2008-03-08 40 inch TV

A Gateway 40 inch TV/monitor. It has some issues, often there is fuzzy ghosting all over it especially at startup, but this pic shows it perfectly clear. We will probe its precise deficiencies and see if it can be used.

2008-03-06 Hard Drives

A colleague found some RAID arrays being tossed, and inside were 60 or so seemingly good 120G Western Digital hard drives. Now we would not want to use these in a RAID type application now, much easier just to go buy 7 1TB drives. But for random machines that need a new HD or an extra 120G or sneaker drives, they seem just fine. We will test them as we use them, you may also if you need one.

No investigation of drive content here for several obvious reasons. Sorry.

2008-03-01 Rocking Horse

A wooden FAO Schwarz rocking horse in OK shape. It seems to function quite well as an offspring amuser so it will be deployed in the offspring amusement device zone.

2008-03-01 Drop Cloth

A roll of plastic drop cloth. Super handy!

2008-03-01 Dell P4 machines

Three Dell Pentium 4 PC machines all seemingly complete and in good order, they were all dumped off by the same guy. Jumping ahead, they all seem to come from the office of a "fund of funds manager".

First one is a hyperthreading 2.8Ghz 512M RAM with an 80G HD. No reason for discard, boots to XP fine. The following summarizes their computer usage:

• Music, 699 mp3s, seemingly sourced from Limewire, well represented artists shown here

       28 disturbed 
       14 blue october 
       12 nickelback 
       11 vertical horizon 
       10 pink 
       10 maroon 5 
       10 concrete blonde 
        9 vast 
        9 queen 
        9 pm dawn 
        9 my chemical romance 
        9 house of pain 
        9 him 
        9 fall out boy 
        8 toad the wet sprocket 
        8 korn 
        8 blake lewis 
  

• Lots of (gothic?) wedding pics and baby pics. Lovely. You are invited to guess, based on the music selection, whether the former owners have tattoos or not. Go on, guess.
• IE caches completely empty, cleaned we would say. Given the facts that the cache dirs were present and these machines are all from a common admin domain and the others have full caches I would say that this user surfed loads of NSFW stuff and knew enough to clean up. We may try an undelete on this at some stage.
• Documents present include resumes, house purchase docs, pleading letters to lawyers, that sort of thing.

The next one is also a Dell hyperthreading machine, 2.6Ghz, 512M RAM, 80G HD. It seems to function well with no apparent reason for discard. Only 15G or so of the disk used. Salient points include:

• Browser cache present and correct, no porn visible upon quick check.
• Lots of google maps usage, many closeup zooms of houses on satellite view.
• Recycler was full of pics, business documents and all sorts of good stuff. Good job they threw these out before tossing the machine. Dop!
• One user has lots of Dell stuff in their cache, presumably browsing for the replacement machine.
• 5 mp3s, bah!

Next machine is a Dell Pentium 4 1.6Ghz 384M RAM with a 20G HD. No apparent reason for discard, seems to work fine. Though obviously if you are going to toss the above machines this one is going to go also.

• Cache has lots of Britney and Rudy pics and no porn.
• The dir "Copy of g drive" has all sorts of stuff in it that may have been forgotten there, lots of stuff presumably related to managing funds of funds. Mixed docs, ppt, and xls. How do these people do any work with these constraints?

The 2.8 benchmarked 12300 secs vs an existing machine's 15600 secs, and hence will be pressed into service.

2008-02-16 Pot

A Calphalon 8.5 qt dutch oven. Missing the lid and the finish on the inside so this is set for a warranty return. It might even be a keeper as we do not have one quite like this.

2008-02-02 Cast Iron

A cast iron Griswold Oval Roaster, number 3. This will be just fine for roasting ornithological specimens of a certain size that happen to fall into our food chain, namely chickens and ducks. We had chicken last night in fact and though the thing was nicely roasted in the deep cast iron chicken fryer we were wishing for a proper oven roaster. Well, here it is. The more astute amoung you will have already recognized the pans in the background from their prior starring appearances on this page. Note that the roaster has only had one initial cure after its clean, it will soon turn black like the others.

This is not really available, if you want one they are hard to find but there is one here, at least at the time of writing.

2008-01-26 Radiators

Two nice cast iron radiators, set up for steam but usable for water. People we know often need these things and if nobody we know happens to right now, the interwebs are usually kind enough to introduce us to new people who need them. How nice.

Update: Sold on craigslist to some guy who bought a repossessed house from a bank which had had all its radiators removed. Cheeky.

2008-01-26 Peg Perego Pliko

A Peg Perego Pliko folding stroller in good shape. It has been used but is certainly fine enough to make its way up onto the list of craig. This model was our stroller of choice for a while, especially while travelling. It folds in two dimensions, had reclining seat back, 5 point harness etc etc. Also it is not junky, the earlier Peg Peregos tended to get very brittle after a while but this generation seem to age better.

2008-01-26 Dell

A Dell pizza box style PC, 128M RAM 700Mhz celeron, 10G HD, seemingly in good order, 1st Grade maths CD still in the drive. In keeping with first impression the machine had nothing but kids software on it. No evidence of having been connected to the net, no surfing detritus etc. Oh well, I guess this was a valid use for a machine, just not very interesting for us. Available if you have a use for such, it runs quietly and could be used for some appliance task.