shows what might be the family dog winking with one eye and getting redeye with the other. Maybe it knew it was destined to have this picture shown on the interwebs??
Compaq Athlon 1.3GHz with 500M RAM and 75G HD. Has a whole family's worth of users on it. Yum, delicious found data. Machine bluescreened on boot and seems to have io errors on the disk. But then also the main 71G partition is absolutely stuffed full, zero bytes available. Highlights:
Friend (10:00:07 AM): yo
User (10:00:09 AM): yo
User (10:00:11 AM): what up killa
Friend (10:00:15 AM): nm u
User (10:00:19 AM): nm'
Friend (10:00:37 AM): you were supposed to call me yesterday douche bag
User (10:00:48 AM): i know cocksucker
User (10:00:54 AM): if i had something to tell you yet, i would have
Friend (10:01:13 AM): what about the summer shit
Friend (10:01:18 AM): send me an email
User (10:01:50 AM): oh yeah
User (10:01:55 AM): aight, i'll get on it
User (10:02:00 AM): those things are hard to find
Friend (10:02:20 AM): wha d o you mean
User (10:02:58 AM): like, it's hard to find good college
programs that aren't like all work for five weeks
Friend (10:03:13 AM): oh yeah
Friend (10:03:26 AM): is it 5 weeks
User (10:03:53 AM): i dont think so, how long do you want to go for
User (10:03:54 AM): about
Friend (10:04:30 AM): i dunno whatever
Friend (10:04:43 AM): not really long like 7 weeks though
Friend (10:05:02 AM): are there choices
User (10:05:26 AM): yeah, but im still lookingh
User (10:05:34 AM): i'll email you all the choices by tonight
Friend (10:06:22 AM): ok ggt
Friend signed off at 10:06:24 AM.
Thus do the high-flyers of tomorrow spend their time today.
389 Compilations
92
79 Outkast
74 The Notorious B.I.G_
71 Dave Matthews Band
40 Van Morrison
38 Bruce Springsteen
34 DMX
28 Creedence Clearwater Revival
27 The Offspring
24 Dropkick Murphys
22 The Beastie Boys
20 Bob Dylan
19 The Jam
18 Green Day
17 Sublime
17 Jimi Hendrix
16 LWL
16 Jerky Boys
16 Bob Marley
15 Paul Weller
15 Chili Peppers
15 Blink-182
14 Red Hot Chili Peppers
14 NaS
14 Metallica
14 J-Kwon
14 Jay-Z
13 Pearl Jam
13 Lit
13 John Mayer
13 Incubus
13 Guns N' Roses
13 Bob Marley & The Wailers
13 Black Eyed Peas
13 Barenaked Ladies
13 Alien Ant Farm
12 Will Smith
12 Nirvana
12 New Found Glory
12 Midtown
12 Matchbox Twenty
11 The Strokes
11 The Streets
11 Death Cab For Cutie
11 Counting Crows
10 Jojo
10 Franz Ferdinand Unknown art of unknown provenance. It has been donated to somebody who may appreciate it.
A wine rack made from that modular wireframe shelving system whose name currently eludes me. It is complete with all the little plastic collets required fopr assembly (in the a tupperware box!), but I think it has never been assembled. Useful for a friend or a stranger via craiglist I suppose, we have no need for a wine rack.
Update: Traded to a wine-store owner for some fine wine but we kept the tupperware.
A pile of faintly interesting books. The salacious exposé into the secret ways and workings of tools is of interest to certain relatives who collect hand tools and the Bell System book is of interest generally, because all old Bell System stuff is cool.
A Delta compound mitre saw in rather nice condition. It is not the most recent type, which I think is a good thing as it feels pretty solid. It runs nice and smoothly of course and the hinge-down action is good. The blade is carbide tipped and fine for good number of cuts. This will be pressed into service in place of the previous one that had some issues.
Most of a Dell Pentium 4 PC. No HD, cpu or memory. I have one exactly like this that has a bad power supply, hence this will result in one working machine plus a spare motherboard. Fine and dandy.
US Army Survival Manual reprint in OK condition. How useful. We may keep this as it has some nice plant guides and stuff in the back.
A fancy first 13 states special state quarter presentation pack, issued by the US Mint and the NARA. Hence this is technically New Old Stock coinage. This is of course useful for the fact that it contains 26 25 cent pieces, handy for toll money we think! Though maybe there is somehow more value in preserving the presentation in its entirety......
We are still faintly perplexed by the fact that this ended up in the trash. Who tossed this and what was their thought process? Answers on a postcard....
A lightweight jogging stoller in good condition. After some air in the tyres it is all ready and good to go, go on craigslist that is. The tyres are almost not worn at all, slight rust showing on some bolts.
A rather nice ornate cast iron steam radiator in OK shape. It has that nasty "heat transfer" paint on it that inspires so many arguments. Not sure if we will use this one or pass it on to our period--piece-o-phile neighbours.
Two micron 1GHz or so Pentium 3 machines with Windows 2000 and Windows NT installed. The NT machine was almost totally empty (wiped?) and the Windows 2000 machine empty except for TurboTax usage and some evidence of moron grade web surfing (espn, weightwatchers, jrcigars, pgaofamerica being represented in the cookies). Courtesy of the tax records we have some detailed information on the people in question but they are just too boring for any further analysis. Not even any cool pics on the HD, no media, nothing. So much for this alleged digital media revolution we hear so much about.
A Sportrunner jogging style stroller that folds up pretty small for it's style. It runs well and is in OK shape. It works OK, unlike most strollers, it is possible to push it without kicking the rear of it all the time and the handle is at a reasonable height (though not quite high enough). It has a label written in hebrew on it so I am guess this is a super spiffy grey market model. Fine and dandy, it even came with a hat for very young offspring and a full bottle of spray-on sunscreen. The only thing really wrong with it was that the tyres needed a quick squirt of air, which of course promptly got.
A nice Allclad skillet. It has a stainless steel interior lining in the aluminium main part. It is in very good condition. Should check on warranty availabilities on these, but meantime this one may be available.
A late first gen iMac in good shape with a LaCie firewire casing containing a fast cd burner. The former owner is an executive with a large music company, in fact he even seems to be some guy in charge of digital privacy for said music company. Oooops! Recently the machine seems to have been used by the young offspring of the family, learning to play chess and suchlike. Continuing our series of self-referential digital archeology, here we have a pic found on the HD, taken with a Kodak EasyShare CX6200:
Extra self-referentiality points for taking a picture of the screen with iPhoto open! Note that in common with many new digital camera owners the first pics they took documented the box the camera came in. How nice!
A Pentium 4 2Ghz Toshiba. This thing works very well except that the enter key is a little touchy, requiring a good tap to get it to work. The machine was unfortunately almost completely empty, no laughable user data here, move along. Picture of the machine shown here for no particular reason. The apple stickers are a little baffling, maybe they replaced this with an apple?
A Pentium 3 600Mhz Dell laptop in somewhat well-used shape. It boots OK with some encouragement and seems to work fine. On it we find:
Two pics shown, illustrating the physical house this household lives in courtesy of local.live and a juvenile female member of it indulging in her favourite high quality beverage with a friend.
Mac Powerbook 667 Mhz, other specs as yet unknown. I know that the charge board does not work on this but that otherwise it might be fine. I have no power supply for it hence will have to borrow one to find out and test it a bit. Watch this space.
It may seem all very idle when you sit around and muse that in order to clean up one's apartment one needs a serious storage system for all the laptops and stuff lying around, but sometimes fortune smiles on the idle. 3 hours after exactly this type of musing, here we are, a special laptop filing system. It may need a couple of extra shelves but this is a good start.
A ridged base cast iron Wagner skillet. In nice condition, just needed a quick scrub and a cure. We already have one like this so this is up for grabs if anybody wants it.
A firewire and USB2 card seemingly somewhat new in the box. Weird. I found it at the bottom of a big box of ethernet cables and such. This may get tossed into the Dell for good measure.
Dell 2Ghz Celeron PC with 256M RAM, 30G HD and Windows XP installed. It seemed to have some trouble booting XP but knoppix worked fine. Primary uses for this PC were surfing and digital pics shot with their PENTAX Optio S. Pic shows the keyboard and screen from the machine in its former household. They had two very similar machines. The other was set up for use by a blind family member. This machine may join a certain cpu intensive project, once I have tested its cpu for its suitability for the task.
A handy dandy CD carry case with lots of CDs inside. Windows ME with key and other such uselessness. The case is available if anybody wants it and the CDs are coasters (i.e. getting tossed).
EMachines Athlon 1400, missing memory, 40G HD, somewhat dusty inside. Machine works fine with some borrowed memory. Lots of delicious things on the HD:
77 Compilations
28 Black Eyed Peas
27 Norah Jones
27 10,000 Maniacs
25 Michael Tilson Thomas, Philharmonia Orch
20 Christina Aguilera
14 'N Sync
14 Kelly Rowland
14 Justin Timberlake
14 John Mayer
14 Jewel
14 Counting Crows
13 Coldplay
13 Britney Spears
12 Zero 7
12 Vince Guaraldi Trio
12 Sheryl Crow
12 Seal
12 George Michael
12 Dido
11 Sade
11 Natalie Merchant
11 Dave Matthews Band
10 Sarah McLachlan
10 Maroon 5
10 Destiny's Child
Lovely. Listening to them now as I write up this page.
2 Emenem
13 Eminem
1 eminem
1 Eminem Feat Dr.Dre
1 Eminiem Pic is one of a series found on the HD that were taken at a wedding. Amidst all the happy people attending there was apparently somebody who felt the need to bring a sickbag from delta airlines in their pocket. That says something about family occasions I guess.
Yet another netgear wireless NAT box thingy. Seemingly OK but we have not actually properly tested it yet. We were able to bring up the management interface and log into it after resetting the thing but have not got it working on an uplink yet.
Weirdly, two calphalon lids. Often we find the pans without the lids, but today the converse. We now have a huge surplus of lids due to the extra lids you get from doing returns. Calphalon lids anybody? They are nice.....
A pretty fine pile of books. Assorted novels and literature etc, all very interesting. An interesting combination of cookbooks and weight-loss books, mostly we do not pick these up. Also some really nice art books etc. The Sotheby's wine enclyclopedia we already found a home for. Some pics below:
Two worklights, as idly requested the other day while working on the house.
HP Pentium 3 800MHz with Windows XP installed and only 32M of ram. Astounding. From the pristine undisturbed state of the monster dust bunnies inside I would say that the 32M of ram was all that was in there the whole time and none had been removed before we got to it. The dust bunnies were the worst I have seen in a while. Needless to say, bearing in mind the memory size, the thing took for ever to boot. Lots of family pics and stuff, a few word docs, kids' homework etc etc etc. iTunes installed with just a few pieces of media, Limewire likewise. This picture was on the HD and is particularly notable in the self referential sense because it shows the HP machine itself that we found the picture on but also the box from the Sony camera that took the picture (as confirmed in the exif headers).
This machine has a new home with a friend of a friend already. We tossed in a 256M ram chip we found seperately. So now the machine is not so very bad and might have another life ahead of it.
Stainless steel kitchen sink complete with Moen single lever mixer faucet and snake squirter. It looks to be in near perfect condition and came up super shiny after a quick clean. We are looking into a new kitchen sink for ourslves but we want an under-counter mount. Hence this one is straight off to craigslist as the last one was a roaring success there.
Update: Sold after a few hours on craigslist. Fine.
A fire extinguisher, of distinctly vintage type. The primary reason this was picked up of course was for scrap brass but it seems pretty special and "period" so we may try to find a rabid fire extinguisher collecter to give us money for it. Ebay or craigslist might assist in this endeavour.
Some art, details as yet unknown but investigations are is progress by those in a position to know. But is it art? We will see.
Well, as I was mining a rich seam of discarded brass plumbing fittings ($1:50 a pound scrap value) a woman asked me if there were any wrought iron railings in the pile I was looking through. I replied that no, there were not, but the guy over there with the Ford Exploder and homemade plywood trailor had a whole load. After overcoming her various stages of incredulity at my apparent omniscience she arranged to offload the railings directly from truck to truck. In return for my handy indexing functionality (something I am known for in other areas) she gave me a starbucks gift card for 5 USD. That counts for this page because I found some free discarded stuff and traded knowledge of it's whereabouts for the card. But, can you still get a drink at starbucks for a paltry 5 USD? I guess I will see.......
Linksys NAT box. Looks to be in good shape, untested as yet. This is pretty surplus so if you need one of these it is yours to play with I would think.
A nice little bar sink, stainless steel complete with water pipe, taps and feeder tubes etc. Missing the snake or soap, though it looks like there was never a snake installed. The sink and taps are in good condition. We are currently looking for a sink but not this type, so this is available in a craigslisty type way.
Update: Sold in a very craigslisty way so no longer available.
Attached to the copper tubing from yesterday we dicovered a water feeder. As luck would have it this is the same model that we have. Ours has had a leaking problem for a long time and even though this one is pretty beat up we may be able to make one good one out of the two. Mmmmm, hybrid devices.
A nice selection of books with enough variety to please everybody. Pic soon.
A Homelite Echo weed whacker. It looked so complete and spiffy that we took it home. After adding fuel and giving it a few cranks it started and ran and whacked weeds. Reason for discard seems to have been that it ran out of fuel. Cool. Pic shows it posed in the neighbour's driveway....
Random Gateway Pentium 3. Again not worth our time to fix up but worth a quick look at the bits. Boring, but here is the summary:
A run of the mill Dell Pentium 3 PC which did not seem to want to boot. Seems in OK shape though, it will be passed on to somebody who has more time for machines this old. First though, a quick look at the HD reveals a happy family lifestyle. Some salient points:
A nice galvanized storage bin which we will use to store our accumulating pile of scrap copper, of which today there was a fair haul. Somebody tossed their entire furnace plus lots of pipes and peripherals.
Two 100baseT switches, mildly antiquated by the standards of their industry, but seemingly OK, one 8 port and one 5 port. Thes will be tested and made available for anybody who wants them. Rob? Charlie? Also present were some junky hubs and a very old laptop, left that other stuff.
Update: both tested out OK, each has power supply etc. Get them while they are hot.
One Calphalon Contemporary omlete pan like this. These are the middle of the range versions and not nearly as nice as the "commercial" or "one" range. This one has a loose handle and a lifetime warrantly so we will find something to do with it.....
A nice selection of computing hardware. First an e-machine Celeron 2.0Ghz PC, 256M ram but no HD. Also an e-machines Athlon 2400, same source as previous, again no HD but has memory etc. Pic shows the Athlon but the Celeron looks almost exactly the same:
Next a Dell Pentium 4, complete with everything. Watch this space to see how much completness there is in the data on the 40G HD. I think this is identical to a prior Dell Pentium 4 we had.
A fancy netgear NAT box and vpn thingy, plus a netgear 802.11g access point and NAT box. Both untested but so far they look in fine shape. One or both may get deployed as they both have advantages over their equivalents that we are currently using.
Another happy little push lawn mower, same brand as our previous ones. This one is in very good shape in the blade department, having been sharpened and set recently, but the handle is a little beat up. No problem, it will get the handle off another one that has a cracked cast iron side casing and all will be well. Shown here before its rennnovations.
Atari 5200 supersystem plus a whole bunch of extras. It mostly looks like it has not been used, all very special. This will be tested and maybe some action stills posted later but for now just a boring ebay style showcase pic.
The 3 foot pipe wrench was required to remove a radiator. Tried the 18inch model and did not work but the 3 footer cranked it right off. How fortuitious that it turned up a week or so in advance of when it was really needed.
The pipe wrench got further cleaning and restoration to original manufacturer colours. Pretty much anyway. It is now in fine shape, as evidenced by this pic. It is pretty old but seems in good shape modulo the surface rust it had on it when it was found. I am sure we will have a use for a 3 foot pipe wrench at some stage.
Also the calphalon 8qt stock pot came back from its excursion to warranty-return-land and went, via ebay, on a journey to the house of a complete stranger. The 10inch omelet skillet went straight from warranty-return-land to a friend of a friend as a gift.
Upon detailed investigation, the dualit 3-slice toaster had one element dead inside. The thing has quite a history already as an acquaintance had asked me that day, "hey, could you find me a toaster?". I thusly found that toaster but he declined to take it as he was pushed for baggage space etc on his plane trip home. After we played with it and grokked the mechanism we liked it, hence our discovery of the bad element (reason for discard?). Another aspect of this toaster we like very much is that you can get replacement parts for it, hence we did so and voila, we have a "new" toaster. Sure beats buying one.
One set of underwater technical lego, complete enough to be convincing. Seems fine. This was donated to some form of remote cousin, hopefully providing some small moment of childhood happiness.
Also a couple of sets of K'nex, well populated though obviously we have no idea of their completeness, should that even mean something with this product. Donated to yet another remote cousin, in fact a 1st cousin of the aforementioned remote cousin. Again, seemingly happiness ensued.
Lots of this is catching up with stuff we found a while ago, but certain readers have been nagging us to update here so off we go. Lots of baby seat stuff. For example here we see a brand new never been used Eddie Bauer infant seat. We offered this to a friend who has impending offspring and he informed us that his wife wishes to buy everything new. Well, this is new, just not bought by you? Whatever.
Further a couple of Evenflo seat bases, these are usually good for craigslist or some such.
Also an Evenflow complete baby seat, ready for use etc etc. Not seen much use hence it will be good for somebody at some stage.
We finally amassed enough non-ferrous scrap to fill a military surplus missile resupply trailor and wandered down to trade it in for cash. A few hundred pounds of alu at 61c/lb, a hundred plus of brass at $1.30, a hundred plus of lead at 16c and a load of copper at $2.50. They issued us a handy little receipt to take to the front desk and they dished out several hundreds of dollars for us. Cool. They even unloaded the trailer for us with great dispatch, better service than one gets at many restaurants.
A painting platform type thing, used for painting the ceiling or reaching into high places with better freedom of movement than on a ladder or chair. This was almost destined for scrap Al but we thought it would prove useful at some stage so gave it to a friend on condition we might borrow it at undertermined times in the future. Oh, and yes it is in fact new in the wrapping?!?
Visiting friends appear with their two genetically programmed terrorist offspring, what should one do to amuse them, we all say? Well it so happens that we found two nice alu scooters that were adjustable in such a way as to provide amusement devices for their age groups. "Engage!", we all cry and deploy the scooters in a frantic ploy to distract the monsters from tall buildings etc. Success........
Not especially special but there it was, all discarded and lonely. A silver hookah. It was promptly donated to one that might appreciate its charms.
6 sticks of PC100/133 memory and a HD. Pretty junky stuff but the memory sells well on ebay in nice assortment style lots and the HD is handy for fixing crappo machine for people. No pic for now, you know what this junk looks like.
Life vest, US Coastguard Approved, to suit some particular mass range of human offspring. This mass range is destined to be attained by our particular offspring at some stage and hence this item will put this aside for that day. Pity about the nasty imagery on it.
36 inch Ridgid pipe wrench, after a cleanup it looks a lot better and may be kept lying around for future usage. Maybe a little refurb first though, it deserves some paint I think and a cleanup.
Double Maclaren stroller, all seems in good shape, just a little dusty. CR for this I think, as soon as we get ourselves organised.
Calphalon square griddle pan with corrugated base. It is almost brand new and has probably been used just a few times, but it was dirty and hence got thrown away. It is very like this one but not non-stick. We have cleaned it a bit already but we have no use for it so it is yours for free if you want it and you get to clean it. The dirt comes off with a little persistence.
This is a very similar thing to that skillet above but copper with a brass handle. It has a tin lining that is coming off, hence the thing is no good for cooking as we do not want to ingest lots of copper. Now it could either have some non-food use or contribute to the brass and copper piles for the non-ferrous scrap. Anybody want it? It is quite ornamental. Made in Italy.
Update: It is possible to get these things retinned, or to do it yourself. Nice! I may have to give it a try, although I am still not really interested in this particular skillet and hence it is still available to any who want it.
There appeared in the air a flying object, saucer-like but with a handle! The elite UFO investigation team that reached the point of impact were pleased to identify it as a Calphalon 10inch non-stick omelet skillet. The point of impact was of course a scrap metal dumpster and the person who launched it through the air had apparently no further use for it. Reason for discard, bowed bottom, which is conveniently also a fine reason for warranty return......
A really nice panasonic steel frame in excellent shape, completely stripped. Also an old and rather classical and stylish Hunter 3-speed with Brooks leather saddle.
We have been looking for a good one of these for a while. This one has a nice handle with heat shielding and a second handle to assist in the final pouring of the coals. It has some rust on it and other siugns of use but is in pretty good shape for something that has endured that sort of heat cycling. It has a nice size also. Tested it the same night cooking dinner on the BBQ, hangar steak, sausages, smoked pork chops, corn, brocolli rabe and potatos all cooked over that fire. We added no further coals after initial starting in the chimney.
Random jogging stroller as shown in the pic. Seems to work fine. Also, another one not shown. It had folding issues but now I oiled it it has different folding issues. We will see about that one.
A Wood Classics teak table, with four matching chairs and a matching bench. They are all in OK shape and will be cleaned and oiled for our use. Fortuitous really, we have been discussing redoing the patio and getting a better table for it as the current one is starting to rust. Curbside bulk garbage day offers a great in-car shopping experience. Here is a pic showing the table and bench after some cleaning and some teak oil, chairs yet to be prettyfied. Note patio underneath that really needs doing, where am I going to find free discarded patio materials we all wonder?
I got this for the custodian of the pool table we found. Not that he is an idiots or needs to learn more about pool but it can sit next to the table in case an idiot does show up.
Probably useless but somebody might want it. No power supply unfortunately.
Two large oxygen tanks. They look to be in good shape, latest test dates 2000 and 1994. They are available for anyone who wants them, failing that I may try to see if there is a deposit on them I can get. Crappy pic taken in dark garage in the middle of the night, sorry about that.
The last one of these Maclaren Double pushchairs went for a pile of cash on ebay so we will try the same with this I think. The last one had a small break in the hood but hopefully this one will turn out to be in fine shape upon further investigation.
A nice looking Dualit 3-slice toaster. I initially got it for somebody else but we might keep it for ourselves now. I have never played with one of these before, they seem quite nice and simple. The previous owners had even been so thoughtful as to empty the crumb tray before tossing it out. How nice.
Eight quart stock pot, regular aluminium with the hard anodised finish worn off somehow on the inside, see pic. It is actually in much better shape than the picture makes out, almost new in fact. It is as if the former owners cooked up a pot of acid in the first week they owned it and that scoured the inside but left the rest relatively pristine. This is going for a nice warranty return and will come back all super spiffy and shiny.
This is a request item for a friend who needs it to move a bunch of bikes he is acquiring from us, they of course appeared on this page at some point. The photo makes it look like there was a brutal mnurder or some such involved in acquiring it but that is just water etc that seems to look sinister in the depths of the night. Honest.
iMac 400. These things are getting pretty dated now but they will still run OS 10.4 with enough memory chucked in. This one boots OS 9 and has some video issues but maybe they are the special firmware thingy. Will find a home somewhere if we can make it work, and maybe if we cannot. We have one or two iMacs in stock in case anybody wants one to tinker with, they run Ubuntu nicely.
Two slightly dated racing style bikes, a Schwinn and a Univega. Both are slightly heavy compared to their really modern counterparts etc but are in nice shape. Both are already in new home with happy users, sketchy pic of this one with tyres pumped up and rideable.
1GHz Dell Pentium 3 PC with a nice 256M RAM chip and 10G HD plus DVD rom. We got this mainly for sending to certain avid teenaged tinkerers (you know who you are!). It does not seem to boot (hardware/power supply issue) and has linux installed on it. Whole or in parts it will still be sent off. Pic shows it pulled apart so that I could inspect the HD on another machine (yours Charlie) using knoppix.
Update: After reseating memory, CPU, HD and all motherboard connectors this PC now works fine. Canadian rebuild strikes again! Currently running knoppix on it watching Ultraviolet with xine as a test of the machine. Check out the screenshot of this here, Dr March is just cleaning up Mike's leech bite. Machine will now be sent complete with extra parts added in rather than as extra parts itself.
Somebody had zip tied 3 bosch oil pumps together and plumbed their inputs and outputs together with very fancy stainless tube fittings such as those sold on this page . As we often purchase and use fittings just such as these we dismantled the assembly, tossed all the junk and the pumps and kept the fittings. Spiffy, the collection included stuff such as these in sizes such as 1/2 inch tube and 5/16 inch tube resp.:
The whole arrangement looked pretty new so I suspect the construction was rather speculative and did not work. And no Rob, these pumps would be no use for your your reclamation setup. For other things maybe some use. Pic of them hangining out between on a shelf
A newish stainless steel 55 gallon drum dolly. These are not cheap, check out McMaster again here ,l item number 2608T14 near the bottom. I have no real use for it so it is up for grabs (Christine??) before I try and find somebody to pay for it. Or maybe I should expand my own oil reclamation activities?
The brass we found was 135 lbs and scrap brass is now USD 1.70 per pound. Woohoo!
No, not the long lost imitator of Weird Al . Al as in the element, or alloys thereof. We finally caved in and picked up some scrap aluminium, mostly because we found a whole pile of good solid chunks of it. It is not as valuable as copper/brass etc but when you find chunks weighing 20 lbs it becomes worthwhile to collect
Some memory and a 30G HD, blah blah. Memory will go to ebay as part of a job lot. The HD had the following salient points:
21 tom petty
10 red hot chili peppers
9 bruce springsteen
8 led zepplin
8 eagles
8 dispatch
6 tupac
6 led zeppelin
6 kc
6 frank sinatra
6 bob marley
6 50 cent
5 will smith
All in all a nice view into the life of a "normal" internet user. Very satisfying to see some nice cliches fulfilled. Here is a pic from the family Christmas Trip to Radio City Music Hall, at least from what I can gather. Do they let you take pics in there, maybe this pic is illegal also?
We found a fancy rucksack/carryon converter bag with lots of fittings on it. Bag was a little decrepit but the snap fittings etc were good so we cut them off. These will possibly be used in some form of custom offspring retention device, maybe as part of aforementioned homemade baby-bjorn project.
The most recent 12inch calphalon frying pan we found has duly made its way back to us after having every part of itself simultneously replaced by the manufacturers under warranty. Nice.
An Epson c84 printer, see here for example. Needed cleaning but seemingly works. Spiffy.
Two 500Mhz Pentium 3 laptops good for not much at all, ITC brand (who are they we ask, without caring to hear the answer). Donated to somebody who seems to value such things so fast that there is no pic, good turnaround.
The existing tricycle that was deployed to amuse the offspring of guests was getting rusty, a testament to its permenant outdoor home. We found an new and inferior version today, inferior because it is plastic, but it will not rust I guess. It will just embrittle and fade. Either way it is on much better shape than the last one, o9ut with the old and in with the "new"
An iMac x86 shipping box. This will be sold to some mac user at some point. Bonus inclusion was all the docs and the OS 10.4.4 install/restore CD. Woohoo!
We found a sufficient quantity of brass sitting on one place to incent us to pick it up. Probably a 100 or so pounds of it. This will all duly be converted into meat and wine via the arcane alchemical process of driving it to a non-ferrous metal scrap dealer and taking the money they hand over to the meat and wine repositories. I am not sure what the exact scrap price of brass is but I know it is unseasonably high. No pic for now, you know what brass looks like.
A local dive bar has been purchased for its booze license and the new owners have decided to toss the pool table. We happened by at the right time and found a home for it. It is real slate and pretty heavy though the furniture elements are somewhat beat up from being in a dive bar the last 20 years or so. Pic shows it loaded into the trailor for transport to its new home. Those of you sneering at my prior perceived trailor snobbery should shut up now.
A late model toilet seat is seemingly pretty good condition. It chimes when the power button is pushed but does not get any further that we can see. Various pieces will be sold to Mac dudes anxious for spare parts.
Either a WWI/II British helmet or a WWI US helmet. Pretty ratty but cool. I think it has only a small value on ebay but a friend of mine likes such things so we will show it to him. Any ideas what that insignia means?
An oldish drill that still seems to function but is way too crappy for our usage. Not that we are drill snobs you understand, but we have several far superior models already. A friend wishes to have it so that is all well and good. I just wish he would have told me last week when I had to the chance to pick up a basic milwaukee drill for 10 USD almost new.
Yet another juicy Calphalon 12inch omelet non-stick with the teflon worn off. We all know where this is going, it even looks almost exactly the same as the last one of this size.
At an estate sale, having selected lots of juicy items, I found some bottles of fizzy hidden in the tool cupboard in the basement. I brought them up from the basement for the attention of the bereaved daughter. The juicy items I of course paid for and hence they do not appear here except in passing. After I pointed out the value of some items I did not want however, I was given a bottle of the fizzy plonk, free stuff. We shall sample it at an approriate time. Pic shows the plonk in front of two of the super bargains I got.
Two threading taps (1/2 course and 12mm 1.5) and large stud extractor. Quite possibly handy things to have so they go into the machine tools chest for future use.
A swirler thingy for mixing or agitating things. It looks absolutely brand new and in fact the power cord that was right next to it was still sealed in its plastic bag. Upon first test it did not work but when I opened it up and gave it a hand assist start it ran fine. After that it started fine on its own. Special. It is an MS 450 Swirler by IKA, I guess.
Aforementioned hard drive was found to have the following data:
Some random PC parts, memory, HD, good sound card, graphics etc etc. These will be sent to approriate users of such, including certain industrious teenagers intent on turning every PC they touch into a miraculous chimera of functionality. You know who you are...
Four intriguing legrests for outdoor chairs. By great good fortune they even fit on our teak chairs. I do not really like them but we will see what shall become of them. Example shown here attached to one of our chairs.
Jack not name, Jack job. All very fine. This thing works sort of but needs some work. It is however better than one of my other jacks (same source) so I may do that work and press it into service.
A nice selection of books. There were a whole bunch of them but I cherry picked a little. Includes Allende: Daughter of Fortune, Sobel: Longitude and some Discworld stuff (not shown).
One red Le Creuset pot with lid in very nice shape. The inside was a little dirty but it seems to have cleaned up OK. The enamel is in OK shape inside (as opposed to having been worn down to the iron) so this is all ready to be used now. Check it out on Amazon.
A 15.5. gallon stainless steel beer keg with Sankey connector on top. It was labelled Miller and was half full. We immediately conveyed this to our friendly neighbourhood brewpub so that I might incurr the brewmaster's gratitude. When I marveled at its good condition and the fact that it had been tossed into the general scrap metal some regulars at the bar pointed out that the fact that it was half full of Miller is enough to make any sane person throw it away. Indeed. No pic for now, you know what a keg looks like.
Two pretty nice Mavic bike wheels with Shimano 600 stuff on them. The tyres are fancy schmancy ones and brand new never ridden. These will go to a friend who has a possible need for such things.
Present was iMac 233 Mhz or thereabouts but the only really useful parts was this keyboard. No sign of the mouse.
This morning, while we were rennovating the back porch, somebody said, "Wouldn't it be nice to put a coat rack there?". Ask and you shall receive. This is not a coat rack but it seems to be some kind of heavy duty convergent evolution equivalent of one. The only markings on it say "Hub Rak". I have some spare hubs for the car mentioned above in the basement but I am pretty sure I will not be keeping them on this thing. Pic shows it after a slight clean, it is heavy guage galvanized steel with some slight rust on the "pegs". Maybe we will regalvanize it next time we do a batch?
The offspring project has exhibited substantial growth in the longest dimension and has in fact outgrown the particular car seats claimed to be relevent to her age group. Hence we have been looking for nice example of the next size up. Voila, we found one today. The other car already has one (the denim covered britax previously seen on this page a while ago) but here is the new one installed into the car that needed one. It seems pretty much brand new and has good attachment straps.
A pair of pretty heavy and moderately old snow chains. They fit 7.50x16 and have some surface rust but seem in pretty good shape A test fit onto a convenient wheel went well. I have passed them onto a friend who may have need of these things. No pic, think piles of rusty looking chain and you will have the correct visual.
A medium sized cast iron campfire cooking pot complete with lid, it has never been used and had surface powder rust on it. I cleaned all that off and cured it and voila, you see it before you. Seems fine for all sorts of cooking activities.
We were given access to a newish iBook that was purchased on eBay. The iBook of course is not "stuff" for this page but the data left on it is fair game, i.e. it was unambiguously discarded and we got it for free. No cleanup had been done prior to shipping out the machine. As far as we can tell the story goes as follows:
Here is gets a little self-referential. Below is a picture of the machine (we think) that we found on the HD of the machine itself, probably taken for the purposes of eBaying said machine. Of course, the machine itself is not actually "stuff" by our definition, but the picture of it was free and hence appears here.
Small spanner double open end with sizes 7/16 and 3/8. Better than a kick in the butt as these are pretty useful sizes.
A 12 inch (lip to lip) cast iron skillet that says "Made in USA" on the bottom but is not a named brand. In very good condition with a nice cure on it as shown in the pic. Available to the first person who informs me that they want it.
A Helium Neon Gas Laser. Hmm, how useful. These things sell for quite a price on ebay sometimes so I think we will get rid of it, will fetch a few dollars and make somebody happy. We did not find the power supply (12V) for it so have not tried it but seems in OK shape.
The New York Times Great Songs of Broadway. This will be for a friend who is more musically inclined than we are. Inclined towards actual production of music that is, and probably also consumption. These guys seem to want to sell you one.
A stainless steel ruler with centimetres and inches marked, useful in our household due to the mixture of mesurement needs, users and capabilities.
A shipping box for a recent 12inch powerbook complete with inserts and some pistacio shells. This will be sold to some rabid mac-head at some point. It is in very nice condition so it could be destined for the *mint* obsession crowd rather than the pragmatic "need a shipping box" crowd. Lovely.
The Calphalon 4qt posted here 2004-12-10 and sent off as part of a warranty return batch has come back. We used it quite a lot prior to sending it off but the anodized finish had come off inside and we were always missing a lid. Note the before and after pics, before first
Instead of basic Calphalon Commercial they sent us Calphalon One, maybe they have discontinued the Commercial line? Pan is quite nice, lid is big improvement over some of the lids on the older Commercial line.
Pile of parts from a PC. On the HD we see the following:
Below is a banner that the owner of this machine seems to have followed up on. AFAIK it seems pretty tame stuff (we did not check out the site) but the cache dirs display evidence of having sampled this site. And no, for those of you asking the question already this is none of our congressman, senator or governer. Still waiting for that stuff to show up, watch this space.
Yet more calphalon, a 12 inch nonstick omelet and a 10 inch anodised omelet. Also a silicone heatproof handle cover shown in the pic sported by an unrelated pan. The big nonstick might be worn enough to be warrantied, or we might just use it. The anodised pan is dirty but in OK "well used" shape, nothing to warrant warranty replacement, so to speak. That may be sent to a friend who recently requested such things of us.
A Mac studio CRT display, not the super huger size but a very nice monitor. This is being donated to winestore owner for his ensuing "conversion" over to Mac from Windows. He got a dual 1Ghz G4 donated (not from us) and I guess one must have all the right peripherals. Shown here being tested on an ubuntu machine lurking in the background that normally runs headless, the more astute amoung you may recognise that machine from its prior appearance on this page.
A pretty new updated ladies bicycle. Updated in that it is a fairly traditional form and style but with fancy all new modern components. Tyres needed air and brakes adjusting and voila, a fine bike. Has that interesting super low first gear to remove need for multiple front chainrings.
OK, picked up a Gateway Profile 400Mhz with 128M RAM, like this one. Booted fine into Windows 98, seems to work. Booted knoppix DVD on it and it seems to have trouble, optical drive trouble. Tried different knoppix CD, no improvement.
Parts are standard laptop stuff so I grabbed a DVDrom from a toshiba laptop, stripped off the toshiba mounts and IDE connection shim, and put the gateway stuff on it. Plonked it in and knoppix booted OK. Upon showing my achievement to a colleague, he grabbed the corner of the still dismantled machine and it went dead. Hmmm. No light, no bios, nothing. At this point I personally declared success because I had fixed what was initially wrong with the thing, but I suspected a warped motherboard had now killed the machine. For some reason he dismantled further. Getting close to fundamentals he tried a last test boot and it worked, hence we remantled piece by piece test booting as we went. Eventually was fully working and all together, change knoppix CD yet again to avoid a big piece of bitrot we dicovered and it works great.
Phew. Now, on the HD was a pile of word docs (homework assigment type stuff) , some porn movies, some music, Napster, Kazaa etc etc. Usual stuff, here are the top 20 domains previous owner got cookies from:
138 sextracker
88 go
83 hitbox
51 yahoo
28 aol
27 advertising
26 sportsline
25 co
24 msn
22 nj
22 att
18 weather
18 porncity
17 cnn
15 gator
14 porntrack
13 villanova
13 lycos
12 mediaplex
12 fastclick
Nicely representative I would think. This machine will become some kind of installed art at the hands of the Z dudes or something as it is quite a handy form factor for that.
Some crappo PC100 memory. Big whooppee.
A nice batch of the basic Calphalon commercial stuff. These are the style with the plated, slightly crude cast handles. Specifically:
Here are two of the pots pretending to be a happy set. These two will be sent off on Tuesday to be warrantied (loss of anodized finish inside...).
And the rest of it in a junkpile-like ensemble. These will be dealt with in due course. The lids we keep as Calphalon send you new lids when ever you return stuff. Finally we now have enough lids!
A super fancy Softride Windshear bike. It has loads of gears, fancy wheels, fancy bouncy saddle mount thing, and elbow bars. Missing one quick release skewer but otherwise in pretty fine shape. We may ride this for a while and then sell it or part it out. The mileage computer on the handlebars has 4000+ miles on the clock. No idea why it was discarded, though I talked to the discarder. I did not want to ask him why as he then might have reconsidered tossing it.
One of two things happened to the 12inch omelet skillet from 2005-10-29, either I got it renewed with the Calphalon lifetime warranty, or I stripped off the remaining nonstick, you judge by the pic what happened:
After having given away our last Mac full keyboard last week we conveniently found an identical one. Some kind of cosmic conservation of junk law seems to be in operatyion here, must investigate further. It had some form of coffee stain in one corner (compare, the one we just gave away originally had coca cola spilt on it) but when tested it all works fine. Quick clean and it is good as new, see the pic:
Bottom of the range Caphalon pancake thingy similar to this. I have no real use for it but we will hang onto it as maybe one of you has a use for it??
Three Pentium 3 PC machines. First one, a small form factor HP with Windows 98 installed. It is now all happily upgraded to an 800Mhz with 256M Ram and donated to a worthy recipient. On the HD:
Next machine, a Dell 800MHz with a fresh clean install of Windows XP on it, seems to have never been used after the install. Handy Dandy. Needs more memory and a network card but otherwise is ready for something. No pic.
Last machine, a crappy Gateway 500Mhz with barely enough ram to boot it's Windows 98 install. More to come on this one?
Yet another Mac keyboard, very good condition, bright green back, lots of sparkly little stars stuck all over it. Works fine, no pic as I have Mac keyboard fatigue.
Compaq iPaq PCMCIA wireless card, new in wrapper. Useless to us I think so will be sold or traded. Looks fancy and shiny.
Everybody is ditching satellite TV round here, maybe for HD cable? The hardware is pretty useless but some poeple want this stuff so we picked up an assortment of junk.
Wow. A guy disposing of his PC decided to shred pretty much the entire machine with a knife and physically break every part he could in order to protect his data from those evil hacker ID thieves he knew to be lurking. Kudos to him for the right idea but his execution as a bit OTT. We salvaged his 1Ghz CPU, 256M PC133 memory, firewire card and some other junk. I think he kept the HD, which was all he really had to do, but who knows what stray data was lost on the motherboard? Extra 800MHz cpu sneaked into this ensemble pic:
Crapped out Compaq Pentium 2 Laptop that has broken screen. Not worth our time but somebody might want to fix/break it. We will see if anybody snaps it up on ebay.
A Carhart jacket. Modelled here by a transient guest, chainsaw purely optional, only used for modelling purposes. Don't try this at home. Nevertheless, jacket is pretty fine.
Yet another mac keyboard, quite a nice one with numpad and an interesting stain in one part. Works fine so was probably tossed because previous MacHead owner, being the supreme aesthete, did not like the stain, and upgraded to the newer version in purest white. Will come in handy at some point, sale trade or usage.
Middling useful Pentium 3 Compaq. 733MHz, 13G HD, 256M memory. Was previously used by employee of J. P. Morgan but did not have much on the HD. Either this individual never really used the machine or the thing was cleaned up by management stuff. VPN stuff and all sorts of shared drive links still in place so I think this machine was used a telecommute box by somebody who never worked from home. Pic showing the thing booting into a very self referential situation there, this page seen in picture on left hand monitor.
Two calphalon items, both without lid. Why do people not throw their lids away with their high end pots and pans? How frustrating. This time a 2.5 qt sauce pan and a 3 qt shallow saute pan thing like this. We have one of the 2.5 qt already but the saute thingy is a welcome addition to the cookware shelves.
HDS 8000 drive duplicator, makes up to 7 clones at once from an IDE drive. Read the manual as pdf here. I am guessing this was tossed because it does not do SATA. Either way, it seems to work so far, great for fast sneakernet parallelization or just cloning drives for servers (I need the SATA version for the servers I have in mind). If I had a cybercafe I would probably use it. As I do not, it may be sent to ebay or craigslist.
Of the four DVD players found a while ago the following has so far been ascertained. All are pretty fancy and play many media typres, VCD, CD, mp3 CD etc etc. Further:
An ever desirable USB mouse. Seems to work fine, pic shows it being tested out on a random laptop but will probably find a home elsewhere.
Some old Apple II something or other. The last one like this went very well on eBay hence we will see if there are any takers for this, whole or in part. Not yet tested.
A small calphalon pan, minus lid. It is in very nice condition, a few scratches in the Teflon. Still waiting on warranty experiments on the last one listed here so not sure what we will do on this one. Picture shows it being pressed into service boiling up receptables recently relieved of their payload of 6 week old baby food.
A wheeled walker thingy. We actually picked this up a while ago but it slipped into the cracks in that clunky interface between real world and internet until now. While we do not currently have need of this particular assistive technology, we may in the future. But who knows, by then we might have gravitic-repulsor-micro-modules or some such nonsense. Mmmmm, maybe we should get rid of this then, perfect condition, made in Sweden, probably the Volvo of walkers, or the Saab? Might have to hit craigslist.
Dude, I got a Dell 1905FP 1280x1024 LCD display. Perfect for you high tech puter users out there! See, see how 1337 I am with my fancy screen and other bling bling? Unfortunately, see picture, this has some vertical lines on the screen. That is rather intriguing. This thing was made in May 2005 and according to Dell it has a 4 year warranty, so we may have to follow that path and see where it leads. Failing that further investigations will be made.
A Gunk brand rubber bungee thingy, pretty short one but brand new still with its label on. Always a handy item when one has a big fat roofrack and a trailor.
A nice simple fireguard in good shape. Not that we have a fire of course but somebody I know will want it. Hal?
A Daewoo DVD player that deals with all of DVD, CD, MP3 CD, Kodak Picture disks. No VCD listed on there, strange. Anyway, looks like it might work though I have no need for it.
Also 3 more similar very modern DVD players found. Does this mean people are tossing their DVD gear for PC based home media centre equipment? MythTV or the M$oft equivalent?
A partial bike with some good parts and some parts without a bike. Pic shows the partial bike and a skewer that came on a wheel that was bent but had a very nice hybrid tyre on it. Gear cluster was intriguing also but damaged.
A Rotel RX950AX, comes with some videos switching capabilities. Looks quite nice and if it works I may use it instead of my current Denon (also a piece of found electronics). Now I know why people strive to get such bargains on so called "Black Friday", this certainly looks fine and the price was right.
A HP ex5000 video thingy that one might use to transduce between TCP/IP and TV video (composite). I guess you can shoot video from your desktop/laptop anywhere in the house to a TV with this. Seems pretty hokey to me, why not just dump the TV in the first place. Oh well, we will test it and get rid of it I guess. Presumably was from same former owner as the amp above.
A rear wheels and saddle plus fancy seat pole, useful for a couple of the partial bikes we have kicking around. Too boring for a pic.
Two Pentium 3 computers of super no-name brand but seemingly cast off from a town library. They are marked "DEAD" on the top but we shall see how accurate that statement is later. Watch this space.
Been watching this space? Good. These were cyber-cafe style surfing machines at the library, from what I can gather. They had some pretty good management stuff on there that seemed to delete the browser cache quite frequently and also keep the machine clean in general. Not sure whether they were flushed every week or what. Kudos to the library. First machine, 800MHz Pentium 3, had dead power supply. Runs now with replacement power supply. Second machine was 500MHz Pentium 3, booted and ran fine. Both labelled "DEAD" but only one was, and even it has come back to life.
A twin stroller in perfect condition, made in china by One-Step. Here it is after a quick wash. This is of no use to us so will be made available for others to acquire via the usual channels.
Well, this is a tricky one. I gave a short presentation about the things that go on on this page and backstage and the steering committee at the event in question decided I should be awarded a prize for my efforts, burgundy duct tape. They said that duct tape seemed highly appropriate for this particular effort. So, to recap the duct tape was free to me in terms of money but earned by pulling stuff out of the garbage, hence I judge it gets a place here.
A super crappy compaq USB keyboard complete with a full set of idiot buttons on it. Picked up because USB keyboards can often find a home in front of a mac, not because we need idiot buttons.
One Trek something or other bike, hybrid style. It had (gasp!) flat tyres but they pumped up fine and seem to hold air. Saddle was a bit ratty but we went back and pulled a better saddle of another bike that was toasted in other ways (bent forks). Reason for discard unknown (flat tyres maybe?). This bike is very nice to ride, an excellent compromise between road and mtn bike. In fact, in terms of general riding to actually get somewhere, better than any "mountain bike" and better than any "road bike". Fate of this thing is unknown, it will fetch up to 100 USD in the city but it is a very useful bike, so we may keep it.
A slot 1 Pentium 3 with firewire, CD-RW and nice sound card but missing CPU and memory. Could go either way, split for parts or pressed into service with somebody who might use it. No pic for now. Below you may peruse some exerpts from the budget of a person that we shall call M (abbreviation used to protect the terminally stupid).
| Monthly Expenses | ||||
| Madge | 800 | |||
| Stu Loans | 400 | |||
| Water | 50 | |||
| GPU | 200 | |||
| PSE&G | 200 | |||
| Cable | 80 | |||
| Groceries | 1,500 | |||
| Amex | 4,000 | |||
| Cars | 1,450 | |||
| Cash | 2,000 | |||
| Mort. | 5,833 | |||
| Household | 2,000 | |||
| Landscaping | 100 | |||
| Other | 1,000 | |||
| Club | 500 | |||
| Total | 20,113 |
The next bit has a units problem all round I think. Do not try and add up the second column and make it tally with what you spend unless you are prepared to allow errors on the scale that astronomers tolerate.
| Months | 11 | |||
| Yearly total | 221 | |||
| Other | ||||
| Insurance/Taxes | 25 | |||
| Vacation | 5 | |||
| Car Ins. | 4 | |||
| Life Insurance | 2 | |||
| Charity | 2 | |||
| School | 4 | |||
| Total | 42 | |||
| Total annualized | 274 | |||
| Monthly | 23 | |||
| Mortgage | $ 1,000 | $ 4.79 | 0.0575 | |
| Taxes | $ -0 | |||
| 2nd Mortgage | $ 250 | $ 1.04 | 0.05 | |
| 3rd Mortgage | ||||
| Insurance | $ -0 | $ -0 | ||
| Total | 5.8 | |||
| $ 1,250 | 12.5 | |||
| Total Mortgage | $ 18.33 | |||
| Total int. | 220 |
I did not see the 101 iTunes they had bought in that budget, I wonder where that comes in. Also this M was cunning enough to earn a fair amount of wad per month (judging by outlays etc) but seemingly unconcerned about the possibility of ID theft from his old HD. I will spare you the moronic obsession with sports that M seemed to be infected with. It's not big and it's clever.
Schwinn Traveler racing style bike. This one is made in japan and slightly later and less desirable than the others, but it is in excellent shape and will be sold off to some urbanite in need of transportation. No reason for discard became apparent during the brief look over it just had. Air in tyres, oil on chain, a quick wipe and ready to go.
White mac professional keyboard, looks in very good condition, no sign of american champagne on it but it sends consfused signals through its usb cable as far as I can tell. Either way, we have enough usb keyboards right now so this one may be going to visit Mr and Mrs Ebay at some stage, working or not.
Two socket style Pentium 3 IBM PCs in good shape, all complete etc. One with Windows 98 and one with Windows ME. I suspect reason for discard of the pair was that previous owner installed Windows ME on one of the two, saw how much of a complete dog it was, then tossed them both. They both orignally had Windows 98 on them. Brief summary:
These are now earmarked for good homes.
A nest of small side tables. Very modern. They seem OK and so will not be just used for their scrap aluminium value, we can find a home for them I think. The black finish is worn through in a few places but that just gives them "patina" as somebody I know would say.
A HP celeron small case and a Dell Pentium 3 slot 1 PC. Nothing special, one might go for parts to the cyber cafe and the other to a friend. Watch this space for the HD investigation.
A bizarre lawn edging device. It looks completely preposterous but must be worth something to somebody, even if just to a collector of weird tools. You ge to cut a swath of grass 6 inches wide with one side or flip it over to use the pizza wheel on the edges.
Calphalon 12inch omelet skillet, click here to see it on Amazon. The teflon is very beat up so one of two things is going to occur. Either Calphalon will send me a new one by virture of their warranty thingy or I will figure out how to strip off the remaining teflon and use the thing as an anodized aluminium pan.
An EvenFlo discovery baby seat with seat base and matching folding stroller thingy for instant mobile offspring deployment. It is in very good condition and surplus to requirements here so we will have to find a home for it somehow.
A medium sized olive drab filing cabinet with a small combination lock box built in. Hidden at the bottom of a drawer was a cheque for 900 USD from many years ago, I bet that caused a ruckus at the time. This cabinet is already pressed into service as a storage device for mac laptops and parts of such, as you can see from the image:
Schwinn Breeze bike in OK shape. The last one was snapped up quickly at an agreeable price to both parties by a young hipster chick so this one seems destined for a similar fate. Has original cool schwinn saddle and the backpedal brakes. Also special 70s sparkly glitter handgrips!
Yet another Maclaren double pushchair. This one is newer and fancier than the last one but has one break in the hood aparatus. Still works OK though overall. We do not need it so off it goes to make us some cash someplace.
For when the offspring is in the mobile phase of its lifecycle, we have acquired this handy dandy portable imprisonment device. Seems in OK shape, compare with previous one we found made of wood and sealed new in the plastic a while ago.
No, not the comfy chair! This is a very fine comfy chair considering it is a folding outdoor chair. Perfect condition with a light coating of sawdust. Sawdust must be why it was thrown out I guess.
Two child seats the next size up, very forward looking. One a britax and one some no-name thing. Pics show then before cleaning, seem in fine shape the a pair.
An EvenFlo baby car seat base. Seemingly new and will be sent to find it's destiny on ebay as we have no EvenFlo stuff.
One car seat stroller base that accepts multiple types of car seat. Handy dandy indeed. Seems to work with what we have so may see service and then be sold off at some stage.
Baby rucksack for slightly larger offspring. While wse do not in fact have one of these we postulate that the one we do have will eventually become such. Will be stored and used at appropriate point in lifecycle of offspring. Pic:
One seemingly new baby bath. Our existing one is very squared and hence wastes a lot of water. It also seems to defy it's intended function in allowing the bathee to slip down and submerge. This is not really a great feature. This new bath uses much less water and has a nice non-slip butt retention device that actually works. Out with the old and in with the "new".
Two Peg-Perego stroller/pushchair thingies. One has a couple of plastic pieces broken off, oh no we cry! Pic shows the other with it's super fancy cover thingy. Also came with the removable undertray thingies etc. I suspect that some of the parts from the broken stroller will find new life on another Peg-Perego so that it can go to see the great stroller marketplace that it ebay.
A total of 3(ish) 1Ghz range Pentium 3 PC machines, two identical Gateways and one Dell. From these at least two working machines should be made. A bunch of parts were missing here and there hence requiring said amalgamation. No pic yet. Such HD investigation as I have done has been pretty barren on the multimedia front but lots of WordPerfect files to read. Subjects range from personal to real estate management. Want to read word perfect files in linux? Get libwpd, works great so far.
After having borrowed the neighbour's caulking gun this week because mine suffered the total handle collapse syndrome that the cheapo ones tend to succumb to I of course found a couple today. One is the wrong size and the correct one has some minor deficiciencies. Never fear, we have the technology to rebuild him! We will make one good one from the two. Pic:
Two Graco strollers/pushchairs, much fancier than the previous one. Hmm, maybe that one we found before will not be pressed into service overseas for us. We have given one away already and here is a picture of the one we kept:
Dell laptop, or some portion thereof. I picked it up on the offchance it had memory in it, but when I got home and looked it had none. In fact it had the following defects:
It sat by the back door trying to be thrown away for a week or more but at some point got thrown on ebay with all its many deficiencies declared and ended up making a respectable sum.
A small portable Coleman barbecue. This, though it seems to have been used only once, is a piece of junk. It was picked up to provide cooking facilities for a friend who is currently off with it as I type in the middle of a field with a bunch of silly people. He is planning on living of BBQed skirt steak for several days, from what I can gather. Ahhhh, the good life.
Two lawn sprinklers, dusty and cobwebby in appearance, but seemingly in good order otherwise. We shall see, these are for a friend whose sprinkler lost a piece, he shall report back on his experiments in sprinkling.
A english country style pint mug with a souvenir from Paris metal thingy on it. What crazy person would buy such a P.O.S. we ask? Who can tell. It is now pressed into service due to our somewhat high rate of glass breakage.
Not very inspiring but functional Graco stroller. After a good washing with simple green etc and some re-arrangement it is ready for shipping off to another continent where it will provide transport for the offspring during its stay there.
Seemingly new exhaust system from some form of yamaha two wheeled powered transport device. I think this is going on ebay, we certainly have no use for it.
One of the Peg-perego strollers from last week was missing a small plastic fastener that holds the liner into the chair. Today we found a later version of the exact same stroller but it had been mangled by a bucket loader. I obtained the little plastic part to fix ours. Now good for ebay or barter....
A faux marble top table with tastless cheap legs. Has a nice cool pattern on the top so has some camp aesthetic appeal. I suspect it has enough appeal to certain demographics in a certain large city nearby such that we will be able to sell it on. Shown here in the back yard:
This was a request, a cheap light golf bag. Some golf courses do not let you play without a bag even if you have no clubs (i.e. sharing with somebody) and hence do not need a bag. This then is for a poor student type of my acquaintance who needs this bag to get on courses with his golfing acquaintances.
Calphalon commercial 10 inch frying pan with anodized finish, or omelet pan as they like to call it. So much more fancy with that name? Is in good shape and just needs a clean.
Two Peg-Perego brand strollers, one a twin Tender model and the other a single Milano model. Both appear completish and only need a clean and look over. These may well be traded or sent off to the great marketplace that is ebay.
An Optima Red top battery. For a price check see here . These batteries are superior in several ways to regualr car batteries and I refuse to use anything but optimas. It looks newish and the sold-on date strip has not been punched out. That means that even if it is dead I can use the 3-year warranty to get a new one. Woohoo! Pic shows it charging, accepting 35amps:
Battery started out at 6.2V and currently is at 12.3V (with charger off of course). Will push a little more in and see if it stays n. Discharge test tomorrow maybe.
A newish but low end Dell Pentium 4 PC. Specs: 1.7Ghz, 256M Ram, 40G HD, CDRW. It was rather dusty inside but worked fine and booted. Pic shows it open for ministrations from the shopvac and inspection. Note the special medical style wrapping I got on some VGA cables recently, I think they do that so I do not catch a virus from any machine I plug them into. Glad I have that!
Reason for discard seems to be marriage, i.e. the two parties involved pooled their computer infrastructure into one machine when moving in together. I think that other machine is a Mac based on the google searches I saw in the cache.
Other things:
A more or less brand new Jerry can. It was by the waste oil displosal and full of used engine oil. I promptly emptied it into the oil thingy and took it home and cleaned it out. It even still had the price sticker on it. Downside of course is that it is a US style jerry can as opposed to NATO standard style, and is somewhat of a cheap knockoff also. Oh well, I bet based on this shiny picture one of you will want it...
A nice little book by Bertand Russell. Could not leave that in the paper recycling, even though I think I already have this book.
A dell early-ish Pentium 4 PC, specifically a Dimension 8100, missing some internals. Present and correct are power supply, DVD-CDRW, mobo, all chassis and cover parts. Missing memory, cpu (plus heat sink etc) and HD. This is up for grabs if anybody wants it. I have a similar machine here so we can test what is there if you like. Pic:
Any takers; Doug, Bob?
A dell lcd monitor in seemingly good order. Missed out on the Pentium 4 Dell machine itself as we were too slow but we got the monitor without the power supply. Fresh power supply purchased in order to restore it to working condition, as evidenced here:
A small selection of books rescued from the terrible fate of recycling. Medieval french churches, breastfeeding and drugs/poisons seems like a well-rounded mixtue of topics for weekend reading.
Why do all the breastfeeding and similar books have such offensive covers? Is it due to the mindless exploited consumeristic idiocy that new parents seem to descend into? On a related note, rejected today was a book on pediatrics that seemed to indicate, at least by it's front cover, that all pediatrics is about horrendous deformation and fear-mongering. You would never guess from this book that human offspring just seem to thrive if you do any old reasonable thing to them. We point to most of the world, and the history of the world, as evidence of this conjecture.
Y.A.S, yet another scooter. This is again for the colleague who fancies himself a scooterologist. Note, no connection with the atrocious german techno dude Scooter.
A schwinn ladies bicycle. Its is nicely made and has some classically good components on it. We fear it is not worth much but it is definitely too nice to be tossed. Any takers out there should speak up, or it will be off to craigslist or some donation mechanism.
Random newish compaq keyboard, has a faintly interesting key action on it so it might be given a test in that perpetual search for nice keyboards. Every now and then the keyboard spillage death occurs and hence must have spares.
A 2nd Edition copy of Stewart's Calculus, ISBN=053413212X . Obviously the 2nd Ed is not worth a lot due to the vagaries of textbook model-year syndrome. Nice condition but a little written in. This is a canonical book. It was passed around at the pub tonight for everybody to recall old times with this stuff. It is a nice book, not sure what we will do with it.
Two juvenile mountain bikes of moderate quality. One had a broken derailleur cable stop so we pulled one off another bike carcass that was sitting nearby and voila, 'twas fixed. These two will probably go to those of our acquaintance that have offspring about to become the requisite size for these things.
A Dell Pentium 4 2.66Ghz PC with 40G HD and 256M ram. Side and front covers missing. It did not boot first time but once we reseated the CPU and memory it booted Windows XP. Well, it tried. It took half an hour or so before the spyware had finished fighting with the anti-spyware etc etc. It still was not very usable even after that so we booted up knoppix to see what was going on. Found on the HD:
A bunch of the pictures were of local places we recognised, that was nice and fun. Took a copy of all the interesting stuff and then it will have ubuntu installed and be pressed into service as part of ragtag fugitive fleet for a certain highly parralellizable CPU-intensive task.
Here is a pretty random pic from the HD that nicely illustrates the previous owner's taste in beer and artistic compositional skills. This was shot on a Nikon E4300 apparently.
While sitting at a traffic light an iMac 500Mhz was spotted with a half Gig of Ram. Seems to be all present and correct. Readily apparent that previous owner was a smoker (literally that is, the translucent casing is brown in places, not a standard apple colour). Upon investigation we discover 600 iTunes and 800 mp3s. How jolly. The well represented artists in the iTunes dir were:
301 Compilations
24 Monade
22 David Bowie
21 Dr. Octagon
18 GZA
18 Ghostface Killah
18 Boards Of Canada
17 Brian Wilson
15 Elliott Smith
14 Junior Boys
14 Beach Boys
13 Built To Spill
12 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
12 Cocteau Twins
12 Brigitte Fontaine
Pretty fine, some form of coolness in there.
A random Pentium 3 600MHz with memory missing. As I happen to have found two 128M PC100 dimms in an otherwise stripped chassis the other day this is not a problem. Possible donation to worthy cause. Investigation of HD shows it was a child's machine with lots of play software. They obviously had net and caught something nasty as there was a Windows 98 install floppy in the drive when it came into our hands.
A trailor. This is really for the neighbour but he asked me to pick it up and bring it home for him as his vehicles currently do not have tow hitches. Due to the fact that we only have NATO pintle tow hitches I just hooked up my trailor and put his inside that. I would not have bothered for myself as I obviously already have a trailor and it makes this one look like a shopping cart; yes yes yes, I am trailor snob. The thing seems to be just fine, wheels run etc. Needs some electrical attention and a quick cleanup.
One of the previously mentioned redundant cast iron pans was bartered for a very nice bottle of wine. That went nicely with our hangar steak this evening.
A big fat pipe reamer/deburrer in OK shape, a little rusty but fine nevertheless. No pic yet.
A nice industrial garden hose. This is especially welcome due to the fact that our existing hose had developed some leaks about half way down about two weeks ago. Previously mentioned hip young dude had tried to fix it with tape of various types but the thing was dying the death of a thousand progressive little tiny holes. The new one had the male end squashed by a car, hence its reason for discard I suspect. I put a new male end on it. It is longer than the old one, far better quality and less kinky. Two out of three is not bad... Shown here with undercar mud cleaning squirter wand attached. Other wand in background is also a recent find.
A tool chest and tool box in rather good shape. Some assorted junk inside but unhappily not a full set of tools. Oh well.
Also a smallish anodised aluminium pan lid in the style of Calphalon Professional (but not actually that make). Pan was present but was crap and had lots of burnt crud on the bottom. The lid fits on a couple of our receptables and pans, so all is well.
Three non-matching cast iron pans. Pic shows the large Griswold and the Wagner after cleaning and recuring. These will be added to the collection, replacing inferior models. The extras generated by this influx will be split between friends with good cause to need these and maybe an ebay auction for a nice matching set at some stage.
Also a Pentium 3 (socket 462) machine with no memory and no CPU. It does however have lots of dust and crud in it, probably, I hypothesize, its reason for discard. Machine may be resurrected with parts or turned into parts at some stage. HD, DVDrom, CDR and other items all look handy dandy. No pic yet.
One funky german keg from the DAB brewery. It has a galvanised steel jacket around a stainless beer capsule at the core. I assume this is to give rigidity and bashproofing at lower cost than an all stainless version. This will be sent to the the local friendly brewer for examination.
One Giant bike that has been well used but is in very good shape and all complete except for the wheels. It has a nice largish frame, often a problem these days. Will hang that some place until some wheels turn up, in fact I already have one spare wheel I can use for it.
One Pentium 3 800MHz machine, boots XP just fine and displays the contents of the formers owners' lives for all to see. Most entertaining. No time for detailed analysis though as this machine was cleaned up and donated to a hip and trendy young dude of our acquaintance. Because he lives in hip and trendy Pankow we assisted him in doing a silly case mod as well as the Windows 2000/ubuntu setup. Who knows, he may be able to turn this into liquid assets based on its hipness and trendiness? I am sure if you put this in a store in SoHo NYC you could fetch a pretty penny.
One almost new but crappo wheelbarrow. Not sure if it will be returned to source yet.
Old oil can that used to be used at filling stations. Will fetch a few dollars on ebay maybe, or adorn some friend's garage.
A Marin Mountain bike that was somewhat expensive at some stage. It has 24 gears and disk brakes and front suspension. It is very light. It is missing the two quick release wheel skewer thingies and the derailleur mount is broken. This mount unbolts so I suspect it's probability of successful repair will be high. I further suspect that the derailleur mount broke as the previous owners threw it away, and they did not throw it away because it was broken.
A brand-new-in-the-box never used Feuerzangenbowle kit. We, of course, already have the required materials for this fine drink and they are superior. But we shall see what we will do with this one. I am pretty sure the market for these is slim, even on german ebay.
Some assorted books and computer parts, as usual. Some 256M ram sticks, always handy for reviving Pentium 2/3 era machines, and a USB card. Also a complete Chronicles of Narnia set and some Roald Dahl, super.
A selection of assorted PC devices, specifically 2x Pentium 2 and 1x Pentium 3. The Pentium 3 will be reconditioned to send off to somebody in need, the Pentium 2 machines will be off to somebody even needier or the cybercafe. The assortment of parts sitting around nearby include a Brooktree TV capture cards and a firewire card plus 2 CD burners. Dell Pentium 2 shown in pic:
A single Maclaren pushchair that, apart from having rather worn rear wheels, will do nicely for the impending offspring. Same make and model as the previous one, just half of such. We may replace those wheels at some stage, shown here after a quick clean with simple green:
One Alice type backpack frame. It is in near perfect shape (say supergrade to those who know that that means) and will doubtless be used in some project at some stage in the future. Jerry can carrier, mobile hotspot, homemade industrial strength baby-bjorn, whatever.
An Apple IIc with most of its original packages and in full working order, as evidenced by the picture. This one may have to go and visit Mr and Mrs Ebay as I certainly have no use for this stuff, modern apples give me enough trouble. Ever tried scp-ing 100k plus files to a G5 Xserve? Ooops.
A Honda trash pump. The motor is pretty beat up and might run but I am more interested in the pump part. That, mounted to a PTO would enable me to kidnap entire swimming pools in short order. How useful.
Two matching sediment bowls from some random petrol engine application. They may be pressed into service as shot glasses at some stage, I am not sure. Pic:
A twin pushchair of the Maclaren brand. We have no real use for this at present but luckily they seem to go well on ebay.
Two kids bikes in pretty fine shape. They are both off now to a friend so that his two conveniently sized offspring can upgrade into these bikes from their previous. Weirdness, botn cranks were pretty loose but were easy to tighten. Was this the reason they were tossed we ask?
5KW generator that had a sheared crankshaft. A friend is going to try and use just the generator part by mounting it on his truck for PTO sourced 110V AC. Looks in fine condition, better than the photo seems to indicate:
A no parking sign sitting in amongst a lot of scrap metal. We have no use for this but I gather certain other groups of people like these. Will save it until such a time as it's potential use or user becomes apparent to me. Failing that the chunky sheet aluminium is great for repairing certain vehicles.
A USB2 enclosure with a 48x cd burner in it, complete with the required funky power supply and a blank CD in the drawer. It is a masterpiece of bad design from the point of view of both form and function, but it does seem to work. Pic:
One somewhat recent funky custom-case PC missing everything but the motherboard, CPU and fans. I took it for the special fan that I intend use extending the life on my freshly waranty-returned 320G HD, but the case will be donated to cyber cafe type people.
Three mac display boxes with polystyrene inserts. These will be hoarded until some suitable chance comes along to offload them to some mac head in exchange for their hard earned cash. Side note: are there any mac heads who actually do work? I think mostly they spend their days animating desktop thingies and loving one button clickiness.
A jolly fine bench grinder, 110V AC with good stone and brush on it. The guards around the wheels are very chunky and the whole thing comes from an era when things were built well. Was given to me by a colleague who was clearing out the garage and was going to toss it. Check out his pic of it:
One Dakon temperature probe that was attached to the side of a largish stainless mixing tub. Tub had been trashed by heavy implements already so I just took the probe. Range 40F to 140F. Seems to work fine.
Some follow up on the Dell PC. The hard drive was a 20G with 16G of crud on it. Some examples of what we found:
21 Led Zeppelin
19 Jimmy Hendrix
19 Black Sabbath
17 Rush
16 Red Hot Chili Peppers
14 Beastie Boys
12 Ozzy Osbourne
12 Frank Zappa
11 The Who
11 Soundgarden
Nothing too surprising turned up, very mainstream stuff. We listened to some it.
3132 www.cdnow.com
1359 gs.cdnow.com
1240 ads.cdnow.com
967 www.nudecelebritypics.com
907 hurl.content.loudeye.com
762 www.qualityvids.com
663 exclamation-all-free-nude-celebrities-naked-pics.com
540 ug.hooters.dk:8080
468 graphics.nastydollars.com
424 www.free-celeb-galleries.com
Music and porn, seems to fit in with the other users of this machine just fine (and most of the rest of the internet also?). Different types of porn though to the other users on this machine.
33 yahoo weather
11 europro steam pants press
9 shakespeare's Henry IV
7 ithaca college
6 habit rabbit vibrator
5 surfing schools california
5 steam fast pants press
5 muhlenberg college
5 leo october horoscope
4 skidmore college tuition
3 syracuse university
3 SUNY New Paltz
3 skidmore college
3 race tolerance education
3 pearl rabbit vibrator
2 trouser press netherlands
2 The Caretaker, the play, nyc
2 the caretaker
2 synopsis, Pinter's The Caretaker
2 SUNY Purchase
What are google doing with your search history we ask?A Dell Pentium 3 PC with Windows XP on it. Fully functional, such that XP can ever be termed functional, boots right up and logs right in. It might well be the case that an exploration of the "My Documents" chaos will appear here as followup. Meantime, a snapshot of the outside. Dude, I've got a Dell.
A nice commercial grade stainless steel shelf. It has a couple of dings but they will hammer out. The edges are nicely welded and finished. Now we just need a place to put it.
A skate roller table of about 7 or 8 foot length. Not immediately useful but I am sure we can come with either a happy recipient or a use for it. It has been suggested that we use it as a creeper. It does run somewhat well down the driveway but that path leads to the dark side.....
Yet another wireless print server thingy. Off to the great Ebay marketplace for this as we have no use for it, the previous one went down pretty well so we have high hopes for this:
A logitech wireless mouse. Luckily it came in a box of junk with lots of fresh batteries so we were able to test it immediately and it is now in use fulltime in its new home. Happy stuff. Shown here with a random Belkin 802.11b card that came with it, that will be sold on to some Mac user at some stage.
A preposterous scooter thingy that seems quite dangerous if the rider is over a certain mass. If the rider mass is too great the steering mechanism seems to become a quite unstable equilibrium and dump said rider face first into the tarmac. We do not think this is purely a generation gap or skill thing as the lighter members of the test team were able to maintain some straight line travel. Lighter in terms of mass, not skin colour. In fact darker skin colour seemed to be better based on our small sample size of two.
Lots of stuff today, first a pile of networking gear including nice ethernet cables, a 10/100 8-port switch and some other assorted stuff. Pics shows some of it:
A pile of assorted junk including some tools, PC memory, AC adaptors, valid credit cards, driving license, silver cigarette case and other rubbish. Not sure what we will do with all this but the shears make great credit card choppers, lots of leverage. We may laugh at people for throwing this stuff away but we are not so unkind as to let their stupidity enable ID theft.
Two books, a photographers guide thingy and an O'Reilly pocket guide to Oracle crud. I think the photo book will form some nice present for some teenage family member and the O'Reilly guide for some colleague who has to deal with the horrors of Oracle against their will.
Cast iron tray thingy for cooking some thing that we are not quite sure about. Eggs maybe? Suggestions please. Maybe you will even win the thing if you come up with a plausible enough answer? Shown here:
Cast iron muffin thingies. We have no immediate use for these so one went to a neighbour and a couple more to a friend on permanent loan. Pic of the two we cleaned up for the colleague:
iMac 400MHz, in full working order with OS-9 installed (is that an oxymoron?). Pic possible to appear but you know what these things look like by now.
Stupid miniature bike thingy that was in need of a chain. We hence procured a chain and proceded to ride the thing around to try to figure out the purpose for which it was built. We have so far failed in this quest? Everybody please, why does this thing exist?? Shown below being ridden by 7 month pregnant woman, but I fail to accept that this is its intended purpose.
One 400MHz iMac missing HD and memory, What a shame. It is the disgusting blueberry colour though so I am not very predisposed towards this thing to start with. May form part of a job lots of mac junk for sombody
One small all-clad , sans lid, from the LTD range of pans. In OK condition, needed cleaning. Now a happy member of our kitchen.
One small form factor Dell PC, missing a hard drive. I had a special request for crappo machines plus parts from an acquantaince the other week so this will be great for that. It is a Pentium 3, socket style, but is super low end. After putting in a new (old) cdrom knoppix booted ok, all the various hardware checks out. This and a pile of parts will be handed over at some stage.
A set of three Wagner cast iron skillets, newish ones unfortunatly. Also a made-in-USA deep skillet of indeterminate manufacturer. The Wagners are available if anybody wants them, but the deep skillet , I guess "chicken fryer" is it's technical designation, is cleaned and cured and ready to cook. It went to visit Mr Hitachi Grinder in the basement and then had a vinegar steam bath before being heated with some oil.
Yet another full mac keyboard. This one does not appear to have had the coca cola rinse treatment but has some dirt in it. Will be useful for something, even if only ebay amusement purposes.
A paper shear in excellent condition. Looks to be of very high quality but very simple, from a time when such things were important. 1950s Cold War American engineering.
Two Hoffritz Knives and sharpening stone. How convenient. They are not the best in the world but will be handy at some stage. They are even not very blunt. Question: Were they just used in a grisly murder before being thrown away?
One HP Scanjet 4100Cse scanner, new in the box, never been unwrapped. The box was still mostly sealed with original tape. Fine stuff. Not worth a lot except as a cheap scanner but when you need a cheap scanner you need a cheap scanner.
A restaurant style stainless steel food tray, we have one already but now we have two. This is slightly thinner material than the other (booooo, hisss!).
A pair of random pewter candle sticks, Made in India. Of no particular value or usefullness apart from the fact that we often get power cuts and have nothing to hold our candles in. We suspect they were thrown away because the candle burned out, we seem to meet to quite a few people with that mindset.
Seemingly 3/4 of a set of garden furniture in very good condition. Our previous set is getting some saggy butt holes in the load bearing areas so these will be pressed into service when Gin and Tonic season hits.
Yet another cast iron skillet, this one a somewhat old wagner 10.5 inch. Probably to be traded for something as we already have one this size. Pictured after a good wirebrushing, acid treatment and recuring.
Four USB keyboards, three of which were Mac knockoff style. These are very handy when selling off surplus iMacs, for example. And only this morning we were remarking on our current deficit in this type of item. How fortuitous. Three shown here in the pic:
Somebody tossed their pipe-fitting kit. I left the pipe threader (too primitive and rusty) and made off with the nice Ridgid Chain wrench, seen here before cleanup:
In addition I picked up their pipe vise, after a swift cleanup they both worked fine, vise seen here:
Yet another cast iron pan, corrugated base even. This one has made its way to the house next door after testing and curing. No pic, but you know what it look like after the last one, see below.
A large selection of iMacs, cast off from some very well know TV show production crew. HDs wiped (kudos to them) but many (variously) functional machines present, one example shown booted and running:
A Seca medical/bathroom style scale that seems to work and is fairly nice. This will henceforth be employed for ebay shipping weight determination and for assessing the mass of people as we did not, prior to this point, have such a device.
One nice white Mac keyboard. Previous owner stated that spillage of noxious acidic corn sugar laden liquid had terminated functionality of said device.
Quick cleanup and it worked fine, the one it replaced being genuine Apple (but without the numpad keys) it went to see Mr Ebay and returned useful cash.
Four stainless steel 40 pint soda kegs. I am not sure what you can do to make these things really useful (i.e. how you can use them for beer) but we shall see. Pic of one of them here about to celebrate new year:
Fine stuff.
A very silly looking iBook 500Mhz box complete with styrofoam inserts and cardboard. There is no iBook inside of course but the idiocy of Mac users guarantees a return for the small investment of picking it up and carrying it home.
Dell Pentium 4 1.8GHz PC stripped except for case, power supply, CPU, heatsink. As we were roving happily sans transport and tools at the time we just took the cpu and heatsink. Update: CPU is now deployed to fix a friend's machine that had somehow developed a bad CPU. Heatsink is a paperweight.
Two sets of Mac OS 10.3.3 install plus software restore plus extra software CDs for iBook G4s. These are unopened and in super condition, pic shows one ready for its appearance on ebay, there are usually a few .
Dell 20 inch CRT. Gentleman discarding it admitted he got a flatscreen for xmas. I suspect there will be substantial pickings next week.
A Micron 733MHz with 128M RAM and a 20G disk. Full working order except that that the memory was in slot number 2. After moving it to slot number 0 the thing booted. Added ethernet (to avoid use of crappy on board ethernet) and modem for export, re-installed and updated and everybody is happy. I hate windows. This will find a home with some grateful punte.
A "Rock Grinder" mountain bike. One pedal has broken frame, must have been that grinding on rocks. Otherwise everything is present and correct. We rode it around a bit before putting it in storage for sale next year.
A cast iron pan with corrugated base. Pic shows it with our partially cooked roast lamb in it after a good clean and high temperature re-curing. It did not come with the lamb of course, we bought that and put it in after cleaning.
A stupid ersatz slot machine that is very annoying. This may be donated to a household we wish to annoy.
While we are not really on the subject here is Calphalon 4 quart sauce pan that we picked up a while ago. Somebody had burnt some food on the bottom, so we cleaned it off and Bob's your uncle, a rather nice addition to the kitchen.
The latest in what seems to be a veritable tsunami of Mac junk, a 233MHz G3 mac tower that had been upgraded to 466MHz G4 with 768M RAM and a 60G HD plus burner. These upgrade parts are fascinating to play with for about 10 minutes, then we get rid of them to rabid mac-heads.
One seemingly good-order iMac 400MHz. We currently have two of exactly this model, one running OS X and one running Ubuntu PPC, so will not be hanging on to this. Missing all the bottom of the case. We got it working but not worth selling like this, will part it out. Pic shows it with the nice USB optical mouse we got also. Keyboard did not come with.
One Pentium 3 800Mhz PC, to be investigated more closely at a later date.
A racing style bike made by panasonic. Does not turn off when I use my tv-b-gone on it, unlike their TVs. Pic of it before chain oiling etc:
One juvenile scooter. A friend is building some form of monster scooter and will get this for the parts.
One mac clone with Sonnet 400Mhz upgrade card, SCSI CD burner and fast SCSI HD, boots OK into OS 9 but what use is that? I have run OS X on crappier macs than this but do not intend to do that on this one. Parts or some other disposal. Memory on top came from even crappier genuine mac that was nearby.
Motor turns out to have burnt winding. Severe bummer that one, but I guess I will keep looking. It is alleged to be fixable but I bet for more than I will pay.
One Gateway Slot 1 Pentium 3 500MHz with no HD and no memory. Off to the cybercafe with that one.
One roll of very good duct tape just sitting there in the middle of the street. Crazy.
One PowerMac G3 P.O.S. Its two virtues are that it might be entertaining to install linux on this thing and that these things seem to go on ebay for 100 USD or more. We shall see.
One Dell Pentium 2 450MHz PC with not much on the HD. Now has been refreshed and turned around to become a surfing machine for somebody in need.
One largish 3-phase motor, I think about 2-3hp, shown next to a wine bottle for scale . I think it has bad bearing but not sure yet. This is of course is the ideal starting point for a single to three phase converter and something I have been seeking for the past short while, since I found that 3-phase drill press in fact. Seek and ye shall find!
Update: One burnt field means this is scrap. The search continues.
Two Pentium 2 machines. One a Compaq P.O.S 400MHz PC with Firewire, the other a Dell 300 MHz. Both yielded immensely entertaining data examination of the HDs. One guy used Napster then Kazaa for his family media needs but Limewire for his porn needs. Very interesting, some of the porn filenames were veritable keyword aggregators.
Second guy had a few hundred mp3s and some wierd porn images hidden in strange cache-like places. Seemed to be using a lot of ftp sites with such software as CuteFTP. Took a copy of all this and archived. Also, the lady of the household was in the habit of replying to spammers and (seperatly) committing very sensitive financial and identity related infomation to email. When she went into hospital to expunge their new offspring from her body she required that she be able to use her laptop with headphones to be able to watch DVDs and listen to music during labor. Classy.
Talking point: If I pull mp3s off a discarded hard drive and save them is it legal? First sale doctrine ? I certainly extract and re-use Windows license keys in the spirit of this principle.
The Compaq is now part of a cyber cafe and the Dell is reconditioned and ready for delivery to somebody who needs it.
One galvanized rubbish bin. Actually there were three but I only took one as I have a few already. How strange is it to find an almost new rubbish bin in the rubbish, rather than rubbish in the rubbish bin? Pic of it on the lawn (currently the part of our property that most needs a bin):
One 8G HD and a bunch of quite good video cards. Who knows what I will find on the HD and where the videos cards will end up?
Managed to save the contents of a garage before they went into a dumpster. First items, a selection of vise grips and clamps useful for welding:
These also came with lots of welding rod and some power cords and stuff. Next item, two sheet metal brakes, one 3 foot or so and the other 6 inch. Quality is not fabulous but will do just fine for things like making stainless steels fuel tanks and such. Longer one is shown here with table scroll saw that was also in need of a home. Scroll saw may find its way to ebay or some other good home. I have very little use for one of those.
Two craftsman sanders, crappy-ish but should work OK when I need such sanders. One is belt sander and the other is a larger random orbital type.
Yet more tree branch loppers also, these ones very big and chunky but taiwanese iffy quality. These may be traded for a nice bottle of wine. No pic for now.
Its a trap! One for small mammals, yummy. Tested it with some cantelupe as bait and we caught a squirrel. Released it again (squirrel not the cantelupe).
A classic 3-speed bike in OK shape. Has been pressed into service as student transport to and from the railway station.
A Micron Slot 1 Pentium 3 was missing its outer case so I just stripped it for some nice parts, ensemble below (plus some imposters). Memory is def worth something, will help save some other machine
Large pile of HiFi stuff today. Starting with a Hafler DH-200 Power amp. Nice condition all round. One just finished on ebay for 150 so this one may find its way there soon.
A pile of NAD HiFi component parts. Not worth much each but pretty nice. They will find a home some place, either as somebody's garage stereo or even an ebay sale.
A Dell 733Mhz Pentium 3 low end PC. Does not boot but had 40G hard drive that seems to both function and have a working install of Windows on it (such that Windows can ever be said to be working). Will either be fixed up or failing that chopped for parts (machine not HD).
A Dewalt crappy 12V cordless. After charging appears to work in drill mode but not in screw mode, clutch thingy has broken. These things are so crap that it is not really worth keeping it even if it does work, but who knows. It can always go back.
One wooden chest made of poplar. Nice but somewhat crude, I suspect it was a project of somebody's years ago. Maybe the original maker just died and his widow/offspring just dumped it? It had some form of finish on it with a dark stain but we have stripped it back and refinished it as seen below(it is not as dark as pic suggests). Neighbour came by to covet this during the restoration process.
Random monitor, to be exported to a needy househol with brrod eager for surfing. Nuff said.
Junky Athlon 500MHz. Previous owner was apparently a young female who insisted on lots of pink and annoying animated flowers. That and the spyware made this machine very slow with its Windows 98 install. Fresh install of Windows 2000 runs fine. She used Napster at some stage in the past and had a stupendous collection of crappy/sappy music. I listened to it during the re-install process. Possibly the worst audio track I have ever heard was:
WTC - new york city (night).mp3
Others strongly represented tracks amongst the rest were the Coyote Ugly and Moulin Rouge sound tracks.
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