The Laptop Graveyard

In one of the dark corners of the warehouse is (what I call) the Laptop Graveyard. This is where laptops go to die -- well, maybe.

A moment of sympathy for the user

This Thursday one of the staff members asked me to help a customer who had purchased a laptop several weeks prior and was having ongoing difficulties with his wireless card. The customer eventually arrived on a bicycle, bearing the offending device. He seemed to be naturally pretty tightly wired, and having spent the previous evening attending Windowless Wednesdays only to encounter another problem shortly thereafter, his patience was strained.

Field trip

I'm in California this week -- suffering in the rain while apparently Vancouver is blanketed in unending sunshine. Meanwhile, here's what a pair of white gloves look like after an hour of volunteering:

That's why you wash your hands before you eat your sandwich! See you next week.

Technological Atavism

Sometime in the early 1990s I came into possession of a Wang word processor -- one of the ones with 8" floppy drives. I tried to find out about that particular model, but quickly learned that you have to be careful how you search for pictures given this subject matter.

My favourite things at Free Geek are the technological neanderthals -- the also-rans and could-have-beens. I've posted numerous times about obsolete laptop teardowns and the strange shapes that portable computers tried out before the bog standard laptop emerged. (And who knows how long that'll last -- personally I'm not sold on the idea of tablet computing just yet, but who knows.)

A strange one came into Free Geek over the last week.

In the words of Alan Jackson (ugh) -- what's so crazy about that?

Phone Tech Nostalgia

Anyone else remember when these were the coolest things ever?

On Power Switches (Part 1)

I've long wanted to write about power switches, but I'm pretty sure it's going to come out with more than its fair share of "get off my lawn, you kids" old-manishness. Forewarned is forearmed.

Let's go back a few decades. In the 1980s, and back beyond that into the mists of time when chips were wood and bits were for horses, the power switch used to look like this:

Laptop Station Humour

For the discerning, literate, sympathetic thief: