Know Your Volunteers

As promised, I'm gradually interviewing volunteers I meet working at various stations. This is Anna, who was working at the hard drive wipe and Ubuntu install stations on Thursday.

New & Busted vs. Old & Boring

A cynic would say that almost everything that's donated to Free Geek can be broken into two categories: New & Busted, or Old & Boring. Meaning that if something really shiny comes in, chances are good that it won't work.

This used to be pretty shiny and now it pretty certainly doesn't work. We will never know what events befell this computer before it got to Free Geek. Hard drive failure leads to lost thesis leads to anger management crisis? Fell off a desk and under a truck? Placed too close to an MRI machine?

Zenith Eazy Pc Teardown

Somewhere on the West Coast of Vancouver Island...

I played hookie from Free Geek this week and hung around Vancouver Island. Fortunately I saved up a teardown for just such an occasion.

Laptops Continued

Tiny dog, tiny netbook

Caelan, Aaron and I spent the day working on the laptop station. (Thanks, guys!) Lots of work left to be done -- organizing and documenting, not to mention tearing through the tremendous amounts of stock -- but we got two or three laptops down into the store, matched a few more with power supplies, and prepared a half-dozen more for scrapping.