A trip to Free Geek

Up until this weekend I’ve had a large rambling collection of computer hardware “that might be useful” but which wasn’t getting any meaningful use by me. I’d been planning to recycle/donate it somewhere somehow and finally got organised, backed up a few things, wiped my hard drives, filled up the Subaru (to the brim) and drove over to Free Geek.
I am seriously impressed by their operation! They’re way huge compared to what I expected, had lots of volunteers and a huge stream of people dropping off things. Their thrift store has gobs of reasonably priced recycled systems and accessories. And they’re all about linux (Ubuntu specifically) and OpenOffice to keep prices down for their target demographic.
I was a bit sad though to see the genuine Hercules monochrome ISA card and amber monochrome CRT sorted into the recycle pile instead of reuse. But then there probably aren’t that many ISA slot sporting motherboards in a chassis big enough to hold the card desired for use by some random nerd like me as a server console. A volunteer said their museum of old computer stuff has had to become picky as they get so much old crap that they’d run out of room.
But it feels good to know some of the stuff (5 computers, 4 monitors, 3 UPS’s, and a lot more) should find new homes and if not be recycled responsibly!