Ever since I leftMacworld ’s home billet in San Francisco to move to Oregon , my attic has been crammed with poppycock : woolen sweater , boxes of model horses , a complete stage set of Nancy Drew Bible , pictures that have n’t been hung , even my 8th level notes . ( Yes , the kind you tossed behind your teacher ’s back . ) But the bighearted space hog of all has been outdated applied science .
My married man and I accumulated an unbelievable accumulation of old Macs , honest-to-god microcomputer , mice and keyboard we break or never used , SCSI cable length long since abandoned , and supervise upon monitor upon admonisher . I ’ve done what I can to bump creative reuses for these things ( face below for how a deadened trackball can find new living as a pulling - toy ) , but if you ’re attached to keeping up with engineering , the inevitable byproduct is an ever - expanding mint of junk .
The twenty-four hours after Steve Jobs made his Intel announcement , we wad the station wagon full of box and hauled it all to a local non - profit that recycles old data processor . The technophile ’s rubbish isFree Geek’streasure . volunteer strip old information processing system of their component part , recycle the thing that ca n’t be used , and then build new calculator from what ’s go out . Volunteers who work 24 hour in the recycling centre of attention or who build six computers realise aFreekBox . These Pentium based system of rules are loaded with — no surprise — innocent exposed - root software ( see the specshere ) .
Free Geek also donates data processor to other non - profit organization . ( And do as a valuable social outlet for Portlanders with events such as theGeek Prom . Ah , to be young and geeky in the twenty-first one C . )
If you ’d care to clean out your bonce , check out thislistof similar - disposed organizations to see if there ’s one in your area . you may also get disembarrass of your previous Macs through theApple Recycle program . Sure , every time Steve Jobs or Bill Gates take a stage it means sure death for many of the computing machine sitting on desks that day . But with a little effort , not all of them will go to dissipation .
