2005-07-15 Marin Bike

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.

2005-07-15 Feuerzangenbowle

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.

2005-07-15 Books and puter parts

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.

2005-07-09 Puters

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:

2005-07-09 Pushchair

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:

2005-07-09 Alice frame

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.

2005-07-06 Apple IIC

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.

2005-06-25 Trash Pump

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.

2005-06-25 Sediment Bowls

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:

2005-06-25 Pushchair

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.

2005-06-25 Kids' Bikes

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?

2005-06-25 Generator

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:

2005-06-22 Sign

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.

2005-06-17 USB Enclosure

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:

2005-06-17 PC Case

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.

2005-06-16 Mac boxes

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.

2005-06-02 Bench Grinder

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:

2005-05-31 Thermometer

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.

2005-05-25 Dell followup

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:

• 616 mp3s from many and various artists. I think they got them from Kazaa and Limewire. They must be some of these so-called music pirates we hear so much about. Will look for the eyepatches, parrots and cutlasses later, meanwhile, a rundown of their top ten artists:

       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.
• More than 7000 porn movie snippets (yes, seven thousand!) in the MSIE cache directories. Some are non-unique or at least highly related to each other but that is still an impressive inadvertant collection to have amassed. Roughly 50 percent repeat looking at some samples md5s, so more than 3k unique porn clips.
• Of the 50000 jpgs (yes, fifty thousand) in MSIE cache dirs I suspect quite a few (half or so) are also porn.
• At least 700 snapshots of their hotmail inbox and more courtesy of MSIE caching.
• Lots of browsing history, check out one user's top 10 sites in terms of numbers of hits:

     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.
• Complete tax records for a couple of (recent) years with income, assets, accounts, SSNs etc etc etc. I am amazed they found time to do such mundane stuff given all the porn and music they had to plough through.
• Word documents describing business dealings in grand buzzword compliant terms; designed, no doubt, to impress whoever happens to peruse them after they were discarded.
• A history of their google searches courtesy of the MSIE cache, top 20 searches by one particular user shown below:

       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?

All in all a most instructive hard drive. It really gives insight into what normal people do with their machines.

2005-05-11 Dell P3

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.