Slashdot Mirror
Online Hardware Swap-Meet
ShadowRayven wrote to us about a cool service called freeboxen: "Freeboxen is an online community for sharing computer hardware. Many of us have old, unused PC hardware sitting around. Why not give it to someone who wants it? Freeboxen makes it easy to post your hardware and give it to a thankful recipient. You can also use Freeboxen to claim the hardware that people are giving away."
If you happen to live in Northern Germany, there is a very similar project called
Nutzmüll
(See this article in the newspaper DIE WELT)
The people working are former long-time unemployed folks paid by the Hamburg community. They are now learning about IT-technology, thus improving their resume and their chances of getting a "real" job in the near future.
The computers you donate to them are given to organizations and people who cannot afford a new computer. (I wanted to buy some old hardware for a livingroom network router from them, but they didn't give it to me. Well, they're right and now that I know that, I have an even higher opinion of them.)
Anyway, Nutzmüll also accepts old software (think Windows95 CDRoms and licenses) that they use to install on the computers. I recently gave them a tip to have a look at Linux and linuxrouter.org and hope that they will find some use for them of the even more outdated hardware they get.
------------------
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
yeah -- i suppose it'll remain to be seen whether hundreds/thousands of new users will serve the purposes of such a site well (depends, really, on how generous the /. demographic is...) see, we have a website sorta like this locally -- most likely, many of you living in the bay area have heard of it (craigslist) with increasing volume from the local "hip" weeklies and whatnot... turns out the folks reading these weeklies are just a bit *too* hip to take a model based on community/sharing and turn it into a minature antique market -- where prices on whatever you might want to purchase were of the "take it away, i don't need it, variety" we're now seeing the "my junk is gold" user, (not to mention the college kids who are taking furniture off the street and selling it as "used" to fund beer runs, etc -- a cute idea, but shameful abuse of craigslist.)
what i'm saying here (ie, how it's applicable) is that services are only going to benefit from a greater user base if that base matches a balance necessary to such a model -- meaning, that there must be people who want to get stuff, and others who want to give.
as the internet lately seems to have been overtaken more and more by some mad mob mentality (post-93, 94, anyone?) obeying the theory that "people on computers in great numbers are infintely stupider" (don't believe it? go witness collective stupidity that overruns holzer's original "truisms" in her Please Change Beliefs work.) I have little hope for such a site to survive as a useful resource given greater numbers of traffic.
sorry, the glass is half empty, and the fuckers getting drunk on paper profits are pissing in it.
fisfhcuerk.
what? i can't say fuck?
Inspired by the free yellow bicycles of Amsterdam (which you can just pick up on the street corner and ride around), the YNC takes donations of hardware, mostly old 486's, fixes them up, installs linux on them, and gives them away for free for use either as NAT servers and firewalls (so people may have multiple machines of any OS on a single network connection) and as Linux user workstations.
I gave my venerable old 486 to them. Like George Washington's axe, it started life as a 386, then got a new microprocessor, motherboard, CPU, case, memory and hard disk before finally going to the YNC.
Note that unlike some operating systems out there, Linux runs just fine on a 486 - I was using it as a web server on mine and could run the server and XWindows at the same time and never noticed any performance problems. Windows 95 was a dog on the same machine.
They also plan to build free internet kiosks in neighborhoods. You'd just be able to walk up to a weather-sealed machine and start browsing at no cost. I've heard the founder has one of these outside his house. What they'd do is hang off the DSL connection inside neighboring homes and businesses, perhaps through wireless.
They also give lessons on setting up firewalls and such, and go around giving public talks on their activities.
They have chapters in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, California, as well as Japan. I'll probably set one up in Maine if my home purchase there comes through.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I, for one, have got plenty of hardware that I need to list on their site... I'd much rather see people use old hardware than have it sit around gathering dust. J. Lincoln over at Freeboxen is also a really cool person, in my opinion.
Does anyone know if it's ok to donate old software, or does this violate alla them EULA's?
Free music from Jack Merlot.
One warship running Windows 2000 only used once...
Freeboxen is a way cool site that fills a needed trading niche, but there are other organizations that actively seek donations of old equipment, "de-obsolete" it by gutting it of counter-productive proprietary and weird components, and find organizations that can make use of it. See:
The Detwiler Foundation's Computers for Schools program
A neat Wired article about the people who do the gutting and filleting of the old stuff
I'm sure there are more-- please post what you know! You might want to consider volunteering with one of these groups, too; users aren't likely to get the most out of an old machine without some guidance or help. But they can learn, and you might feel better about yourself for having helped to lessen the digital divide a bit for a person or two who could really use a machine, any machine.
Granted, not all old equipment is useful. But much of it is far more useful than some of us gearheads might think. Better in the hands of someone who might actually use it than taking up space in a landfill.
It's the Network Economy, after all, and for some, just being able to participate means a hell of a lot more than having a machine with mHz instead of gHz. As Harry Tuttle said in Brazil, "Hey, we're all in this together".
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
Modems (2400 to 56K)
486 motherboards
Toasted 486 cpu's (from overclocking just a bit too much!)
Monochrome monitors with patterns long burnt into 'em
even 14 or 15" color monitors
Buttloads of old network cards
network cable with just a few too many kinks...
keyboards with sticky keys (but no one knows why...)
Mice with encoders that skip every other count
old copies of DOS or Windoze 3.1/95/95SE.
and the list goes on.
Feels like a walk through a computer museum! But it's really cool, 'cause somewhere out there is someone who really wants or needs this stuff!
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
a Gnutellized hardware sharing network : you put the client on your box (must support TCP/IP, so sorry, no ZX81 online), and it will talk to all other to-be-shared boxen. If someone wants it, he will have to locate you through your IP address, thus proving the lack of privacy of Gnutella-style networks, and then come to your place to pick it up.
Now for the fun : if you really do want to get rid of that box, install a Gnutella servant with Metallica mp3s on it, and simply wait for the lawyers to come to seize it. This way we can convert RIAA and MPAA lawyers into trash pickers, which will make them do some valuable work for public interest.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
If you haven't been to one, you are missing out. You can get great deals on computer and electronics junk. Last time I was there I bought all the cables I needed at the time and a really nice case for my laptop and spent less than $30 total. Some people like to hang around towards the end of the day when vendors reduce their prices or give stuff away to get rid of it.
I wil be there manning the booth for my company. We have a ton of old equipment to get rid of. If you see a stack of 150 mac classics, stop by and say 'hi'!
Okay, they have a website where you can get free hardware if you don't have some. But without a computer, how do you access their website? How do you send an email to the guy offering it? Maybe we need another website to ... uh, wait ...
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication