2005-06-17 USB Enclosure

A USB2 enclosure with a 48x cd burner in it, complete with the required funky power supply and a blank CD in the drawer. It is a masterpiece of bad design from the point of view of both form and function, but it does seem to work. Pic:

2005-06-17 PC Case

One somewhat recent funky custom-case PC missing everything but the motherboard, CPU and fans. I took it for the special fan that I intend use extending the life on my freshly waranty-returned 320G HD, but the case will be donated to cyber cafe type people.

2005-06-16 Mac boxes

Three mac display boxes with polystyrene inserts. These will be hoarded until some suitable chance comes along to offload them to some mac head in exchange for their hard earned cash. Side note: are there any mac heads who actually do work? I think mostly they spend their days animating desktop thingies and loving one button clickiness.

2005-06-02 Bench Grinder

A jolly fine bench grinder, 110V AC with good stone and brush on it. The guards around the wheels are very chunky and the whole thing comes from an era when things were built well. Was given to me by a colleague who was clearing out the garage and was going to toss it. Check out his pic of it:

2005-05-31 Thermometer

One Dakon temperature probe that was attached to the side of a largish stainless mixing tub. Tub had been trashed by heavy implements already so I just took the probe. Range 40F to 140F. Seems to work fine.

2005-05-25 Dell followup

Some follow up on the Dell PC. The hard drive was a 20G with 16G of crud on it. Some examples of what we found:

• 616 mp3s from many and various artists. I think they got them from Kazaa and Limewire. They must be some of these so-called music pirates we hear so much about. Will look for the eyepatches, parrots and cutlasses later, meanwhile, a rundown of their top ten artists:

       21 Led Zeppelin 
       19 Jimmy Hendrix 
       19 Black Sabbath 
       17 Rush 
       16 Red Hot Chili Peppers 
       14 Beastie Boys 
       12 Ozzy Osbourne 
       12 Frank Zappa 
       11 The Who 
       11 Soundgarden 
  

  Nothing too surprising turned up, very mainstream stuff. We listened to some it.
• More than 7000 porn movie snippets (yes, seven thousand!) in the MSIE cache directories. Some are non-unique or at least highly related to each other but that is still an impressive inadvertant collection to have amassed. Roughly 50 percent repeat looking at some samples md5s, so more than 3k unique porn clips.
• Of the 50000 jpgs (yes, fifty thousand) in MSIE cache dirs I suspect quite a few (half or so) are also porn.
• At least 700 snapshots of their hotmail inbox and more courtesy of MSIE caching.
• Lots of browsing history, check out one user's top 10 sites in terms of numbers of hits:

     3132 www.cdnow.com
     1359 gs.cdnow.com
     1240 ads.cdnow.com
      967 www.nudecelebritypics.com
      907 hurl.content.loudeye.com
      762 www.qualityvids.com
      663 exclamation-all-free-nude-celebrities-naked-pics.com
      540 ug.hooters.dk:8080
      468 graphics.nastydollars.com
      424 www.free-celeb-galleries.com
  

  Music and porn, seems to fit in with the other users of this machine just fine (and most of the rest of the internet also?). Different types of porn though to the other users on this machine.
• Complete tax records for a couple of (recent) years with income, assets, accounts, SSNs etc etc etc. I am amazed they found time to do such mundane stuff given all the porn and music they had to plough through.
• Word documents describing business dealings in grand buzzword compliant terms; designed, no doubt, to impress whoever happens to peruse them after they were discarded.
• A history of their google searches courtesy of the MSIE cache, top 20 searches by one particular user shown below:

       33  yahoo weather 
       11  europro steam pants press 
        9  shakespeare's Henry IV 
        7  ithaca college 
        6  habit rabbit vibrator 
        5  surfing schools california 
        5  steam fast pants press 
        5  muhlenberg college 
        5  leo october horoscope 
        4  skidmore college tuition 
        3  syracuse university 
        3  SUNY New Paltz 
        3  skidmore college 
        3  race tolerance education 
        3  pearl rabbit vibrator 
        2  trouser press netherlands 
        2  The Caretaker, the play, nyc 
        2  the caretaker 
        2  synopsis, Pinter's The Caretaker 
        2  SUNY Purchase 
  

  What are google doing with your search history we ask?

All in all a most instructive hard drive. It really gives insight into what normal people do with their machines.

2005-05-11 Dell P3

A Dell Pentium 3 PC with Windows XP on it. Fully functional, such that XP can ever be termed functional, boots right up and logs right in. It might well be the case that an exploration of the "My Documents" chaos will appear here as followup. Meantime, a snapshot of the outside. Dude, I've got a Dell.

2005-05-07 Stainless Shelf

A nice commercial grade stainless steel shelf. It has a couple of dings but they will hammer out. The edges are nicely welded and finished. Now we just need a place to put it.

2005-05-07 Roller Table

A skate roller table of about 7 or 8 foot length. Not immediately useful but I am sure we can come with either a happy recipient or a use for it. It has been suggested that we use it as a creeper. It does run somewhat well down the driveway but that path leads to the dark side.....

2005-04-16 Wireless Print Server

Yet another wireless print server thingy. Off to the great Ebay marketplace for this as we have no use for it, the previous one went down pretty well so we have high hopes for this:

2005-04-16 Wireless Mouse

A logitech wireless mouse. Luckily it came in a box of junk with lots of fresh batteries so we were able to test it immediately and it is now in use fulltime in its new home. Happy stuff. Shown here with a random Belkin 802.11b card that came with it, that will be sold on to some Mac user at some stage.

2005-04-16 Scooter trike?

A preposterous scooter thingy that seems quite dangerous if the rider is over a certain mass. If the rider mass is too great the steering mechanism seems to become a quite unstable equilibrium and dump said rider face first into the tarmac. We do not think this is purely a generation gap or skill thing as the lighter members of the test team were able to maintain some straight line travel. Lighter in terms of mass, not skin colour. In fact darker skin colour seemed to be better based on our small sample size of two.

2005-04-16 Network Gear

Lots of stuff today, first a pile of networking gear including nice ethernet cables, a 10/100 8-port switch and some other assorted stuff. Pics shows some of it:

2005-04-16 Junk Assortment

A pile of assorted junk including some tools, PC memory, AC adaptors, valid credit cards, driving license, silver cigarette case and other rubbish. Not sure what we will do with all this but the shears make great credit card choppers, lots of leverage. We may laugh at people for throwing this stuff away but we are not so unkind as to let their stupidity enable ID theft.

2005-04-16 Books

Two books, a photographers guide thingy and an O'Reilly pocket guide to Oracle crud. I think the photo book will form some nice present for some teenage family member and the O'Reilly guide for some colleague who has to deal with the horrors of Oracle against their will.

2005-04-10 Mystery Cookware

Cast iron tray thingy for cooking some thing that we are not quite sure about. Eggs maybe? Suggestions please. Maybe you will even win the thing if you come up with a plausible enough answer? Shown here:

2005-04-10 Muffin Tins

Cast iron muffin thingies. We have no immediate use for these so one went to a neighbour and a couple more to a friend on permanent loan. Pic of the two we cleaned up for the colleague:

2005-03-22 iMac

iMac 400MHz, in full working order with OS-9 installed (is that an oxymoron?). Pic possible to appear but you know what these things look like by now.

2005-03-22 Mini Bike

Stupid miniature bike thingy that was in need of a chain. We hence procured a chain and proceded to ride the thing around to try to figure out the purpose for which it was built. We have so far failed in this quest? Everybody please, why does this thing exist?? Shown below being ridden by 7 month pregnant woman, but I fail to accept that this is its intended purpose.

2005-02-26 iMac

One 400MHz iMac missing HD and memory, What a shame. It is the disgusting blueberry colour though so I am not very predisposed towards this thing to start with. May form part of a job lots of mac junk for sombody