 |  | 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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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.
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