Free Stuff, Selling Stuff, NewsVine

There are some weeks when it seems the hardware gods smile favorably upon your cause and lend a helping hand. This has been one of those weeks. I finally got a chance to check out Regional Computer Recycling and Recovery out in Victor on Wednesday and have to say that I was stunned. Piles upon piles of old, discarded hardware that nobody but a geek could see the value of. Every color iMac collected, pallets of G4s, walls lined with Sun boxes, and more x86 boxes than you could ever want. After a few calls back and forth with their tech, I've settled on a Sun Ultra 5. Some PC oriented interfaces like IDE, mixed with the 64-bit goodness of an UltraSPARC IIi processor. This box will be a serious workhorse.

Not only was I fortunate enough to find RCR&R's candy store of a warehouse, there were some (mostly) anonymous people just giving away RIT's discarded equipment as they were loading it onto a truck. I walked away with a G3-300, a Palm m105 with a cracked screen, a 12 GB hard drive, and a PS2 in quite a few pieces.

After a seemingly long walk back to my dorm room, Jamie and I fixed a few apparent problems with the PS2 and plugged it in. Sure enough, we saw the pretty PS2 menu screen. The optical drive still has a few problems spinning up but aside from that, it's as good as used. I'll be keeping my eye out for spare PS2 parts that might be of use in getting this thing working.

When I was done fiddling with the PS2 I checked my email and found that I had been elected to participate in the beta for NewsVine. I'll post a review here at some point but for the moment, you can take a look at my NewsVine page.

On top of all of that good fortune, Carlos Mencia is doing a performance on campus tonight and I've got a ticket. Overall, this turned into a pretty good week. Catch ya later.