 |  | 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.
Click here to find out what this "Stuff Page" thing is all about
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Currently viewing older stuff, starting from entry number 1686....
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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.
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