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Scrounging for Fun and Profit
Guinnessy writes: "According to Toni Feder on Physics Today, scrounging used equipment is worthwhile if you can avoid the pitfalls of wasting time and compromising scientific goals. Feder interviews experimenters who have dug up everything from dewars to nuclear reactors."
you know what, this has allready happned.
New IT corporate thought is to destroy (with sledge hammer or other objects) all tech before it hits the dumpster.
I've seen this in action at a number of companies.
Not really.
In spherical coordinates, there are certain triangles( ie isocelese triangles with lengths = 1/4 the circumfrence of the sphere which actually have 3 right angles)
Shoot Biitney off into space?
Now *that* would piss the aliens off!
However, if I have the story right, unit 2 reactor has already been scrounged- by unit 1. Unit 1 reactor was cracked beyond repair by a colossal blunder worthy of a Discovery Channel engineering disaster show. During construction of the steel inner containment building, the walls were built by lifting sections of sheet metal into place and welding them together, like building an above ground tank, while the outer concrete containment building was being poured. But they decided to take a shortcut when they built the domed top of the inner containment building- They welded it together on the ground and were going to lift it into place using a huge crane. After the dome was assembled, they hitched it to the crane, and lifted it up and over and had it dangling over the reactor building, ready to lower into place. The construction crew left it hanging there when they knocked off of work for the day and were going to carefully lower it into place the next morning.
But they didn't count on mother nature. Overnight a huge storm brewed up and blew through. A huge gust of wind, perhaps a tornado, perhaps wind shear from a sudden downburst, blew the lid off, so to speak. The huge domed roof fell into the unfinished reactor building, on top of the reactor, and cracked it beyond repair. (This could not have been considered a nuclear accident, of course, since the reactor was unfueled and had never been used.) The crane, who some say was one of the world's largest, toppled into the parking lot and was totally destroyed, along with the many contractor's vehicles and construction equipment that was parked there. This set back construction by a couple of years and a billion or so dollars. They had to extract the damaged reactor and replace it.
By that time, Carter had pissed on the parade of the nuclear power industry and replacing it would have been prohibitively expensive, so they had to use the reactor originally intended for unit 2 and mothball the plans for completing the second half of the power station. They left the hole dug out for unit 2 an open pit and dragged the damaged reactor out back and cut out huge square samples just to see how badly it was damaged. And so to this day it sits out back rusting away.
The sum of any two angles of a right triangle is Pi radians. offer only valid for select triangles in spherical coordin
Back to math class for you! Or maybe not. Obviously it didn't take the first time through.
The shop classes I took as a budding geek in high school were always well stocked with good trash. The AC/Refrigeration class was full of refrigerators found along the road that the class repaired and sold for profit, and the computer science class was well stocked with old computers (mainly from the days of TRS-80's and Apple II's- I was an 80's teen). The A/V room had surplus broken U-Matic videocassette recorders (Remember those? U-Matic was to video tapes what 8" floppies were to computers. These tapes were 3/4 inch wide in a cartridge the size of a textbook.) I ended up carting away old copiers, green monochrome monitors, mechanical adding machines, etc. one day when I helped my old shop teacher clean out the storeroom. Being blessed with a shed in the back yard, I started scrapping everything for motors, light bulbs, etc. I even removed individual components from circuit boards with a squeeze-bulb desoldering iron from RatShack, and categorized them and squirreled them away in plastic storage bins. Is that obsessive-compulsive or what?
A few other places worth looking:
Local universities. Ours sells everything from office furnature to autoclaves(sp) and there's plenty of power cubes and misc cables for free or cheap.
Self storage companies: Many of the local ones have auctions on a regular basis to sell off the stuff from the storage lockers that wern't paid up. With both a jail and University near by there's lots of interesting unclaimed stuff:)
The local thrift store is pretty worthless though since wife of another local geek works there and grabs all the good stuff right away.
--
Ray
It's never a mistake to grab an old SGI - Irix is slick, and if you don't want it, you can be sure that someone you know will swap you something for it.
I tried to grab this one a couple of years ago when MSU was getting rid of it.
Someone beat me to it, but later that day, I got a call offering it to me, as it wouldn't fit through the door of my friend's apartment!
I snapped it up, as I had plenty of room, and was working at a place where I had easy access to Irix disksets.
Your comment reminds me of a parked car (an cool ancient Citroën 2CV to be more precise, don't know if they made it all the way to the States though) I once saw, with an antique rotary phone fixed on his dashboard. Excellent hack and hilarious.
I doubt if it worked though...
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
Is it considered scrounging when you pick up the several hundred thousand dollar diode laser you just dropped on the ground in the rain? Just wondering cause a strikingly similar situation occurred recently.
----
Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
When Bruno Bauer inherited Zebra, a retired 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine...
Man, I wish my rich uncle would die and leave me a 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine!
Whoohoo! Count me in!
Although...you suppose they didn't mean Scotch?
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Anyone know where to find local dot-bomb auctions? (Milwaukee, WI area). I'd like to pickup some cheap equipment.
well, like the guy in the article, i wouldn't mind picking up a petawatt laser myself... unfortunately, i doubt my mom would let me keep it in the basement.
(some people just don't appreciate legitimate scientific inquiry!)
He purchased it for just a few hundred dollars from the lab which had been clearing out their parts warehouse. It took him a few months to get it working again, but a few weeks ago I was present when he performed his first successful "atom smashing" in his upstate New York backyard.
A glorious experience, to say the least.
Got Rhinos?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D155950088 3/stephensdumpsterA/104-0517296-7823930
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
At my university, UConn, the dumpsters outside the engineering and physics buildings are always full of interesting stuff. old networking equipment, lasers, computers, magnets, peices of metal. lots of goodies..
My friend thought he'd hit the jackpot when he lifted a laser from an old cat-scan machine from a hospital and made a crude rave device...this article is talking about making *anti-matter* with a laser that the governemnt wasn't interested in anymore. And I only end up being offered used 486's!
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Think about it for a second. A whole new season of junkyard wars... With nukes...
Eric Gearman
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
Honestly, I don't think that it is a good idea to remove the dewars.... remember the last time? AKIIIIIIRAAAAAA!!!! TETSUUUOOOOOO!!!! (NEO TOKYO EXPLODES) Sorry, I had to do it. Its kinda a /. law.
research scientists scrounge around for stuff?
It makes perfect sense, i know a few researchers who go out every weekend to scrounge for some Dewars.
Little tip to junk lovers everywhere: Every physics department has a room or two that they don't use for anything. What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.
that's some really cool stuff the got there. anyone know if there are requirements before you can pick up some of those more advanced suplus items? i'm sure some guy can't just walk off the street and ask for a super laser, can they? and if they can, i got dibs!
Geeks can build some cool stuff with scavanged parts, like a nuclear reactor.
Scrounging and scavenging equipment is a vital skill for all experimental scientists. It's usually more along the lines of finding the unused goodies that somebody has stashed in the back of their lab than finding the expensive stuff described in the article, but everyone without military-class bugets learns to do it. (Actually, I'll bet that even the best funded darlings do a lot of scrounging, too) Figuring out how to use the components is sometimes a bit of a trick, but there are few things as fun as finding a pile of junk and figuring out how how those components are going to help your next project.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Found on Yahoo! under "Recreation->Hobbies" Dumpster DivingD iving/
guarenteed goatse free : http://dir.yahoo.com/Recreation/Hobbies/Dumpster_
From the article: "Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
This is so true. Although people tend to get nostalgic about computers, especially in the Linux crowd - let's face it - a computer older than 4 years is certainly useless, drains electricity for no aparent reason; at nowadays prices you can cheaply replace it with something many times more powerful.... Just reminded me of a thing I saw on TV - some sort of university in the US was giving old, used computers to schools in Africa, so kids there are not so distanced from the Internet age. The old crap they showed was competely useless junk. When I imagined the shipping cost they paid for these things.....
A hungry bear does not dance!
at the University of Maine at Portland, my favorite physics professor (and scrounging mentor), Charles Armentrout, equipped most of the physics labs from scrounge when UMP's new science building went way over-budget on a big concrete estimating error. They were able to finish it (less 2 floors that were dropped from the design), but couldn't furnish it much. Charlie's scrounging skills meant the Physics labs were fully equipped, while the chemistry labs were just so much empty space. Scrounging just plain rules.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Anyone else see potential for Laboratory Wars?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Britney Spears: The relative value to the human race of shooting her into space (V=WxA Value=Weight x anoyance)is still lower than the aforementioned dinosaur. Once the commercial viability is set, we may be able to raise private contributions. Perhaps a bake sale. Cher: Not worth the trouble, she is almost dead already. N'Sync: V value again is low, and with the entire band, the payload would be enormous, unless we shoot them up one at a time. They would be worth considering for the test launches though... Michael: Aerodynamically, the best specimen, (the nose..)However he can afford good lawyers.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I've gotten some great stuff second hand. ;)
Most of my computer stuff:
A dual proc PIII 650 soon to be upgraded with 60
GB of hardware raid.
2 sparc20s
My friend has gotten some even cooler stuff.
He has an old centrifuge (which he hasn't found a use for yet.
He also got a still which had previously only been used for distilling distilled water (they needed really pure water for this experiment). Now he uses it to make moonshine
right here. Enjoy.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"If you get a 100-kV power supply built in 1950, chances are you'll be happy. There is continual improvement, but no quantum leaps. Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
Oh, how true that is. And it applies on a personal level. I have a basement full of computer crap to prove it. I thought "Oh, I'll put them together and make some usable systems for a local charity." BZZZTT! The local charities won't even take anything less than a P5 or pm601 system. They say 486's and 040's cost more to test than they can sell them for. Frankly, it's hard to find a place to dispose of them.
But peripherals, cable and infrastructure stuff? That's a different matter. I picked up three fiber transceivers from Value Village a month ago for $5ea. Ditto ($7) for a HP Deskjet 1600 (the big 9ppm postcript color inkjet w/jetdirect). IMHO, local thrift stores are great for this sort of stuff IF you don't get sucked into buying more stuff to fix the great deal you got.
Looking for little stuff like power adapters, modems, printers, etc? Head for the local thrift store. Looking for wiring or shielding? Check out industrial supply places (like Pacific Iron & Metal in Seattle, where you can get castoff spools from the local telcos). Looking for bigger infrastructure bits? You can get rackmount cases, cable, sensors, and all manner of interesting bits directly from telco salvage units, places like re-pc, or if you're nearby, places like Boeing Surplus
A little time spent doing some smart looking can save a lot of cash. Otoh, A lot of time looking can be a huge waste. You just gotta know when to stop and pay retail.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
Try dovebid.com
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
How often has a chance encounter or off-topic exploration resulted in a true find. That dohickey may lead you to something great.
Those folks scrounge everything. I used to work there, and there are whole floors of scrounged equipment. I remember building a power supply in an old cabinet for some visiting resaerchers. Took a week of labor and a few thousand in parts. Without leftover parts and the cabinet, it would have taken a month or two to order a switching supply for $50K.
Dale is the king of surplus equipment. Glad to see he's still there.
GREAT! Now i can strip the metal off that old russian missle burried in my back yard and use it as a make-shift trash can lid to fly down a snowy hillside. Ah.. what would we do without science?
So that's what Banjo is running on!
sulli
RTFJ.
like hunting rats with a .22
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Just once, I'd like for someone to have a sense of humor and say, "our plan is use this L-A-S-E-R to destroy cities unless you pay us one hundred billion dollars..."
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
While I was a hobbyist, many moons ago, I used a lot of scrounged eq (some of it looked a heck of a lot better than they stuff they had in the college physics labs, to boot!) and did pretty well. As a result, however, I have a tendency to scrounge before I'll actually fork over the really big zorkmids for new stuff. (Hmm, could that be a problem?)
Revealed: Jar Jar after having his ears bobbed!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There's a store based off this, it's called AXMAN SURPLUS.
Need a bunch of Teddy Ruxpin heads?(just the guts) Go to Axman.
Speaking of neat junk I've scrounged, anyone want three Eimac 450TH transmitting tubes? 450 watts RMS in class A mode (lots more in class C), thoriated filament directly heated. Filaments are good, no shorts with an ohmmeter, were replaced from a big Toronto radio station as part of a normal maintenance cycle.
Want 'em? Visit my site!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"Bauer landed both Zebra and the Petawatt laser through personal contacts"
DAMN I know the wrong kind of people...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Hmmmmm.
I'm some *someone* can come up with a better use for Ms Spears than shooting her into space?
I have a few in mind myself.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
That if you don't scrounge, then, well... you are just a wannabe geek.
Here in Phoenix, AZ - I scrounge on everything (hell, just yesterday I managed to obtain a couple of old PCs from my work - nothing of great interest in them, but the cases are nice - they were headed for the trash, from what I understand). I have several sources - both in the "pay-as-little-as-you-can" to "free-for-the-taking":
1. My work (free old junk)
2. Apache Reclamation and Electronics (cheap small and LARGE junk)
3. Electronic Materials and Computers (E^3) also known as Elitech (sometimes get ripped off here)
4. Dave's Computers (still checking this place out - owned by a guy who got shafted at E^3)
5. Some place on 9th Ave and Madison (Westech or something - want to check this place out soon)
6. Global Recycling (still need to check this place out - they are only B2B, so need EIN or something)
7. Equipment Exchange (behind BOB on Grant or Lincoln - great place for strange and big manufacturing stuff)
8. There is also a metals company off of (Washington?) across from Greyhound Park that is cool
For everything else - late night Friday/Saturday runs through dumpsters! Behind Nortel, Honeywell, many business/industrial office parks - great fun. Just bring a flashlight, some gloves, and throw a few boxes in the truck (to tell security guards you are moving and looking for boxes - most of the time they will leave you alone, or at worst, ask you politely to leave - don't hassle 'em, don't stick around - just apologize, thank them, and LEAVE).
I remember one time near Metro Center finding a stash of old computer equipment, another time behind a Honeywell finding some old minicomputers and terminals, and a big winchester drive (all the stuff was too big to even THINK about lifting). One time over at a Nortel my friends and I found some kind of telephone equipment rack - we grabbed that real quick. Another time we found a bunch of Narcotics Monthly magazines (funny thing, this was in a business park - not sure WHY these were there, unless some PI had an office there).
For the rest, there is always online retailers of used/surplus junk (I have a ton of links, too many to list here). Of course, the final place to check is Ebay.
Great fun buying and finding used stuff...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I can't believe they had such a big section on Prof. Morse. As a student who works in the same building as him, I know that he is undoubtably the best scrounger on this campus. It's true his stuff is really old (like that huge bank of capacitors he has), but he seems to pull it all together. He has to do this becasue he probably doesn't get much money from NSF, et. al.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
--and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??
The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....
When I was in high school me and a buddy of mine helped the chemistry department head "inventory" the stock during a big move. We got everything under the sun. Unfortunately, we found out that some of the containers were mislabelled, and nearly blew our heads off opening a can of ether.
Just a warning that scrounging isn't risk-free.
Argonne, Sandia, etc... have acres of stuff that they use for a contract then can't actually sell - it's a major drool factor that one can get their hands on... Then there's the surplus Buran shuttle that the Russians had to dump a few years back. Don't remember who got it. Maybe Cosmosphere in Kansas?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Man, I've been asking for that 2 ton laser ever since I was a kid. No one's ever been nice enough to give ME one.
PETAWATT laser?? God damn! Do you hear me? God damn!
I'm glad to see resourcefulness acknowledged by the slashdotters. It's a nice break from the Microsoft whining. Maybe we should give this guy some sort of award for teaching, something like the "First Annual MacGyver Award" or something...
~ now you know
Unit I had longes first run of it's type and has been 1GW onto the grid for 15 years. Unit II scrap and large multi million dollar hole.
just my 2 cents per kilo watt hour.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm willing to bet that it can be made far more reliable than the big accelerators of today: it has many fewer parts, and they are all much more accessible. You're also not subject to overbearing safety rules that make everything take much longer than it really needs to (without providing much improvement in safety). For reference, during operating periods, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory tries to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On average, beam is delivered successfully for about 100 out of those 168 hours.
If your friend is going to run this cyclotron, I recommend that he learn about radiation safety and put together a radiation monitoring system.
"Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
One of the scientists in the article claims (and a lot of commenters seem to agree) that old computers are as useless as disposable diapers. The researchers at Oak Ridge, TN would probably not agree. There was an article in the latest issue of Scientific American describing the Stone SouperComputer that was built at Oak Ridge National Labs because they needed a supercomputer to model environmental regions, but they couldn't afford one. They cobbled together a Beowulf cluster out of a bunch of obsolete surplus PCs that the lab had laying around.
The article can be found online at: www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html
The photos that accompany the article are great.
Not bad for a bunch of "disposable diapers."
Many computers some of us here at slashdot may think of as disposables can come to great use for underprivilaged kids, schools, non-profit orgs, etc...
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
Imagine scrounging together a Beowolf Cluster!!!
Do I know you?
My family got our current printer from the Depot Campus dumpster. (LaserJet 4+ with JetDirect card and the corner of the plastic banged off. Sweet.)
Oh, and there's a `Coherent Everlase' laser in the hallway of the Physics building that's been sitting there for at least a year. It's the size of a Buick. *drool*.
Not that I have *any* idea what I'd do with it.
About time such an article appears, but don't forget the other sciences (Chemistry, Biology, etc.). I have saved at least $20,000-$50,000 by buying used equipment to start my new Biochemistry lab in a West Coast Medical School. Why pay $700 for a shaking platform when you can find one for $20 on the web? Same your money for the absurdly expensive reagents like restriction enzymes and detergent buffers. Below I've listed some tips for the would be Biological/Chemical scrounger: 1) As the article says, skip the computers. Buy only analogue instruments that have CHART RECORDER OUTPUTS. Using these, it's trivial to capture the output and store on a computer (companies that cater to high school science classes sell things to do this for as little as $70, see for example Vernier Software). Also, analogue instruments are much easier to repair. 2) Ignore the initial comments of your colleagues. When I started, my colleagues called me "Jed Clampet", but have now changed their ways and scrounge themselves :)
3) Check the internet for sites like labx.com, essentially an e-bay for used scientific equipment.
4) Appreciate the fact that you are helping to save the environment, and teaching young-uns to be self sufficient.
5) Rent Mad Max to get in the spirit of things.
Right on then, enjoy.
How come everyone calls it `scrounging' or sometimes `dumpster diving'?
It was always `trashing' up at UConn...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
SRI International (in Menlo Park) has an auction twice a year and do they have cool stuff!
If you want a glovebox for your living room, a pallet of old Macintosh SE computers, old test instruments, a radar dish, or my favorite, the contents of a prototype intercept station with about 30 mil-grade HF recievers - this is the place to go.
We picked up a large jar-bath which we put a life-sized plastic brain into that now reposes in our living room.
http://www.sri.com/ (I think they should have one in a few months).
-- Jamie
Ohhhh man, you're skating on thin ice there, bubba.
But, you didn't phrase your inane comment in the traditional "CYIaBCo%s", so I'm gonna have to take a pass on this one.
The anti-Beowulf-cluster troll troll.
I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, and am used to being in the shadow of the Lab. It is very much a "company town." As you would expect, LANL gets all of the cool toys and when it gets better toys, a lot of the stuff goes out to salvage. One of the town's more "colorful" residents, Ed Grothus, has been going to the Lab's salvage sales for decades and collecting anything he can get his hands on. He has *warehouses* full, and has collected the best bits into a "showroom" (read: a converted ex-supermarket that is stacked floor to ceiling with mounds of oscilliscopes, heaps of cable, PDP-11's, crates of microscopes, piles of office chairs, racks of test equipment, slides of test detonations, etc.) that he calls the Black Hole.
It is *quite* something to see and enough to make any geek drool. *THIS* is the place to hold _Junkyard Wars_.
I found this article on it. [NOTE: Author claims Black Hole was around since '69. Not true. The building was a "Shop & Go" (?? been a few years) until sometime after I graduated. I don't think he was open to the public (he did sell privately to movie makers and the like) until the supermarket was "converted".]
I wish I had some of my photos of the place on-line to show y'all.
There is a documentary out there that Ed sat me down to watch last time I was there called "Atomic Ed and the Black Hole" that gives you some pretty good glimpses into some of the stuff he has there. I have heard from friends that the film is in a few film festivals around the country.
Los Alamos Sales Company Inc. : +1 (505) 662 7438.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
When I was going to IIT, CNS (their network administrators) would throw out all kinds of stuff. They'd just leave it in piles in the corridors in the basement; it would get picked up later by whatever junk disposal service they had.
Talk about geek-friendly. There were at least thirty of us down there every night, looking through the piles of sliced coax, battered 386s, and 70s-era printers for something that others might have overlooked. I scored some sw33t terminals off there...;)
State schools, on the other hand...:(...I go to Portland State now, and they don't throw anything away. Since they're a state agency, it goes to a warehouse somewhere in Salem for "re-apportionment" to other agencies unlucky enough to be last in line for funding. Like they're going to use even half of that stuff!
I also thought I could do some dumpster-diving here at work, but this is a FEDERAL agency, so no can do! I asked my boss where it all gets put. Her answer: "Remember that scene at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', where the ark's getting put away in that huge warehouse?" So sad...think of all the electronics that only a geek could put to good use...rusting in the warehouse for two decades, until some droid decides to sell them...
In the meantime, I'm thinking of checking out some other universities...in my experience, it's the private schools that usually just send the stuff away. Public schools usually have a program in place to see that it doesn't get "wasted".
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
mod up as funy...
How many of us have had to stop going to the local tech salvage shop because could'nt stop from spending money.
You know your a real geek when these two conditions are met
1. They know you by name
2. You dumpster dive their bin.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Actually, I won the MacGuyver Challenge Award at this years LepreCon (www.leprecon.org/lep27/) in Scottsdale, AZ. I didn't do anything nearly this cool though...
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I'm using older computers for routers and Web servers, plus they are very useful for my relatives. I have a 486 set up just for word processing for my uncle, and my mother is getting along find with a P133. My Web server / file server / e-mail server is running on a 486 - 66 MHz and works just fine. I'd recomend that you give away your older computers to someone who would like to have them, rather than throwing them away. They run UNIX style systems great if you are in text mode. Windows 95 works fine with 8 MB of RAM.
I was at grad school with Toni Feder a dozen years ago, and since she got hired at Physics Today I've always taken note of her articles; we talk on the phone once in a while too. She's always finding something interesting and slightly controversial in what you would think were boring physics or astronomy subjects - good stuff!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I saw an interesting brown-purple box sitting in the hallway at Comp Services here at U. of Guelph today. Wanted to take it. Long story short, it was a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris, weighing in at about 50 lb, and unable to run any software or OS I would have any idea how to use (I'm a Windoze luser). I liked the case though, I had visions of gutting it and sticking my old P233 in it :-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Sadly on the world domination front, the pulse is so short that the thing only delivers about 600 joules of energy (enough to light a 100-watt lightbulb for 6 seconds). Maybe you could briefly dominate some ant farms or something.
you must be pretty young if you think a 486 and p133 are old
-
scroungers gives a wrong idea of the skills of these guys. call them hardware hackers instead. or coin a new word. like 'scrapers'. or scraperz. or..
Greetings, ;)
I am involved in a non-profit org. that does just this. (CARP - the Creative Arts Reuse Project) our major project has been the Please Take M.E. (Materials Exchange) -- which in two years saved 7 tons of materials with only a 3000 sq. ft warehouse. The Please Take is run in conjuction with a local Dumpster Diving group (yes, and the DDers are 40+ people strong). While our major interest is in the Arts (and the environment, of course) our finds/materials are definitely cool for science teachers, home improvement, computing both vintage and current, robotics, and all sorts of other geek/nerd hobbies. We also work in conjunction with a very vibrant local computer-reuse community. Right now we're looking for a new warehouse space, but we have new office space and are really ramping up activity again. There is recent talk of white LEDs, lots of welding, cat5 cable, and 5,000 watt bulbs. Anyways, if you're in the Philadelphia region (or not) and are interested in ANY sorts of creative reuse of materials, scrounging, arts, the environment, dumpster diving, curb crawling, etc etc etc.. feel free to check out our (basic) website above, and by all means drop me an email.
Oh, and if you just happen to need a tax deduction, we are an official 501(c)3 nonprofit
--
My AE-ms is true.
Scrounging has to be one of my favorite hobbies. One of best places in the New England area is the MIT Flea Market in Cambridge, MA. It's held the third Sunday of every month from May Throught October. What started as a ham-radio event has blossomed into a great place to find just about anything technology-wise. Just picked up a nice SparcServer 20 dual-processor system with all the trimmings for $200. Since Solaris 8 is downloadable and free it's giving me a break from loadinq BSD and Linux on everything in site.