My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Internal hard drives with dust, fluff and shit on. Bundles of CAT5 all tangled like string. These are some of my least favourite things. Regular readers will know that I have banged on before about our shared tendency to hoard bits of hardware that we don't need. That is, we don't …
Yes, I have the obligatory crate of random power supplies from obsolete kit 'just in case' and many boxes of tangled cables. But over the years at work I also appear to have collected or inherited a bunch of larger and less common items that I really know that I will never find the time to do something with (I haven't in the last 15 years when I had more free time so there's no chance now) and noone else wants, but I just can't bring myself to commit them to the WEEE recycling collection firm.
The largest of those is a Silicon Graphics Challenge L ('deskside' chassis the size of a small fridge). Also a bunch of other SGI and Sun workstations from the 90s, all in various states of disrepair and I think none actually working.
The largest of those is a Silicon Graphics Challenge L ('deskside' chassis the size of a small fridge). Also a bunch of other SGI and Sun workstations from the 90s, all in various states of disrepair and I think none actually working.
I'm in that boat. Minus the Challenge L, but I do have various old HP 3000,9000, DEC (VAX,MIPS,Alpha) and Data General workstations and servers. Accompanying all that, is bunch of terminals, cabling, old network kit starting from early says of ethernet. There is also myriad of smaller,handheld and Z80 and x86 based stuff.
I should clear out. But I actually like the old stuff. The old stuff had soul. Maybe that's why they play tricks if you try to get rid of them.
How do you all have space for this amount of stuff?
I have been clearing out my house, I've given away 3 desktop computers, with associated LCD and keyboard and mouse.
I'm down to a desktop and a laptop.
I've cleared out boxes of old cables, cards, cdroms that will never be used again, car parts for cars I don't own anymore
...
It feels good. I've spent years (since my first son was born) feeling bad for not finding enough time to make use of this stuff. Now it's a weight that has been lifted.
I'm happier, and so is the rest of my family since that nagging feeling has stopped stressing me out.
I just can't bring myself to commit them to the WEEE recycling collection firm.
While we're on the subject, how awful are consumer WEEE arrangements? Retailer claims to pay into national recycling schemes, gives you a link to a website that redirects to local council, local council will have one recycling site that accepts things, or, if you are in London, will share it with an adjacent council and it'll be in an inaccessible part of the city. And don't get me started on trying to get rid of scrap metal responsibly...
The obligatory first step to begin is to say loudly:
My name is ..., and I am a hoarder...
But did you noticed the trend? You will ONLY need that kit IF you throw it away. You will NEVER need it as long as you have it. As such it is impossible to benefit from you having it.
So logical thing to do is to throw it all away, buy decent stock of alcohol to help with the pain in a few short months until all the requests to borrow stuff you now no longer have died out.
My wife's uncle died earlier this year, and the family gathered round to undertake the task of clearing his house (he lived alone). He was a motor mechanic, who at various times had worked for a number of race and rally teams.
The house was as you might expect from a long-term batchelor, with car magazines piled up in stacks in the living room, new forms of life growing in the kitchen, and take-away food containers and pizza boxes much in evidence.
Upstairs (in a three-bedroom house) one bedroom was in use, the other two were full of all sorts of junk, masses of broken car parts: old batteries, cylinder heads, carburettors, you name it, it was there, covered in oil or rust or worse.
Climb up into the loft, and it was a different world!
A clinically clean, white painted room, with work benches round the walls, racks and racks of tools all carefully placed in order of size, and various bench tools - small lathe, grinder, pillar drill etc, all immaculately clean, and in the center of the floor, on a stand, a Ford Cosworth V6 engine in the process of being rebuilt.
We were at a loss with what to do with it all - we certainly couldn't just let a house-clearance gang touch that lot!
I've not pushing up daisies yet but I did amass a large collection (1000+) of kit car magazines over the years. Without going into detail they had to go. After investigating various methods of disposal I emailed the editor of a kit car magazine that was relatively new to the market. he took the lot and gave me a 5 year subscription to his mag.
P.S. Around my way there is a charity TWAM (Tools With A Mission) which collects old tools, refurbishes them and then ships them to third world African countries. They even take old computer hardware now.
but still have two boxes of classical LPs
That's another thing that used to annoy me about vinyl - different industries used different grades of vinyl which had a considerable effect on quality of sound and longevity.
It didn't really matter that singles used the cheapest grade since they were short-lived but some record companies also used that grade for albums which, theoretically, should have a longer life.
Many of them are better (or at least more authentic)
I never ever got the fetish for vinyl - I hated it at the time (no matter how good your setup was, the sound quality inevitably degraded when you played the record and you had to be really, really careful about how you stored the records[1]) and I still hate it.
Yes, the remastered versions are often not as 'authentic' as the old records but to my mind that can sometimes be a benefit. Especially when 'authentic' means a crackle-laden mushy sound and several skips during the song... Which might not matter so much on craptastic pop tunes but very much does on prog songs - especially longer ones.
[1] Which is why I used to play the records as little as possible - once to make sure it was OK and then a second time to record to tape[2]. And only thereafter if I needed to re-do the tape.
[2] Which was itself a degradation on sound, even on metal tapes with a good tape deck and Dolby.
I've got about 9 linear feet of vinyl stored upright on shelves with a mental note to someday buy a turntable designed to rip them to files/CDs. Vinyl isn't weird.
OTOH, I've got 3 feet of LaserDiscs and two LaserDisc players that haven't been touched in a decade, not to mention random VHS and Beta tapes of various sizes and formats.
And also the tangle of cables and hardware that the article was about. FYI, my 5 1/4 and 3.5 floppy drives are both internal.
The only tech I keep for sentimental reasons is an Atari ST, complete with worn out joysticks and boxes of games, most of which we never got beyond level 1, but kept trying.
Leads and adaptors do get hoarded because they might be useful one day, but on top of that, I don't really trust that throwing stuff in the small appliances bin at the tip will get them recycled responsibly.
I used to use Ebay as a way of recycling tech, until someone "returned" a completely broken version of the working tablet they'd bought from me and Ebay refunded their money, despite photos of two plainly different serial numbers.
I only recently ditched all of my ISA and EISA sound, graphics and communication boards. You know, from the time that PCs didn't even have a serial port on the motherboard.
I conceded that not even having any motherboards from the era to put them in probably meant that they were surplus to requirements.
I must get round to ditching all of the <1GB drives sometime, but I've just got to check that there's nothing important on them....
I must get round to ditching all of the <1GB drives sometime
Newsflash!
its not just the 1gb...
its all the IDE ones ...
and most of the Satas too.
if you've got a lot of 160gb sata discs lying around you cant pile them all together to make a decent storage area - there arnt enough sata ports/controllers .
On this logic I declare any Hard disc smaller than 1tb redundant.
Depends what you need them for. IDE drives are useful for particularly old systems where 'large' drives aren't supported, and an IDE to SATA converter isn't appropriate. In those cases either a Disk On Module (DOM) or IDE to compact flash (with a 2-4GB CF) is a decent idea, but DOMs can be pricey.
However, look into the prices of SCSI to IDE/SATA converters and prepare to wince.
Moderately sized hard drives (100GB upwards) are useful in hot swap bays for trial operating system installations, provided they're fast enough.
Disagree that one. My main PC has a 2TB main HDD. But two 500 gig HDDs are in there too. One salvaged from an older system and one from a TV digibox. And they're keeping backups. One has images the other data backups. I do also have other backups, a pair of external drives that I swap between, but the first port of call is the internal discs.
Several times I've bought things without adapters very cheap, and either found a suitable one at home or made one out of two (one with the correct voltage/amperage, one with the right plug) thus saving money, and recycling in the process.
Sadly this sort of thing will die out, as if Lightning cables are anything to go by they don't last long enough to be re-used, and the cables are so thin inside as to be un-bodgeable.
If the gizmo says 12v / 1A , and your psu says 12v / 5A - it wont blow it up
But if the label on the psu, written in 1pt flyspec font actually says 19V 1A, but it has the plug on the lead that fits the gizmo and you plug it in in error, it probably will blow up the gizmo, and possibly the psu as well.
The one that has annoyed me recently is the power supplies that come with cheap home dehumidifiers. They seem to put out an unusual voltage (IIRC 13V) and also have a plug that isn't the same size or shape as any other standard power supply (a rectangular thing with two 'female' pins and a notch in the side) and seem to burn out after a year, with nowhere you can get a replacement...
"If the gizmo says 12v / 1A , and your psu says 12v / 5A - it wont blow it up"
If the psu is not regulated then it is probably going to deliver a much higher voltage to a device which has a lower current draw.
These psus are calculated to deliver the correct voltage at the stated current through the psu's inherent internal resistance. Even if the device has its own built-in regulator - the extra heat dissipation from the excess voltage may soon kill it.
If the psu is not regulated then it is probably going to deliver a much higher voltage to a device which has a lower current draw.
On the one hand.. I've never had a problem with appliance PSU's of any sort. If I have a 12v .00000001A device and a 12V 1,0000,0000amp PSU I'll expect it to work.
On the other hand.... I've killed a couple of motorbike voltage regulators by jumping the bike from a running car. Older/smaller bikes use something like a zener diode to regulate voltage, and they dump excess power to ground (heating up in the process). A car tends to run at a slightly higher voltage than a bike (IIRC 14.5 vs 14.1), and the poor little zener just cannot keep up.
Well, it was told to me as a true story and one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story...
There is this bloke in Melbourne, Australia who goes around to all the government auctions and buys up all their obsolete computer gear eg washing machine disk drive etc. He gets the stuff for pennies/cents since its all obsolete and nobody wants it. He then stores it all in a disused aircraft hangar and waits... Inevitably, some *other* government department urgently needs a washing machine disk drive to keep their legacy system going. Guess where they have to go to get one? I'm sure he doesn't mark it up too much!
I don't know about the guy in Melbourne, but I have had dealings with a similar company in Adelaide that used to buy and sell stuff to/from what was then known as the Weapons Research Establishment.
WRE's problem was that we were either trying to buy stuff before it even got onto the market, or alternatively, was so well tried and proven as to be totally obsolete.
A customer moved their IT server support contract from us to an under-cutting competitor. The latter then found that the only source of spares was in our hands - not to mention the technical expertise. They then had to outsource the support to us - but with them taking all the SLA risk and penalties.
...to admit my shame.
Sometimes I have re-bought items I know I already own because finding them in the loft full of junk is a daunting task. Cables, little widgets, connection converters etc. I know for certain I have at least 1 or 2 of them but a 30 second ordering spree on eBay will yield the item with less effort.
Someone please make me feel better and tell me i'm not the only person that does this? :s
You're not the only person. For me, it's got worse since I moved into a big house. When I measure the chore of searching the place for the tool I need* against the cost of replacing it with something that probably costs much less than the original, the replacement usually wins.
*I wouldn't need to search If I put things away neatly when I've finished with them. But I'm a lifelong believer in "associative retrieval" - I can find anything by remembering what I last did with it. Unfortunately my memory isn't what it was.
I would advise organising everything properly. I historically haven't done that, and if you let things get into a state it takes a colossal amount of work to sort things again.
If you keep buying things, you then find you have a large number of e.g. DVI to VGA converters (which I've then used, attaching multiple old systems to a KVM)
"Unfortunately my memory isn't what it was."
When putting something "out of my hand" I now try to make a conscious effort of noting where I put it.
The worst case is coming across something you know you will soon need. You move it to a "safe" place. Then afterwards you find you can only remember where it was originally - and the "safe" place eludes you.
"The worst case is coming across something you know you will soon need. You move it to a "safe" place. Then afterwards you find you can only remember where it was originally - and the "safe" place eludes you."
I always think "where would i expect to find this later on" , and have to put it in that spot, even if thats not where i want to keep it!
"Someone please make me feel better and tell me i'm not the only person that does this?"
No. Most recent was a pair of pliers. Couldn't find my pliers anywhere. Went out and bought a new pair. Used them. Went to set them down and realised I was putting them beside the pair I couldn't find on a shelf I'd searched several times. Tools have this mysterious ability to dematerialise, possibly move to a different place and maybe time and then return by some quantum jiggery-pokery.
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