 |  | The Stuff Page: Things that ended up tossed but that seem like they have another life ahead of them.
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| | The Stuff Page: Things that ended up tossed but that seem like they have another life ahead of them.
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One Pentium 3 800MHz machine, boots XP just fine and displays the contents of the formers owners' lives for all to see. Most entertaining. No time for detailed analysis though as this machine was cleaned up and donated to a hip and trendy young dude of our acquaintance. Because he lives in hip and trendy Pankow we assisted him in doing a silly case mod as well as the Windows 2000/ubuntu setup. Who knows, he may be able to turn this into liquid assets based on its hipness and trendiness? I am sure if you put this in a store in SoHo NYC you could fetch a pretty penny.
One almost new but crappo wheelbarrow. Not sure if it will be returned to source yet.
Old oil can that used to be used at filling stations. Will fetch a few dollars on ebay maybe, or adorn some friend's garage.
A Marin Mountain bike that was somewhat expensive at some stage. It has 24 gears and disk brakes and front suspension. It is very light. It is missing the two quick release wheel skewer thingies and the derailleur mount is broken. This mount unbolts so I suspect it's probability of successful repair will be high. I further suspect that the derailleur mount broke as the previous owners threw it away, and they did not throw it away because it was broken.
A brand-new-in-the-box never used Feuerzangenbowle kit. We, of course, already have the required materials for this fine drink and they are superior. But we shall see what we will do with this one. I am pretty sure the market for these is slim, even on german ebay.
Some assorted books and computer parts, as usual. Some 256M ram sticks, always handy for reviving Pentium 2/3 era machines, and a USB card. Also a complete Chronicles of Narnia set and some Roald Dahl, super.
A selection of assorted PC devices, specifically 2x Pentium 2 and 1x Pentium 3. The Pentium 3 will be reconditioned to send off to somebody in need, the Pentium 2 machines will be off to somebody even needier or the cybercafe. The assortment of parts sitting around nearby include a Brooktree TV capture cards and a firewire card plus 2 CD burners. Dell Pentium 2 shown in pic:
A single Maclaren pushchair that, apart from having rather worn rear wheels, will do nicely for the impending offspring. Same make and model as the previous one, just half of such. We may replace those wheels at some stage, shown here after a quick clean with simple green:
One Alice type backpack frame. It is in near perfect shape (say supergrade to those who know that that means) and will doubtless be used in some project at some stage in the future. Jerry can carrier, mobile hotspot, homemade industrial strength baby-bjorn, whatever.
An Apple IIc with most of its original packages and in full working order, as evidenced by the picture. This one may have to go and visit Mr and Mrs Ebay as I certainly have no use for this stuff, modern apples give me enough trouble. Ever tried scp-ing 100k plus files to a G5 Xserve? Ooops.
A Honda trash pump. The motor is pretty beat up and might run but I am more interested in the pump part. That, mounted to a PTO would enable me to kidnap entire swimming pools in short order. How useful.
Two matching sediment bowls from some random petrol engine application. They may be pressed into service as shot glasses at some stage, I am not sure. Pic:
A twin pushchair of the Maclaren brand. We have no real use for this at present but luckily they seem to go well on ebay.
Two kids bikes in pretty fine shape. They are both off now to a friend so that his two conveniently sized offspring can upgrade into these bikes from their previous. Weirdness, botn cranks were pretty loose but were easy to tighten. Was this the reason they were tossed we ask?
5KW generator that had a sheared crankshaft. A friend is going to try and use just the generator part by mounting it on his truck for PTO sourced 110V AC. Looks in fine condition, better than the photo seems to indicate:
A no parking sign sitting in amongst a lot of scrap metal. We have no use for this but I gather certain other groups of people like these. Will save it until such a time as it's potential use or user becomes apparent to me. Failing that the chunky sheet aluminium is great for repairing certain vehicles.
A USB2 enclosure with a 48x cd burner in it, complete with the required funky power supply and a blank CD in the drawer. It is a masterpiece of bad design from the point of view of both form and function, but it does seem to work. Pic:
One somewhat recent funky custom-case PC missing everything but the motherboard, CPU and fans. I took it for the special fan that I intend use extending the life on my freshly waranty-returned 320G HD, but the case will be donated to cyber cafe type people.
Three mac display boxes with polystyrene inserts. These will be hoarded until some suitable chance comes along to offload them to some mac head in exchange for their hard earned cash. Side note: are there any mac heads who actually do work? I think mostly they spend their days animating desktop thingies and loving one button clickiness.
A jolly fine bench grinder, 110V AC with good stone and brush on it. The guards around the wheels are very chunky and the whole thing comes from an era when things were built well. Was given to me by a colleague who was clearing out the garage and was going to toss it. Check out his pic of it:
One Dakon temperature probe that was attached to the side of a largish stainless mixing tub. Tub had been trashed by heavy implements already so I just took the probe. Range 40F to 140F. Seems to work fine.
Some follow up on the Dell PC. The hard drive was a 20G with 16G of crud on it. Some examples of what we found:
21 Led Zeppelin
19 Jimmy Hendrix
19 Black Sabbath
17 Rush
16 Red Hot Chili Peppers
14 Beastie Boys
12 Ozzy Osbourne
12 Frank Zappa
11 The Who
11 Soundgarden
Nothing too surprising turned up, very mainstream stuff. We listened to some it.
3132 www.cdnow.com
1359 gs.cdnow.com
1240 ads.cdnow.com
967 www.nudecelebritypics.com
907 hurl.content.loudeye.com
762 www.qualityvids.com
663 exclamation-all-free-nude-celebrities-naked-pics.com
540 ug.hooters.dk:8080
468 graphics.nastydollars.com
424 www.free-celeb-galleries.com
Music and porn, seems to fit in with the other users of this machine just fine (and most of the rest of the internet also?). Different types of porn though to the other users on this machine.
33 yahoo weather
11 europro steam pants press
9 shakespeare's Henry IV
7 ithaca college
6 habit rabbit vibrator
5 surfing schools california
5 steam fast pants press
5 muhlenberg college
5 leo october horoscope
4 skidmore college tuition
3 syracuse university
3 SUNY New Paltz
3 skidmore college
3 race tolerance education
3 pearl rabbit vibrator
2 trouser press netherlands
2 The Caretaker, the play, nyc
2 the caretaker
2 synopsis, Pinter's The Caretaker
2 SUNY Purchase
What are google doing with your search history we ask?A Dell Pentium 3 PC with Windows XP on it. Fully functional, such that XP can ever be termed functional, boots right up and logs right in. It might well be the case that an exploration of the "My Documents" chaos will appear here as followup. Meantime, a snapshot of the outside. Dude, I've got a Dell.
A nice commercial grade stainless steel shelf. It has a couple of dings but they will hammer out. The edges are nicely welded and finished. Now we just need a place to put it.
A skate roller table of about 7 or 8 foot length. Not immediately useful but I am sure we can come with either a happy recipient or a use for it. It has been suggested that we use it as a creeper. It does run somewhat well down the driveway but that path leads to the dark side.....
Yet another wireless print server thingy. Off to the great Ebay marketplace for this as we have no use for it, the previous one went down pretty well so we have high hopes for this:
A logitech wireless mouse. Luckily it came in a box of junk with lots of fresh batteries so we were able to test it immediately and it is now in use fulltime in its new home. Happy stuff. Shown here with a random Belkin 802.11b card that came with it, that will be sold on to some Mac user at some stage.
A preposterous scooter thingy that seems quite dangerous if the rider is over a certain mass. If the rider mass is too great the steering mechanism seems to become a quite unstable equilibrium and dump said rider face first into the tarmac. We do not think this is purely a generation gap or skill thing as the lighter members of the test team were able to maintain some straight line travel. Lighter in terms of mass, not skin colour. In fact darker skin colour seemed to be better based on our small sample size of two.
Lots of stuff today, first a pile of networking gear including nice ethernet cables, a 10/100 8-port switch and some other assorted stuff. Pics shows some of it:
A pile of assorted junk including some tools, PC memory, AC adaptors, valid credit cards, driving license, silver cigarette case and other rubbish. Not sure what we will do with all this but the shears make great credit card choppers, lots of leverage. We may laugh at people for throwing this stuff away but we are not so unkind as to let their stupidity enable ID theft.
Two books, a photographers guide thingy and an O'Reilly pocket guide to Oracle crud. I think the photo book will form some nice present for some teenage family member and the O'Reilly guide for some colleague who has to deal with the horrors of Oracle against their will.
Cast iron tray thingy for cooking some thing that we are not quite sure about. Eggs maybe? Suggestions please. Maybe you will even win the thing if you come up with a plausible enough answer? Shown here:
Cast iron muffin thingies. We have no immediate use for these so one went to a neighbour and a couple more to a friend on permanent loan. Pic of the two we cleaned up for the colleague:
iMac 400MHz, in full working order with OS-9 installed (is that an oxymoron?). Pic possible to appear but you know what these things look like by now.
Stupid miniature bike thingy that was in need of a chain. We hence procured a chain and proceded to ride the thing around to try to figure out the purpose for which it was built. We have so far failed in this quest? Everybody please, why does this thing exist?? Shown below being ridden by 7 month pregnant woman, but I fail to accept that this is its intended purpose.
One 400MHz iMac missing HD and memory, What a shame. It is the disgusting blueberry colour though so I am not very predisposed towards this thing to start with. May form part of a job lots of mac junk for sombody
One small all-clad , sans lid, from the LTD range of pans. In OK condition, needed cleaning. Now a happy member of our kitchen.
One small form factor Dell PC, missing a hard drive. I had a special request for crappo machines plus parts from an acquantaince the other week so this will be great for that. It is a Pentium 3, socket style, but is super low end. After putting in a new (old) cdrom knoppix booted ok, all the various hardware checks out. This and a pile of parts will be handed over at some stage.
A set of three Wagner cast iron skillets, newish ones unfortunatly. Also a made-in-USA deep skillet of indeterminate manufacturer. The Wagners are available if anybody wants them, but the deep skillet , I guess "chicken fryer" is it's technical designation, is cleaned and cured and ready to cook. It went to visit Mr Hitachi Grinder in the basement and then had a vinegar steam bath before being heated with some oil.
Yet another full mac keyboard. This one does not appear to have had the coca cola rinse treatment but has some dirt in it. Will be useful for something, even if only ebay amusement purposes.
A paper shear in excellent condition. Looks to be of very high quality but very simple, from a time when such things were important. 1950s Cold War American engineering.
Two Hoffritz Knives and sharpening stone. How convenient. They are not the best in the world but will be handy at some stage. They are even not very blunt. Question: Were they just used in a grisly murder before being thrown away?
One HP Scanjet 4100Cse scanner, new in the box, never been unwrapped. The box was still mostly sealed with original tape. Fine stuff. Not worth a lot except as a cheap scanner but when you need a cheap scanner you need a cheap scanner.
A restaurant style stainless steel food tray, we have one already but now we have two. This is slightly thinner material than the other (booooo, hisss!).
A pair of random pewter candle sticks, Made in India. Of no particular value or usefullness apart from the fact that we often get power cuts and have nothing to hold our candles in. We suspect they were thrown away because the candle burned out, we seem to meet to quite a few people with that mindset.
Seemingly 3/4 of a set of garden furniture in very good condition. Our previous set is getting some saggy butt holes in the load bearing areas so these will be pressed into service when Gin and Tonic season hits.
Yet another cast iron skillet, this one a somewhat old wagner 10.5 inch. Probably to be traded for something as we already have one this size. Pictured after a good wirebrushing, acid treatment and recuring.
Four USB keyboards, three of which were Mac knockoff style. These are very handy when selling off surplus iMacs, for example. And only this morning we were remarking on our current deficit in this type of item. How fortuitous. Three shown here in the pic:
Somebody tossed their pipe-fitting kit. I left the pipe threader (too primitive and rusty) and made off with the nice Ridgid Chain wrench, seen here before cleanup:
In addition I picked up their pipe vise, after a swift cleanup they both worked fine, vise seen here:
Yet another cast iron pan, corrugated base even. This one has made its way to the house next door after testing and curing. No pic, but you know what it look like after the last one, see below.
A large selection of iMacs, cast off from some very well know TV show production crew. HDs wiped (kudos to them) but many (variously) functional machines present, one example shown booted and running:
A Seca medical/bathroom style scale that seems to work and is fairly nice. This will henceforth be employed for ebay shipping weight determination and for assessing the mass of people as we did not, prior to this point, have such a device.
One nice white Mac keyboard. Previous owner stated that spillage of noxious acidic corn sugar laden liquid had terminated functionality of said device.
Quick cleanup and it worked fine, the one it replaced being genuine Apple (but without the numpad keys) it went to see Mr Ebay and returned useful cash.
Four stainless steel 40 pint soda kegs. I am not sure what you can do to make these things really useful (i.e. how you can use them for beer) but we shall see. Pic of one of them here about to celebrate new year:
Fine stuff.
A very silly looking iBook 500Mhz box complete with styrofoam inserts and cardboard. There is no iBook inside of course but the idiocy of Mac users guarantees a return for the small investment of picking it up and carrying it home.
Dell Pentium 4 1.8GHz PC stripped except for case, power supply, CPU, heatsink. As we were roving happily sans transport and tools at the time we just took the cpu and heatsink. Update: CPU is now deployed to fix a friend's machine that had somehow developed a bad CPU. Heatsink is a paperweight.
Two sets of Mac OS 10.3.3 install plus software restore plus extra software CDs for iBook G4s. These are unopened and in super condition, pic shows one ready for its appearance on ebay, there are usually a few .
Dell 20 inch CRT. Gentleman discarding it admitted he got a flatscreen for xmas. I suspect there will be substantial pickings next week.
A Micron 733MHz with 128M RAM and a 20G disk. Full working order except that that the memory was in slot number 2. After moving it to slot number 0 the thing booted. Added ethernet (to avoid use of crappy on board ethernet) and modem for export, re-installed and updated and everybody is happy. I hate windows. This will find a home with some grateful punte.
A "Rock Grinder" mountain bike. One pedal has broken frame, must have been that grinding on rocks. Otherwise everything is present and correct. We rode it around a bit before putting it in storage for sale next year.
A cast iron pan with corrugated base. Pic shows it with our partially cooked roast lamb in it after a good clean and high temperature re-curing. It did not come with the lamb of course, we bought that and put it in after cleaning.
A stupid ersatz slot machine that is very annoying. This may be donated to a household we wish to annoy.
While we are not really on the subject here is Calphalon 4 quart sauce pan that we picked up a while ago. Somebody had burnt some food on the bottom, so we cleaned it off and Bob's your uncle, a rather nice addition to the kitchen.
The latest in what seems to be a veritable tsunami of Mac junk, a 233MHz G3 mac tower that had been upgraded to 466MHz G4 with 768M RAM and a 60G HD plus burner. These upgrade parts are fascinating to play with for about 10 minutes, then we get rid of them to rabid mac-heads.
One seemingly good-order iMac 400MHz. We currently have two of exactly this model, one running OS X and one running Ubuntu PPC, so will not be hanging on to this. Missing all the bottom of the case. We got it working but not worth selling like this, will part it out. Pic shows it with the nice USB optical mouse we got also. Keyboard did not come with.
One Pentium 3 800Mhz PC, to be investigated more closely at a later date.
A racing style bike made by panasonic. Does not turn off when I use my tv-b-gone on it, unlike their TVs. Pic of it before chain oiling etc:
One juvenile scooter. A friend is building some form of monster scooter and will get this for the parts.
One mac clone with Sonnet 400Mhz upgrade card, SCSI CD burner and fast SCSI HD, boots OK into OS 9 but what use is that? I have run OS X on crappier macs than this but do not intend to do that on this one. Parts or some other disposal. Memory on top came from even crappier genuine mac that was nearby.
Motor turns out to have burnt winding. Severe bummer that one, but I guess I will keep looking. It is alleged to be fixable but I bet for more than I will pay.
One Gateway Slot 1 Pentium 3 500MHz with no HD and no memory. Off to the cybercafe with that one.
One roll of very good duct tape just sitting there in the middle of the street. Crazy.
One PowerMac G3 P.O.S. Its two virtues are that it might be entertaining to install linux on this thing and that these things seem to go on ebay for 100 USD or more. We shall see.
One Dell Pentium 2 450MHz PC with not much on the HD. Now has been refreshed and turned around to become a surfing machine for somebody in need.
One largish 3-phase motor, I think about 2-3hp, shown next to a wine bottle for scale . I think it has bad bearing but not sure yet. This is of course is the ideal starting point for a single to three phase converter and something I have been seeking for the past short while, since I found that 3-phase drill press in fact. Seek and ye shall find!
Update: One burnt field means this is scrap. The search continues.
Two Pentium 2 machines. One a Compaq P.O.S 400MHz PC with Firewire, the other a Dell 300 MHz. Both yielded immensely entertaining data examination of the HDs. One guy used Napster then Kazaa for his family media needs but Limewire for his porn needs. Very interesting, some of the porn filenames were veritable keyword aggregators.
Second guy had a few hundred mp3s and some wierd porn images hidden in strange cache-like places. Seemed to be using a lot of ftp sites with such software as CuteFTP. Took a copy of all this and archived. Also, the lady of the household was in the habit of replying to spammers and (seperatly) committing very sensitive financial and identity related infomation to email. When she went into hospital to expunge their new offspring from her body she required that she be able to use her laptop with headphones to be able to watch DVDs and listen to music during labor. Classy.
Talking point: If I pull mp3s off a discarded hard drive and save them is it legal? First sale doctrine ? I certainly extract and re-use Windows license keys in the spirit of this principle.
The Compaq is now part of a cyber cafe and the Dell is reconditioned and ready for delivery to somebody who needs it.
One galvanized rubbish bin. Actually there were three but I only took one as I have a few already. How strange is it to find an almost new rubbish bin in the rubbish, rather than rubbish in the rubbish bin? Pic of it on the lawn (currently the part of our property that most needs a bin):
One 8G HD and a bunch of quite good video cards. Who knows what I will find on the HD and where the videos cards will end up?
Managed to save the contents of a garage before they went into a dumpster. First items, a selection of vise grips and clamps useful for welding:
These also came with lots of welding rod and some power cords and stuff. Next item, two sheet metal brakes, one 3 foot or so and the other 6 inch. Quality is not fabulous but will do just fine for things like making stainless steels fuel tanks and such. Longer one is shown here with table scroll saw that was also in need of a home. Scroll saw may find its way to ebay or some other good home. I have very little use for one of those.
Two craftsman sanders, crappy-ish but should work OK when I need such sanders. One is belt sander and the other is a larger random orbital type.
Yet more tree branch loppers also, these ones very big and chunky but taiwanese iffy quality. These may be traded for a nice bottle of wine. No pic for now.
Its a trap! One for small mammals, yummy. Tested it with some cantelupe as bait and we caught a squirrel. Released it again (squirrel not the cantelupe).
A classic 3-speed bike in OK shape. Has been pressed into service as student transport to and from the railway station.
A Micron Slot 1 Pentium 3 was missing its outer case so I just stripped it for some nice parts, ensemble below (plus some imposters). Memory is def worth something, will help save some other machine
Large pile of HiFi stuff today. Starting with a Hafler DH-200 Power amp. Nice condition all round. One just finished on ebay for 150 so this one may find its way there soon.
A pile of NAD HiFi component parts. Not worth much each but pretty nice. They will find a home some place, either as somebody's garage stereo or even an ebay sale.
A Dell 733Mhz Pentium 3 low end PC. Does not boot but had 40G hard drive that seems to both function and have a working install of Windows on it (such that Windows can ever be said to be working). Will either be fixed up or failing that chopped for parts (machine not HD).
A Dewalt crappy 12V cordless. After charging appears to work in drill mode but not in screw mode, clutch thingy has broken. These things are so crap that it is not really worth keeping it even if it does work, but who knows. It can always go back.
One wooden chest made of poplar. Nice but somewhat crude, I suspect it was a project of somebody's years ago. Maybe the original maker just died and his widow/offspring just dumped it? It had some form of finish on it with a dark stain but we have stripped it back and refinished it as seen below(it is not as dark as pic suggests). Neighbour came by to covet this during the restoration process.
Random monitor, to be exported to a needy househol with brrod eager for surfing. Nuff said.
Junky Athlon 500MHz. Previous owner was apparently a young female who insisted on lots of pink and annoying animated flowers. That and the spyware made this machine very slow with its Windows 98 install. Fresh install of Windows 2000 runs fine. She used Napster at some stage in the past and had a stupendous collection of crappy/sappy music. I listened to it during the re-install process. Possibly the worst audio track I have ever heard was:
WTC - new york city (night).mp3
Others strongly represented tracks amongst the rest were the Coyote Ugly and Moulin Rouge sound tracks.
One Stanley No7 plane. Of no immediate use to me but complete and in need of a cleanup. Presumably will be snapped up by a crazy tool collectors of our acquaintance.
Three plumb bobs. Seemingly useless you may cry but not if you have a mildly insane neighbour who collects them.
An assortment of thing to hit and things to hit with. What seems to be a slate splitting hammer and some other stuff. Again, only a couple of items of usee to me here but I know people who collect such things.
One portable drinking chair with spaces for two beers. One pop rivet on the back had given out but is already fixed and ready for service. Indoor usage pictured below:
A seemingly complete e-machine 500MHz Pentium 3 that does not appear to boot. One of the very few old machines I have found that really will not boot. No worries, the memory is useful, and the hard drive was a fruitful source of amusement.
Previous owner had a small collection of mp3s seemingly acquired from semi-legal download sites. The following is telling:
wold0126<54>My Music% find . -type f | grep mp3 | sort | tail ./Unknown/Untitled - 02-17-03/13 - Track 13.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/01 - Track 1.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/02 - Track 2.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/03 - Track 3.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/04 - Track 4.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/06 - Track 6.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-01-02/07 - Track 7.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 08-09-02/13 - Data Track.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 10-14-02/02 - Data Track.mp3 ./Unknown/Untitled - 10-14-02 (1)/05 - Track 5.mp3
They are even missing their ID3 tags so I would have to listen to all that stuff to see what is there. The few I have so far got through were the likes of Tatu and Christina Agui-whatsit . Not promising. The word docs had some nice stuff in them and had more useful names. Former owner also seems to have had a proclivity for online gaming and dating services.
I guess this counts. Relative of a friend of a friend picked up a Rockwell Delta drill press that was being chucked. It found its way to me. It is 3-phase, hence some fiddling will have to take place on the power supply front but seem very nice. Big, heavy, old, see for yourself:
Amusingly somebody had jacked a regular 110V household plug on the end of the cord in some (presumably) vain attempt to use it.
For those with curious nature here is an updated picture on the Emglo Compressor. It was dismantled and had a paint job with POR-15 on the tanks and some general attention. The pressure switch needed cleaning to make it function correctly. It now seems to work fine.
Flatbed trolley. A little rusty, works fine, suitable for large welders, gearboxes etc. I may give it a coat of POR and touch up some joints with the welder (not necc in that order) but in the meantime here it is after having the wheel bearings greased:
Garden seat with cast iron ends and wood slats for the seat and back. To get it into Heidi for transport home we broke off all the wood slats and cropped off all the bolts. Nice. Plan for this might be galvanize the cast iron ends and put new teak slats on with stainless hardware. Rubber feet will make it the indoor/outdoor bench. Pic of the ends resting in the garden (not my pic!):
Pair of bolt croppers, about 18 inches in length, OK quality, fully adjustable, nick in one jaw, slight rust. We used them on the way home to help clean up the next item. Pic of them cleaned up and oiled here:
One Pentium 2 400MHz Gateway. Seems damaged physically on the motherboard and is missing a cdrom.
One Pentium 3 Slot 1 style, missing memory, half the case and hard drive. Hmmmm, maybe I see a chimera coming on.
A new-in-box Coleman Mosquito Deleto 2100 device. Looks all special, its destiny is not yet decided but could end up joining some similar ones , Pic of ours here:
Interesting old frame saw that should provide entertainment for those collectors of old tools. It works, it was used to chop an old workbench in half for no particular reason, well maybe to facilitate extraction of the two vises bolted to it. Pic:
The loppers from Tuesday, pictured below, have been used heavily over two days of clearing trees. They earnt us two bottles of fine wine so far and promises of more to come. For being so useful they got a quick canadian rebuild and coat of high visibility paint on certain parts.
Was a long way from home and hence out of free fuel, was forced to actually buy fuel! The horror. Put in 10 gallons only. Went to pay and noticed that the fuel stop had a food area, almost a cafe. I asked about their deep fryer oil and they showed me a 55 gallon drum of the best looking oil I have ever seen. It was not luck that I had three 5 gallon buckets with me.
They did not seem to understand that it was against their interest to give me that oil. Oh well.
A realtor type office seemed to have emptied itself, including lots of computing related items, into a dumpster. We made off with numerous items, inclucing but not limited to.
One Gateway Pentium 2 266MHz with no memory but a hard drive full of realtor stuff. Most entertaining. No porn though.
One Gateway Pentium 2 233Mhz yet to be investigated.
One unidentified Athlon type thing with lots of memery but no HD. DVD rom and CD-R still there all happy.
One Belkin KVM switch, two TV capture cards and assorted 168 pin memory.
Several Windows and Office install CDs. Great, just what we need.
Pair of ethernet crimpers and lots of cable ready to be crimped. These are probably the most useful thing in the dumpster even if they did draw blood. Pic:
Linksys wireless print server adaptor, not the sort of thing we would use but you never know we might find a use for it. More likely a customer for it. Pic:
Pair of pruning loppers. They seem to fully functional. They are not computer related but they sneaked in at the end here anyway.
Ten gallons of oil from a well known, if slightly touristy, bar. I will never be eating there as their oil was pretty brown and burnt. Slackers. Oil filtered quickly though and is all ready to go.
What a grandiose name for such a piece of junk, one crappy Compaq Presario type thing with a ~350MHz Celeron, Windows 98, 8G HD and some weird and barely useful amount of memory. It has a CD writer which could always come in handy. More to the point it had Kazaa Lite installed with an extensive collection of "media", for want of a better word. In particular 1030 MP3s from such luminaries as:
49 Metallica
45 Aerosmith
23 U2
22 Rolling Stones
22 Kid Rock
17 Led Zepplin
16 Rage Against The Machine
15 Linkin Park
15 Elvis Presley
13 Red Hot Chili Peppers
12 Dave Matthews Band
11 Van Halen
11 Steve Miller
11 Offspring
11 Guns N' Roses
11 Bush
11 Audioslave
Also there were some Seinfeld episodes and the obligatory sprinkling of porn. I bet if the owner is reading this he is really hoping I do not reveal his name and address further down this page. Oh yes and I now have a bunch of his passwords and his horrible homework assignments written in Word. Blech.
Yet another shredder, this one had a slight jam behind the power switch that the paper trips on the way in. Cleared with a pair of needle nose pliers (not even any dismantling with this one) and all ready for its new home. This one is not cross cut but goes very fast. Pic:
Nice pair of folding aluminium outdoor chairs with drinks trays on the side. They look little used, and in fact the fabric is not faded, just dusty. I am sure they will be employed at some riotous event in the woods someplace. Pic of one of them:
One large canal boat lamp that has a steel (as opposed to brass) body. It had a hack job electric conversion and body was very rusted hence I think it is not worth saving but the nice fresnel lens has cleaned up nicely. This may have to form some type of post-industrial artsy table lamp, to go with our galvanized pipe coffee table. Pic of it mostly cleaned:
Got 5 gallons of oil from the butcher that was nice and clear, filters well. Bought meat for the BBQ, they gave me the fuel for the truck, what a deal. Pic of the cardboard wrapper from the oil bottle for reference purposes.
Long hiatus there while I was off and about. Back to business with a small Craftsman 358 chainsaw that had a broken pull cord. Cord is now fixed and some attempts will be made to run the thing. Not a very useful thing though, too small, disposable chainsaw if you will as I am sure that one good session cutting oak would kill it off.
Found a restaurant with a small dumpster full of waste oil. Was maybe 6 feet by 2.5 feet and had a foot of oil in it. I make that about 400 litres, or around 100 gallons of fuel. I got 20 gallons first time hence have lots to look forward to. Quality was good, nice and thin and clear.
Found a pile of 5 old Mac laptops and a Newton, but decided not to take them as they were so super old and useless.
10 more gallons of oil from the drum I found earlier. There are maybe 5-10 more in there but it is getting more murky as I get further down.
One Craftsman table saw. It is very heavy and has pretty high speed. It was missing the belt when we picked it up but the temporary use of a genuine mercedes alternator belt demonstrated the functionality of the unit. Missing a fence unfortunately and the legs need tightening up. Pic of it showing evidence of testing around
As I did not until now have a table saw this one gets to find a home in the basement, at least until a better free one comes along.
Lastly I took some buckets to that drum of cooking oil and got 10 gallons. Half is now filtered and ready to go, the rest soon to follow. Will get the remaining 15 gallons tomorrow. Need more plastic buckets......
Well, got another shredder today, must be about the fourth this year. It is not a cross cut version and is missing its basket and lower flap but has a credit card slot. It is an Aurora AS1002MSB. When I first tested it I got nothing but I dismantled it and removed some stuck plastic and paper crud and it works fine now in forward and reverse. Pic below of it tastfully poised on my next (but not yet fully assembled) cork trivet:
Some kind of PS2 scanning pen inventory dongle device, maybe from a store. There was a whole pile of Pitney Bowes kit nearby but it had been half stripped. Pic below:
Weirder still is the Mercedes microfilm and audio educational device plus many cassettes for it. To be explored later on, watch this space.
Also there was what I think was a Mac Clone from some years ago. HDs were all present and SCSI-2, I left them being impatient. I took what I think is the CPU board in case it is sellable, pic below.
A Compaq Pentium 3 mostly stripped. I took the 10/100 ethernet card and the HD. HD is 6.4G Western Digital 26400 and functions fine, has a total of 20366 files on it. Looks like a functioning WinNT install with FAT32 file system. Former owner was a Morpheus user, but I cannot see much in the way of downloaded crud. Pretty tame HD really this, some files pertaining to appliances and household stuff.
Hmmm, have located a 55 gallon drum with old cooking oil in it. Obviously I have to leave the drum and take the oil, hence I need to go back with several buckets. May also have to accost the owners of the drum, but only after I have this batch from it. It seems to have about 25 gallons in it and quite clear looking.
One somewhat rusty clamp-on pipe vise. I did not have one prior to this so it is worth cleaning up I think. Photo makes it look worse than it is......
It works intermittently, current suspect is the presure switch thingy, which should be easy to clean or fix or replace. Here it is in unflattering surroundings woken from peaceful sleep in the trailer:
Five assorted small stainless steel food service containers, complete with refried bean remants and maggots. They look to be just dirty but otherwise in very good shape. You can never have enough commercial quality kitchen gear, or so I hear. If you do ever have enough then there is always ebay..........
Here is a pic of them in varying states of cleanliness. Angle grinder with stainless wire brush is my friend.
Five gallons of cooking oil. It had already seperated into about half-half creamy goop and oil. I decanted the oil off the top and filtered it, looks very clean and ready to go. I am sure I could use the goop as well but will just take that back as am not in the mood, too humid. Added to the 5 gallons from the city the other day this lot should take care of my fuel for the week.
Two nice 304 stainless modular shelf elements made by Metropolitan Wire Corporation. Both are 60 inches long and the depths are 14 and 24 inches, check them out here for a price quote , $286.70 and $386.70 respectively. Now all I need is some legs for them. Available here its seems for slightly less money. I have seen these legs floating around before, I will have to pick some up at some stage. Meanwhile here are the shelves after some form of cleaning:
One HP 6360 with Athlon 367MHz CPU and 10GB disk. It was missing its memory but upon being supplied some it booted fine. Lots of family pictures, tax docs for every year since 1998 and all sorts of other goodies on with working copy of Windows 98 (great, honest!). Extensive addressbook present (good for social engineering purposes?) and other assorted personal items. Too much data to wade through now, will store away and save for a rainy day. Here are the faqs and specs for this from HP, nice that the first item on the list is spyware. Errr, I run NetBSD and my machine is slowing down, do I have spyware......?
One sketchy screen dump of me rifling through the "My Documents" folder using Knoppix, much more stuff scattered all through the disk.
One pair of new-old-stock industrial electric motor mounts, in the original plastic bag with screws etc. These could be handy. Not even any rust on them despite the fact they are cast iron and unpainted.
One Micron 1GHz desktop in complete working order with a working install of windows 2000. Comes with 10G HD, 126M of RAM, slot loader CD drive and Zipdrive (oh joy). Surprisingly clean install, in terms of spyware and data from previous owner. We of course now have his ISP and work logins and passwords.
Aforementioned seatless bike now has a seat. A rather dated peugeot racing bike graciously donated its seat. A quick squirt in each tyre from the compressor and a wipe all over with a WD40 soaked rag made the bike look rather shiny. And we all know that shinyness is what counts, n'est pas? I rode it round the garden a few times during SFW to do proof of concept work. Now that thing is officially looking for an owner. I do not want it. Pic of it in it's "canadian-rebuild" glory:
One apple 24x laptop cdrom drive. I suspect it to be broken but we shall see. Also found an iMac recovery CD. I suspect some macHeads have been cleaning out.
One pair of garden shears, in somewhat better condition that the ones I used the other day on the long bits round the front lawn. A second pair were examined but had loose handles. Long conversation with Costa-Rican guys about volcanos.
One Gateway 32M PC100 memory dimm. Not much use but I will throw it in the next elligable PC that I overhaul. Image (I suspect) not of 32M dimm but found from GS for part number:
One push lawn mower in slightly rusty but working condition, identical to previous push lawn mower
One Pentium 3 chassis and motherboard with 46G IBM HD. Hard drive proves to have flippy floppy heads, machine yet to be tested. Big Blue quality shines through again, I had one of these exact drives go bad a couple of years ago. Picture shows sample from GIS:
Two stainless steel bottle troughs from a bar, slightly dirty. One is just over 3 feet, the other is 2 feet long and both cleaned up nicely for the pic:
Two mountain bikes, one with disc brakes and missing only an inner tube. Fixed and sold within 2 days. The other missing a seat and otherwise complete except some minor tyre issues, saved for stock, probably just awaiting addition of a seat at a later date. It looks like some 14 year-olds rode these just long enough to make them no longer shiny, then left them out in the rain until they were thrown away.
One Apple Laserwriter 8500 for up to A3 paper in good condition except for the fuser. Pic of similar from GIS :
It even came with a with duplex tray which is shown below ready for ebay. Some of the other good parts may get used also.
One Dell Pentium 4 PC case and motherboard, no CPU, memory etc.
Maxtor 91531U3 15GB hard drive. 15482 files found, of which I extracted 6617. These included such entertaining gems as
My Documents/Goals2001.doc My Documents/ProposedCommissionSchedule.doc Recent/Wire Transfer.doc Recent/Resume.doc
Library picture of similar drive from GIS. The drive functions fine.
Seagate Medalist 4321 4.3GB hard drive. 14682 files found of which I extracted 4888. The extensive porn collection included such delicacies as:
My Documents/My Pictures/pics/HILARY.gif My Documents/My Pictures/pics/INTERN.bmp My Documents/My Pictures/pics/FloppyTitsAnimated.gif My Documents/movies/movies/2xfist11.mpeg My Documents/movies/movies/monkeyp.mpe My Documents/movies/movies/nipple_twist.avi My Documents/movies/movies/smoking.avi My Documents/movies/movies/poopin~1.avi
This drive also functions fine despite being pretty old. 2/2 today. These drives will go towards fixing up Pentium 2/3 machines for people.
One radar detector. As yet untested but this could mean I get to drive home faster! Yeah right. Is it more important to get there eventually or get there fast? Answers on a postcard to /dev/null.
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