No worries! And good luck!

Throwing in a little odd advice for the secondhand scene - even if the shops are bad, I’ve had some good luck with estate sales and cleanouts (where a family or realtor basically opens the home to anyone who’ll cary stuff away and save them the trouble and cost of throwing it out). It can feel kinda bad, picking through stuff in that context, but we’ve saved a bunch of nice old tools and kitchen stuff that way, and the houses generally have everything else you might need for a house. Personally I think the best BIFL stuff is old and made before they really perfected enshitifying their products.

The cleanouts I’ve been to we found through postings on our local free groups (which I also really recommend) or word of mouth, but I used to know some folks who went to them professionally, looking for merchandise for their own businesses, so they must be advertised somewhere normal people would find them too.

I’ve found working/fixable laptops, laptop chargers, cables, TVs, monitors, and space heaters to be the easiest things to give away again once I pull them from a dumpster.

Cables and converters and little USB devices like hubs are also pretty easy. Lamps and power strips/extension cords too.

I’ve only done a few desktops, they went but I don’t know if there’s the same demand.

RAM and hard drives go a long way towards making the task of fixing laptops easier/cheaper since people often pull those parts before binning them. The time I found a stack of wiped laptop hard drives enabled a ton of free computer rehabs.

As others said, you may need to feel out whether people are going to use your bins as a way to dispose of damaged things they normally have to pay a fine to throw away - my local Free Group recently had a problem with people ‘offering up’ broken CRT TVs, air conditioners, and even refrigerators without telling the recipient (conveniently passing the burden of the fee and disposal logistics from households that could afford to buy replacements/upgrades to ones that were relying on free groups to get their appliances). Then again, I think I’d watch to see if there’s a problem before preemptively trying to lock it down and possibly making the system worse overall.

I’ve currently got a giant box of various working laptop chargers (a company trashed their entire supply of loaners). I’ve been thinking about building some kind of outdoor free library (similar to the ones for books) with a bunch of cubbords sorted by brand, but need to figure out a decent location where it can live.

Also ask around friends and family - in my experience lots of folks keep a couple old machines they no longer need because they don’t want to throw them out (or pay extra to throw them out) and once folks know you as the old computer guy you might be surprised at how many people message you to be like ‘you want this?’ before they throw something out.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always free groups like Buy Nothing and Everything is Free online, usually local to your town or city.

Corporations and universities often have ewaste bins but getting access will depend on your circumstances. I find them there, clean them up, and pass them to a local refugee resettlement charity.

Your local recycling center may be accepting volunteers - I’ve been working with a guy who volunteers at our recycling center and he’s been working on setting up a reuse option for all the working laptops that come through. Currently their policy is that all computers must be securely destroyed to protect peoples’ information but if he can catch them and get permission to wipe the drives and give them away then he’s allowed to do so. He also saves hundreds of TVs and monitors per year - he could do more, tons still get thrown out, but they have some tight space limitations at the center and have already been giving him as much space for storage and organization as they can.

Also proplifting is easy as can be with succulents. You can pick leaves up off the floor around the display and just set them on some dirt at home. Next thing you know you have a new plant.

I’ve only ever bought one new computer in my life (I currently own like a dozen laptops) and I’ve never actually bought a TV. I’ve gotten them all from friends and relatives, pulled them from ewaste and picked them up off the curb. I’m sure this varys wildly but where I am it feels like working electronics are so common and available in our world we’re one step short of just picking them up off the ground.

I’m a huge fan of rom archives! A few years ago I built an arcade cabinet using as many secondhand parts and materials as possible and set it up to run a ton of games on an ewaste retropie. It took months longer to make than it would have if I’d just gone to a lumberyard but I had the space and time, and I was already on the local free groups daily so keeping an eye out for stuff from my parts list wasn’t hard.

Sure! Always happy to hear any recommendations!

Same! I think I’ve only ever paid for one computer, everything else has been hand-me-downs or ewaste. I’ve never had a top of the line machine but I don’t need one for my hobbies or work. Usually when I start a new project I take a laptop off the pile, install a fresh os, and set it up just for that.

The power draw is a good point and definitely something to consider - one of my neighbors recently put a meter on his old one and was surprised to find it drew as much power as his air conditioner. I’m not sure how to balance the higher draw against the environmental cost of manufacturing and shipping and disposing of the TV, but I’m doing my best to contribute as little to the economy as I can, so I’ve settled for being careful to just turn it off whenever I’m not actively watching something. My city has options for sourcing power from green sources so what I do use hopefully encourages more investment in wind and solar in my region. (It seems pretty legit from what I’ve been able to find anyways.)

GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I’d suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you’re comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.

For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn’t find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.

Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it’d probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don’t think any feel reliable enough to me yet.

Good points! I suspect the ‘even thickness’ thing came from broken up concrete pads/sidewalks/patios, where the result would be irregulary shaped on X and Y but somewhat consistent for Z depending on how well they prepped the site for the slab. In that case it might end up pretty similar to landscaping rock. In some of the photos you can see they have a much flatter top and much more irregular edges and undersides.

100% agreed on demolition practices. There’s a lot of potential in deconstruction for reclaiming building materials rather than consigning them to the waste stream. The tradeoff is in time, person hours (my grandfather once claimed a truckload of bricks from a demolished mill to build the family fireplace - my mother and her siblings weren’t allowed to come inside that summer unless they chipped cement off some bricks and brought them with them). And in materials/energy - blades for a concrete saw and power to run it, perhaps. I’m sure there are other ways to get more-or-less regular building blocks but they’ll have some cost to balance against the good of saving the materials and reducing the need for new manufacturing. Either way, there’s some cool potential. Treating rubble or urbanite like quarried stone I think fits the solarpunk ethos.

Thank you for the details on bonding concrete! I’ve used cement to patch some holes in custom-shaped, 45° concrete blocks I made once (didn’t shake all the air pockets out of the first couple) so I knew you couldn’t just stick concrete to concrete, but not how to actually go about it when you had to. I’ll refer back here if I need to fix it someday, or if it comes up in any of my stories.

Thanks!

That beats connecting the speaker jack to the mic jack and recording with audacity.

TBH this is some really basic wiring stuff. You identify three differently colored wires, match them to three terminals, and tighten three screws. The same attachment system is in every outlet and light switch in your house.

When I was a kid, a buddy and I would pick through the scrap metal pile at the town dump for forging/blacksmithing material. Most of the guys working there would just kind of ignore us, but the old timer who ran the place would start yelling if he noticed and we’d have to scram. Nothing ever came of it, luckily. I would have explained that we were really bad at forging so most of the metal rods and lawnmower blades etc were going to end up back there eventually.

Things are a bit better where I am now. A friend volunteers at the dump and they’ve let him set aside TV’s to test and give away, and if he catches people when they drop off computers, he can ask if they want it to get reused, otherwise the dump’s secure destruction guarantee means he has to let it get sent for recycling. Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to pull hard drives or anything like that.

I wish for a society where that kind of reuse was the norm. Where items that work or can be fixed get set aside, organized, and cleaned up, and that that used stuff was people’s default when they need something. Reuse infrastructure on a huge, corporate/municipal scale. For now I just help him divert computers to people who can use them, and dig stuff out of corporate ewaste I have access to to give away.