Proxima Desktop Projector 2400

I like old video projectors. They've been around in some form since the dawn of television -- the old CRT-based ones were technically the same as televisions with the brightness cranked so that they'd throw an image onto a screen. These evolved into huge three-tube monstrosities that you can now get for the price of a hernia.

But when the LCD display came along things got more interesting. In the late 80s someone started manufacturing little units that sat on top of a classroom-standard overhead projector. IBM's Thinkpad 755CDV laptop from 1995 could have the back of its display stripped off so that it could be similarly used to project an image.

By the end of the 1990s digital projectors had taken a familiar shape and dropped massively in both weight and price... but in the meantime there were some weird species in circulation. I already wrote about one (see the end of the article). Here's another. Excluse the blurry photography.

The Worst Computer Of All Time

I've slagged a few computers here for being knock-offs or badly designed -- and I got called out by a commenter on that last one, who basically said "hey, I used one and it wasn't that terrible." And I can't disagree with the guy. Our old cadaver powered up dutifully, dead hard drive notwithstanding, and I don't doubt it would run reliably for another quarter-century.

On the other hand, there have been lots of computers sold with much more serious problems -- laptops with exploding batteries, untrustworthy hard drives, defective motherboard capacitors, computers that had to be dropped periodically, and awful quality drivers, not to mention this infamous scam.

All of this makes the maligned Zenith Eazy PC look pretty good. But this got me thinking: what is the worst computer of all time? Everyone loves a good train wreck -- so if you disagree, please submit your own. But my money is on the IBM PCJr.

Cropped from Marcin Wichary's photo (Some Rights Reserved)

Donation of the Day

I complain too often about people donating perfectly good gear just because it lost its glitter when the plastic wrapping came off. Sometimes a donation comes in that redeems my faith in human nature.

This note came in with a couple of laptops. It reads:

The $100 Home Theatre

Let me start by warning that although this post is about a successful project, it begins with a eulogy for a much-cooler project that met an untimely end.

Geeks and Knitting

Somehow knitting is suddenly subversive and cool -- from yarnbombing to knitted zombies to sock wars it screams of a previously-uncool niche suddenly discovered and embraced. But there is something irredeemably nerdy about it. I chatted with one of our volunteers -- also a knitter -- about this and discovered a few odd parallels.

Yarnbombing outside JJ Bean on Commercial

On Power Switches (Part 2)

I wrote about power switches here and was working up to some broader numbers that take the discussion out of the individual household and into the greater infrastructural realm. Each household has a few things kicking around that are always on, or can only pretend to be turned off, and the cost is a handful of watts -- who cares, really? Well try multiplying that by millions of households and the costs mount up.

Source http://groverflanagan.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html Some Rights Reserved

A day in Drive Enclosure Hell

I hoped to celebrate my return to Free Geek after a few weeks' travel by hunkering down at the laptop table, but as usual, fate had other plans. A woman came upstairs looking for help, bearing in her hands a USB drive enclosure:

Looks innocent enough, right?

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.

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:

Dinosaurs and Cockroaches

This was going to be a New Years' post, but since it's almost February, I think I'll give up singing Auld Lang Syne and go instead with an evolutionary metaphor.

The equipment we receive as donations at Free Geek spans around 30 years. That covers a lot of revolutionary change, from the advent of the home computer itself, to the explosion of the IBM PC format whose heritage dominates the equipment that we deal with, to the Internet age, through to the increasing domination of wireless and portable computing. And a thousand smaller revolutions in between.

Sometimes it's interesting to note what hasn't changed in all that time. And sorry, folks: I realize that this is going to be a really nerdy post.