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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."
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
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!
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Vote Homer Simpson for President!