Used Technology

Computer Recycling is now selling refurbished Inkjet Printers. We're selling the Inkjet Printers as tested, with cartridges, but without ink or with very low ink. We've been working with a local ink refilling shop very close to us, BTI Solutions, in order to test printers. We've started to maintain a local database of information about which printers easily work with Ubuntu Linux and which ones don't, so not only are we testing the printers for fitness, we're making sure we support Linux as much as we can.

Gnome-Blog This post is courtesy of some software under Ubuntu called Gnome-Blog. Gnome-blog makes it possible to post to any Blogger blog from the gnome-blog software. It's not terribly feature-rich (very simple Interface), but it works!

From Hardware The past couple of months have brought a lot of changes to The Working Centre's Computer Recycling project. One of those changes is the addition of a working Vic 20 (we also have a Commodore 64) and an Atari 800. The Vic 20 is on display and anyone is welcome to drop in and play one of the games we have on cartridge for it. Currently we have the following games: * Donkey Kong * Pac Man * Spills N' Fills * Pole Position * Home Babysitter * MasterType * Garden Wars We do have a Commodore 1541 disk drive for the Vic 20 and a tape cassette drive, but at the moment we're collecting software on cartridge. The Atari 800 is not set up yet. We're looking for a small 19" or less television to hook the Atari to.

We're always in need of hard drives at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project . Hard drives 20GB or larger are especially appreciated. When we get systems and drives in we normally use DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke to overwrite hard drives (removing any traces of data). Using a utility like DBAN is much better than formatting the hard drive. Formatting doesn't remove data from a hard drive, it simply breaks links to the data. Data recovery experts can easily recover data from a formatted drive.

This is an example of an ideal donation we'd love to have at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project . This generous donation was the second large donation from the same donor. Donations of the same type of computer are wonderful not only because they can be easily sysprepped and cloned, but its easier to teach volunteers how to fix the computers because any problems the machines experience are usually similar since the machines are identical. One of the issues with getting hundreds of computers that are not the same is that they usually have dozens of different problems, and explaining dozens of different problems to volunteers who come in at different times is a difficult task.

Software Freedom Day 2009 is a couple of short months away, September 19, 2009. SFD also happens to be yours truly's birthday. So, this year I want to make this a big event in Kitchener, Ontario. I've already registered The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project for the event which means we'll likely have a little swag and some posters for the event. I also have a verbal commitment from Marcel Gagne, award-winning Linux Journal Columnist , and author of several Linux books, to appear. We've been working on putting Linux on iMac G3 computers, an area that seems to be sadly lacking in the community with the influx of multi-core PCs. We'll talk about our target market for these iMacs and the ups and downs of installing Linux on the G3. We're also gearing up to give away several PIII systems running Ubuntu Linux, but we need a lot more donations to cover the numbers we'd like to give away. If you have a spare Pentium III lying around and you live in th

One client brought in his Toshiba Satellite 5000 notebook because his USB ports were not working. After updating some unknown Windows drivers that turned out to be drivers for the SDCard we focused our efforts on the BIOS. Unfortunately it turns out that the Satellite 5000 doesn't have a standard BIOS. The BIOS on the Satellite 5000 is accessed through a program called HWSetup.exe on Windows. We figured that the USB might be disabled in the BIOS since all the drivers looked fine in Windows. The next problem was that the client had installed a non-original version of Windows XP on his Toshiba notebook, which meant that the utility wasn't present. We scoured toshiba.ca to no avail., only finding the utility on toshiba.com. When we ran the Toshiba Utilities installer which installs the HWSetup.exe file along with a few other tools we got an error message about another Toshiba Common Files utility which wasn't installed. More searching on Toshiba. The point here is keep your or

Modems and More This 28.8 external modem (modulator / demodulator) used to be a pretty penny, but now few people in North America use dial up modems. External modems like this Bocamodem were generally much more expensive than internal modems. This Bocamodem did 28.8 kb/s (28,000 bytes per second) and featured a 14,400 bps Group 3 Fax modem (you could send faxes out through it). With the V.42/MNP5 data compression you could supposedly get 115.2kbs (115,200 bytes/sec). Almost all modems at this stage were "Hayes Compatible" and this Bocamodem was no exception. This particular modem came with an ISA card with a 16550 UART. To most this means nothing, but in the days of 386's many systems didn't come with a 16550 UART chip on the motherboard which meant you couldn't get speeds much faster than 2,400 bytes/sec. This modem had a NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) that could store the modem configuration.

I found a few good introductions to Electronics on Youtube, but one of the best, shortest introductions is from who else but Make Magazine:

Inspiring Electronics Labs Our focus at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling program has been on building and repairing systems for low income earners in the Kitchener / Waterloo region, but one of the side projects some of our volunteers wanted to branch into was electronics. It started when I replaced our aging soldering iron with a finer (hotter) soldering pencil, and some flux. We moved the soldering station out to the component testing station where we have motherboards mounted on to the wall for testing components like video cards, memory, etc. (I'll post photos in another post) To help inspire new ideas for the lab I googled Electronics Lab images and came up with the following labs: This lab desk isn't very advanced organizational-wise, but it has a number of important components we're missing, including a good oscilloscope. Image from the Arizona State University Power Electronics lab . I'm not usually fond of this tan coloured wood, but it seems to wor

There's a neat blog post called How to Build the CMoy Pocket Amplifier that I was thinking of trying out. As I think I've mentioned before I built a car media computer that runs off a 12V inverter and some regular PC speakers (car's audio wiring is all messed up, it wasn't me -- honest). The sound is low and I wanted to do something custom, this looks like the perfect project.

Today I had the opportunity to work with an Asus EEEPC Netbook. Unfortunately it was a bit under the gun with 14 volunteers vying for my attention along with 5 customers who of course wanted to speak to me (instead of a volunteer). The EEEPC owner had an external USB DVD burner that she couldn't get working under Xandros Linux. Neither Brasero nor K3B were installed. What was interesting was that the DVD+RW tools were installed and dmesg revealed that Linux did see the CD/DVD+RW. Unfortunately Brasero did not and k3b was missing some dependencies so we couldn't install it. On the command line the following appeared to burn (very slowly): wodim dev=/dev/sr0 filename.txt However when I went to check the CD we couldn't mount it under another system...

This afternoon I ran across an interesting site with photographs of a " PalmTop " made by IBM running IBM's OS/2 operating system. Hand-sized computers have existed long before the Netbooks, but computers like the XO laptop and Netbooks have revolutionized the industry because of their wireless connectivity capability. Thanks to Daniel Basterfield for putting together the interesting PalmTop site.

In today's flooded netbook environment I wouldn't buy a Palm TX. While the TX is typically less expensive (I think mine was approximately $299CDN new a couple of years ago) it isn't quite as functional, especially compared to the Linux-based netbooks. Here are a few problems the TX suffers from: * Proprietary Operating System - While there are development tools on Windows and Linux for Palm OS, you're still locked into an operating system that you have a limited environment to develop for. Steps have been taken by a small group to create a Linux-based OS for the Palm TX but it lacks some necessary functionality (e.g. Wifi). * Limited wifi security without buying an option. The Palm TX doesn't do WPA2 wifi security out of the box, which means it's insecure out of the box. Palm calls the paid upgrade an "Enterprise Security" feature. The upgrade isn't terribly expensive, only $10 last I looked, but it no longer appears to be available on Palm's s

If you live or work in the Kitchener/Waterloo area and your organization is looking to dispose of any of the following equipment, please contact me (Charles) at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project: http://www.theworkingcentre.org/cr/ . Normally we charge to take in any of this equipment because of the recycling costs associated with this equipment, but we're a bit tight on these items and would be happy to wave the fee we'd normally charge. Laser Printers * HP 1100, 1100A Laser Printers (& proprietary parallel cords) * HP 2300 Laser Printers * HP 4200 Laser Printers Please note the condition of each item (whether it's working or not -- we still might accept non-working models of these printers for parts). We're also looking for working notebook power supplies for the following models of notebooks: * Thinkpad A31

For those who care http://freshmeat.net/ got a nice new web 2.0-ish redesign. I've always liked Freshmeat and this new design looks even better.

At The Working Centre's Computer Recycling we offer computers with Ubuntu Linux installed (System Unit, Monitor, Keyboard, power cords, mouse, everything you need to get going) from $30+. Systems start at PIII 600MHz with 256MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, basic, but enough to get started. So far we've been doing stock installs of Ubuntu 8.10, which leaves me customizing the distribution by installing things like codecs, autologin, etc. I've been working on setting up a Drupal portal for volunteers to learn to do these things. Once the portal is done I'm going to make it available both in our remaster of Ubuntu and here online.

We have a Xerox Phaser 8550 Thermal Wax Printer available to anyone who wants to pick it up from the shop. We tested it and it turned on but the display spewed out an error. I don't remember what it was (obviously not toner since this is a was printer). We could spend the time investigating and fix the printer, but we'd rather just give it away to someone really interested in a Wax Printer. From Technology

The other day we built a multimedia computer for the shop . I chose Mandriva Linux because I wanted to provide volunteers with a different experience from the typical Ubuntu Linux they're used to. And it was an experience for me. I've worked quite a bit with Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu, but not so much with Mandriva. I actually found myself a bit lost when it came to package management. I was unfamiliar with urpmi. So I did a bit of research and found a few interesting links. See the story I wrote here: http://www.charlesmccolm.com/content/helpful-mandriva-linux-links

A couple of volunteers from The Working Centre Computer Recycling Project and I started a podcast, Tech Data, last Saturday after the shop closed. The first episode I put out myself a few weeks ago, but last week, John, Andrew and I got together and recorded a second episode. I've managed to edit about half the podcast. The second episode should be out by Saturday. Check out the podcast here: http://www.charlesmccolm.com/podcast/

The other day I met with other members of our organization's IT crew and it occurred to me that Computer Recycling was short on some items that might seem plentiful in today's environment. Our most wanted list goes something like this: Clean USB Keyboards Clean USB Mice SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM in 128, 256, and 512MB configurations Hard drives 10GB and larger An oscilloscope for the shop HP Laserjet 2100 and 2300 printers Working speakers with all parts If you have any of these items available in the Kitchener/Waterloo area please contact us as per the link below: http://www.theworkingcentre.org/at/comp_recycling/comp_recycling.html