Continuing to downsize
As its coming up to the festive season, I though it would be a great time to donate unwanted electronics and computing items.
Donating techλ︎
I used Freegle and Freecycle to offer unwanted electronics and computer items.
- Parrot AR Drone
- Desktop computer (self-build)
- Eee PC 900
- Gaming high precision mouse mat (for lazer or optical mice)
- Truly Ergonomic Mechanical keyboard (very heavy, but solid)
- WiFi bridge (2.4Ghz)
The Parrot AR Drone was one the first drone I ever saw and was popular at hack-days and other tech events. The first time I saw 'the parrot' was at Hackference 2014 (1 day conference and 1 day hack day). The drone was part of a conference day, controlled via console controller via a computer running node.js software.
I got my Parrot Drone from a 2-day hackathon in London, during the summer of 2015. Work had kept me busy for the rest of the year (and the following year), so the drone had never really been used. Ideas of what to do with the drone never came fourth in the following years.
I dug out the drone to see if it would still work but finding an app to control it was very challenging. There are many 'drone' controller apps on the Android Marketplace, but all failed to recognise the Parrot drone. So it was long past time to donate to another.
Back in the day (early 2000's) I used to be very good at building my own desktop computers. One of the first builds included a motherboard with two separate CPU's (before multi-core CPU's were designed). I learned a great deal about CPU paste, cooling blocks and fans.
I still had two big desktop computers, one that was also a RAID server (software raid). The RAID server is still is working condition, although was many years behind the latest Ubuntu Linux operating system. This was pretty easy to update, going through 2 dist-updates of the Long Term Support (LTS) Ubuntu versions.
The other desktop hadnt been used for many years and was quite dusty inside. After a careful clean I tried to get this to work, but it would power off within pressed the power button. I have several working laptops and a dedicated RAID server, so have no need for either self-built desktop.
Both desktop computers were very good quality of their time and I could have reused many of the components (power supply, CPU heat-sink, fans and the case are all in good condition). I always used the Zalman CPU Air cooler, a beautiful design with a circle of copper fins which takes away heat via six heat-pipes. The design is very efficient so the fan of the cooler is only needed on more intense usage of the CPU.
The Asus Eee PC was the first laptop (netbook) that I bought for myself. Being a 'netbook' it was extremely portable, so excellent for taking to community events and conferences. The Eee PC was also very cost effective at 329 GBP, where a full scale laptop of the time cost at least 1,000 GBP, more for a branded laptop.
The Eee PC could run Windows or Linux. I used Linux and it has a really nice desktop design, very similar to the modern Gnome and Ubuntu desktop designs. For browsing, coding and writing, the machine was perfectly fast enough.
The only challenge I had with the Eee PC 900 is the size of the keys on the keyboard, which were a little too compact for my big fingers. A couple of years later I got an Eee PC 1000, which had a slightly bigger form factor and larger keyboard to allow me to touch type accurately.
The Eee PC is a 32-bit architecture which is becoming much harder to find operating systems for. Bodhi Linux has a 'legacy' distribution, including the very nice Enlightenment desktop. I successfully install Bodhi on the Eee PC and it ran very well.
There is a move away from 32-bit linux support and even Debian Linux has recently dropped support (Debian 12 Bookworm LTS is the last version to support 32-bit). Some common apps have become 64-bit only, such as Google Chrome (although fully open versions may still be available).
If the Eee PC 900 keyboard was bigger, I would be tempted to keep it as a laptop for writing my journal. But alas I will donate it to someone with smaller fingers :O
I still have the Eee PC 1000 as it is faulty and doesnt display the initial Asus screen when powered on. If there is a fault with the screen then it would still be useful to donate (with caveats). If its the motherboard then I doubt it is of interest to anyone, but I may still try donate it.
Thank you.
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