 |  | 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 1708....
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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.
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