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| Spring Cleaning 2023 | Posted in pix and tek on April 16, 2023 |
For most people, spring cleaning is a time to clean out and refresh your house, getting rid of all that junk that's cluttering up your spaces. But for people like me, it's a great time to find cool stuff by digging through random peoples trash! You know what they say, "one man's trash is another man's... trash!"
Ok everyone, you know the drill. Spring Cleaning 2023.
For all the past spring cleanings, the stuff I found was brought home in my backpack on my bike, or just by carrying it home and walking, and that meant that I could never travel as far as I wanted to. But this year, things have changed, and I now have a bike trailer.
But I know what you're thinking, you must have THICK legs if you can move that trailer, which I don't. I'll admit, I cheated. I used my friend's ebike, which was actually the best biking experience I've ever had in my life. But that's for a future page, let's get to the stuff.
This was one of the few spring cleanings that I didn't actually find as much on the first day as on the second day, but here's what day 1 had to offer.
In the left pic, I found this cute little red cassette player and radio!, A Sony ZX-7 in bright red. Unfortunately, the silver bezel on the right side speaker is missing. It was also missing on the left side, but I actually found the bezel in the same pile at the house! But after a lot of digging, I couldn't find the other side. Still a pretty cool little radio though!
And in the right pic, the last for day 1, is a buncha cables. I always, always pick up cables whenever I see them. I got plenty of power cables and a decent amount of ethernet cable! I also always pick up power adapters since you never know when you might need a 14.5v center positive barell jack power adapter!
That also brings me on a side tangent that I always can't believe how many cables I find, whether during Spring Cleaning, or at the thrift store. I, literally have not bought a SINGLE cable brand new, EVER. It's insane that anyone would spend $50 on an HDMI cable when there's tons of them about to be thrown into the garbage that you can just have for free or extremely cheap! Anyways..
As you can see, there were also a couple remotes, but I only kept the black and purple one since it was universal. The rest went back out.
Now, day 2 was the big one for this year. It started off slow, but it ramped up in the evening. It was pouring rain out and freezing cold the whole time, but I knew that free stuff was on the line, so personal comfort was not a priority.
The first thing I found that day was a bin of lights. ...okay, not that interesting, but they were LEDs, and one thing I still don't understand about my parents is that they still rely on old-ass (still legal to sell in Canada) incandescent and halogen bulbs to light our house, and for comparison, I use all LEDs in my room. My dad said it's because he doesn't like "how the light looks", but I installed one of these LEDs in the living room and I don't think he even noticed.
Anyways, on the right side, we have a calcualtor! A Sharp EL-1611 still with the box, manual and PSU! I'm not sure how old it is, but Sharp still sells an EL-1611V to this day! But this one all works, even the printer! I'm not sure what it uses to "print" on the paper, but I assume it's thermal. Of course the paper is very old, but you can still faintly see numbers being printed as you use it, so I'd say it works if I got some new paper!
And sitting behind a treadmill was this little old RCA TV! A 10" RCA E09395GM which appears to be a little old portable TV from 1989. Only thing about it, is that I can't plug it in!
If you look in the right side picture, the power cable is missing, and there's just 4 prongs sitting there. I was thinking of just removing the connector altogether and wiring my own cable, but I don't know the pinout of this connector, or what the 4th prong could possibly be for? I asked on Reddit, who managed to identify the cable as a non-standard, but sometimes used portable TV cable, but there still isn't a reliable place to buy one... So I'll probably just have to bypass it entirely, but I'll try that later. If it works, there'll be a new page coming soon on what I plan to do with this thing, because the size is perfect for an idea I had!
And we have keyboards! Okay, gross, I know, but I clean the stuff I find, ok?! Here we have an older Microsoft keyboard, some generic cheapo gamer keyboard, and at the top was something I didn't expect to find- a brand new $100 Logitech MK710, IN BOX, NEVER USED! Only thing that appeared to be used was the mouse, and even the Unifying USB key was still there.
Next, we have some batteries. Okay, sure, but I also found this power inverter! If you don't know, one of these power inverters you can connect to whatever DC battery, probably a car battery, and get some 120v power outlets! These are awesome to have in a power outage to get you on your feet for a while, thought I wouldn't run it off those drill batteries for long.
Also, I found this little old Sears Voltmeter! This thing is probably from the 80's, is completely solid state, and doesn't even have any batteries or anything, just 2 leads and you can check your battery voltage up to... 16 volts. Okay, kinda odd, but still really useful to have, especially for testing batteries! As you can see, I found a box of 9v batteries that expired in 2011, but 2 out of the box were still good! (or, at least 8 volts)
It also apparently measures Dwell, as in degrees of rotation, and RPM, as in revolutions per minute. I don't know how that's possible with just 2 leads, unless there's another component to this thing that I'm missing, but I'm not going to use those anyways.
Now here's what were looking for, some good computer stuff! On the left side, we got some monitors! The one on top of the RCA TV was an Acer display. I thought the white stuff was spiderweb, but turns out it was really scratched, so it went back out again. But I still got the 2 ones on the left!
The big one is an LG Twin Towers 20 from 2013. Yes, that's the actual name. The monitor is called "TWIN TOWERS", I am NOT joking! It's actually a really nice monitor though, and better than my current main computer monitor, but it didn't have a power supply, since apparently monitor designers find it more important to make their products "but loook how thin it is!!!" than having basic functionality included inside. I still think it'd be worth it to buy a power supply though!
The last monitor is a good ol 4:3 monitor, a Dell Ultrasharp. I actually set this one up already, and it's in place of where my NEC Multisync 1530v was. I'm still keeping the NEC, but it's in rough shape these days and the Dell is actually probably my best 4:3 monitor.
On the right side, we also have an HP Compaq desktop PC. Now, I'll admit, this is actually my friend's old PC, but he originall found it on Spring Cleaning in 2022, and upgraded it a bit before getting a new PC, but he has a new PC now, so he gave me this one! Also sitting on top of it is one of those old ubiquitous Linksys routers, which might be fun to mess around with the firmware at some point!
Also again, we have some more cables, components and circut boards. Nothing worth noting, but just mentioning it's here. The bag on the right even had some antenna amplifiers (not pictured), which would be useful for whenever I set up my antenna!
And here's some more random stuff! On the left side we have a pair of Radio Shack rabbit ears! Yeah, I know these suck for OTA DTV, but it was worth a shot for some other antenna testing. Sitting on it is also a PCI-E USB card, which.. doesn't even have a bracket and 2 of them face inwards, and I don't know why it even exists but I suppose it could be useful in some case.
There was also that little clock, but the hour hand doesn't move. Maybe that will be a future task for superglue. Anyways, there was also a Canon SureShot film camera, which I'm not a photographer, but it's something that emokonata is more interested in, so I figured I'd give it to him later.
On the right, is something kinda odd, but it was right across the street from me so I figured I'd just grab it. It's a freeplay windup and solar radio, which just radiates 90's energy with its shape, and translucent blue plasitc. It's even still brand new, and was purchased for $120 back then at home hardware!
Also, surprisingly, I haven't actually found that many computers, and I thought I found one, but it turns out that it was shit. I already knew that it'd be garbage just by looking at it, and since it was an old AIO, but I didn't expect it to be this bad when I opened it.
Inside it was... completely corroded and fucked, and filled with water and outdoor debris. I don't even know the model of this thing since I was too disgusted of it after I opened it, and it immediatley went outside to be dismantled and thrown in the recycling.
The picture on the right is of some of the stuff I yanked out inside that was in the LEAST bad condition. A couple memory card adapters, a PCI-E to PCI right angle adapter, cables, a WinTV card that probably doesn't work, a "media bay" that's basically just a USB-B cable in a box, and the optical drive. There was already no hard drive.
Honestly, when I see stuff like this, it reminds me that I'm not really that filthy of a person, when other people have stuff like this inside their house.
Anyways, as you can tell, I love Spring Cleaning, but one thing I can't help but think about when I see stuff like this is how wasteful we are as people. During Spring Cleaning, everything goes out, cardboard, glass, wood, metal and anything that isn't picked up in 2 days goes into the garbage truck, no recycling or salvage or anything.
So maybe next time you see a pile of stuff on the side of the road, don't hesitate to pick through it, you never know what you might keep out of a landfill.
| ~ more from dvd3000.ca ~
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