Mar

6

2008

The Second “R”

Author: Matt

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Growing up, I remember this mantra being drilled into my brain at school, and demonstrated in very real ways at home by my parents. Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the second “R”, specifically reusing old computer hardware.

Up until fairly recently, I had a big pile of old servers (we’re talking Pentium Pro and early Pentium 2 boxes) that I disposed of, since they were just gathering dust in my friend’s basement (so much for my dreams of building a poor man’s linux cluster to help my friend with his video rendering). Now that all that’s gone, I still have a lot of bits and pieces kicking around my own place, and I’m thinking now’s the time to start gathering it all together and figure out what the heck to do with it all.

My plan at this point is as follows:

  • Designate the corner of one room as the place where all the outdated tech will sit
  • Inventory the appropriate specs for each of the pieces of hardware (storage capacity for drives, connection type for flash cards, etc.)
  • Start plotting my projects

    • Part of the impetus to do this is that I’m planning on turning my 7-year-old PC into semi-retirement as a file server. I’m hoping that, for example, if I gather up all the small USB drives and flash cards, I could mount different parts of the kernel to them, which would mean that my larger magnetic drives would be solely for file storage. I’ve got a couple other ideas rattling around in my head, but they’re dependant on getting some loaned equipment back, so I won’t go into the details now.

    Feel free to post your thoughts/suggestions on projects that could be attempted!

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    One Response to “The Second “R””

    1. anna Says:
      March 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

      I love reusing broken hardware because you don’t have to feel guilty about anything. Just decide what somehting is going to be and do what you need to.
      So for these type of projects, I’ve made from Apple mice soap holders (they work nice and look cool, and were shocking to people when those mice were $ 60 each), and from an Apple keyboard.. I’ve made a wallet, a laptop holder, earring holder, got the keys left for a daskeyboard, and got the silicon things still left.
      And will eventually reuse some old old (and very broken) Macs to a maquarium, plant pots…
      Oh – and any broken logic board pieces etc will be so cool. Coasters, ear rings, keyrings.. even a table if you have enough of htem, or a mosaic.
      (I’m terribly practical – as long as hardware works, I want to run some OS in it. So if it’s older hardware, some Linux experiments usually..)

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