When winter weather wrecks one's carefully considered curriculum, for me, it's time to trudge out old tech.
I said recycling in the title, but this is mostly about re-using and repurposing.
Moving on...
As previously established, I do a lot of repairs, and I repair a wide range of things. Many repairs require parts, so I like to keep hoard miscellaneous things that I find that may hold useful parts, especially electronics. Some of these things I find, some are given to me, and some are repairs that turn out to be not worth fixing, but possibly worth scavenging to someday fix something else.
Many of the things that are given to me will actually work, but be outdated, or need a very minor repair that someone doesn't want to bother with because they want something newer. I do not discriminate by age or compatibility, only by usefulness.
One of my favorite indoor activities is hauling a bunch of this old stuff out and seeing what works and what doesn't, and what is still useful or not. It often triggers some nostalgia, and gives me some light riddles to solve while I'm huddling indoors.
The picture below shows a few of my recent discoveries that worked out well. The Audiovox phone on the far left powered up okay, and despite it's small screen and lack of keyboard was still perfectly usable. These old phones had super loud ringtones that you can't get anymore, and usually pretty good battery life. The little LG 'smart'phone has a touch screen and works okay, but is pre-Android and more than a little clunky. It does have a microSD card slot, so I might try to force some Android into later, but for now it makes an okay little media player. The green Ipod knock off is actually a pretty well featured little media device, with microSD support, built in speaker and microphone, widely compatible picture and video viewer, and FM radio tuner. Despite the little screen, I actually like this and may keep it. The purple thing on the right is a small digital 'photo frame'. It works, but the battery is either dead or disconnected, and it uses a Windows-only interface to load and unload pictures, so this may just become scrap. I might try to pull just the screen to experiment with... we'll see what the weather does.
This old dusty gem is, as it says, a DynaVox, which was a tablet with a specific software setup for enable speech-challenged people to communicate. If I remember correctly, this had Windows7 on it, and was hanging at boot. I want to see if I can get some Linux installed on it. Not sure what I would use an 8 lb. tablet for, but it might be fun to play with.
The old Dell laptop below is actually going through this process for a second time. It had either an early dual-core or fast single core with hyperthreading, but the sound doesn't always initialize at boot, and sometimes the screen loses yellow color. Some time ago, I had Ubuntu Studio, 12.04 I believe, installed on this, and actually used this to do some recording. It was a little slow to be really useful for sound files, but worked great with my MIDI gear. I want to see if this will fire back up so I can try to backup some old recordings onto something more reliable. After that, I'll probably scrap the laptop. I'll keep the paracord carrier, which was one of my very first paracord projects.
One of my favorite, ongoing projects is this old NOOK color. This was given to me with a forgotten unlock code, so essentially bricked. After hours of internet searching, I found a method to restore it to a factory state, but then couldn't get past the registration screen, because apparently the website it connects to for registration no longer exists. I eventually found a way to skip registration, and it now works perfectly as an e-reader, but there is no app store for it and the installed web browser is basically useless. I've heard that I can boot this to a Linux or Android kernel via the microSD card, so I look forward to posting about that in the future.
My most favorite finished re-use project so far is this old Mac PowerBook G4. These things were build military grade, and the only thing wrong with this is that there are no modern OSes that run on this hardware, largely because 32-bit CPU architecture is all becoming obsolete. This has a single core PowerPC 883MHz (not a typo, MHz) RISC processor, which actually performs really well despite the unimpressive clock speed. Ubuntu Linux supported the PowerPC up until version 16.04 (maybe 16.10), and I was able to successfully install it. There is no modern browser support for it, but using an older version of Firefox I can check my email, browse and post to Facebook (they have a compatible version of the website), Twitter, and all of the forums I've tried so far. The Linux kernel it's using doesn't recognize the internal sound (yet), but it works just fine with an external USB sound card. The old browser will not load YouTube, or any blockchain enable sites I've tried... probably a problem with newer encryption on 32 bit processors. I will basically use this as my tablet for doing routing internet stuff around the house, because my eyes are getting too bad to read my tablets without reading glasses.
It does play video up to 720p, but not really well. It plays audio files just fine, and is a lot faster than you might think. It boots in about 40 seconds, loads the web browser in about 10 seconds, loads most web pages as fast as any dual core laptop I've used. The internal WiFi does work, the bluetooth does not (yet), but bluetooth is also fine with a USB dongle. In fact, every USB device I tried with this has worked perfectly, and file transfer speeds aren't bad. You have to read the third line from the bottom, open source developers have a great sense of humor!
Of course, it's not all electronics. I also collect ratchet straps and other tools at work that get thrown out, if I think they're salvageable. These two were rusted fast, but still pretty solid. I sprayed them with a little WD-40 every couple weeks all summer, then just wiped them off with paper towels a couple weeks ago. Everything works exactly as it should.
That's all for this post. If anybody wants any more information about any of the gadgets you've seen here, feel free to ask in the comments. I may do more detailed posts about a couple of these in the future, requests will move up their timeline.
Be well everyone, I hope to see you back for more! In the meantime, never be afraid to try!