Urban Adventures & More

I moved to my mom’s place last weekend, and managed to usurp my (older) brother’s room as an office (I have a desk, my girlfriend has a desk, and we left the bed alone so he can sleep there). Now that I have a place to comfortably use my desktop computer (it was pretending to be DVD player in my apartment), I realized that my Gentoo installation was almost a year out of date.

So I went about the slow and annoying process of updating everything. I think it said there was 1.5 GB of files to download, and don’t even get me started on the time spent compiling and fixing install errors. After a few hours of this, I threw up my hands, killed the install process, and downloaded an Ubuntu disk. That entire process took perhaps an hour all together.

Like my previous Ubunutu install, on my laptop (which I also upgraded to 8.04 Beta yesterday, which was a cinch!), things didn’t go perfectly. The problem is again mostly with the graphics card, and I think the problem is basically that the default video card for nvidia cards is the free version… which does not perform anywhere nearly as well as the proprietary version (the use of which I have no problem). I also have KDE 4, which is pretty sweet.

So, that was good. And then there is another machine we have (An AMD XP 3200+, I believe with an Asus motherboard), one we were using a server until we realized it was a waste to run this noisy machine ourselves. I decided that I would use it instead as a web browsing machine to put in our basement (the most convenient place for that part of the house). Although I had had some trouble with this hardware in the past (I couldn’t get the Gentoo install disk to boot; Windows barfed when it booted), I assumed that Ubuntu, known for its hardware excellence, would have no problem.

How wrong I was! As soon as you try to boot into linux from their main menu, the disk says something along the lines of “Kernel panic: trying to kill idle process”, and hangs. I haven’t done a thorough investigation online, but I don’t think this is a common problem; I wonder whether this is hardware, software or BIOS related. Specifically, I wonder whether something is really wrong with the motherboard, CD-drive or CPU or whether the disk itself is bad, or if there is a bad BIOS setting. The fact that I had similar trouble previously leads me to rule out CD-ROM problems, but it’s hard to tell what about the hardware is wrong.

If there’s anyone out there reading this… any advice? I suppose I should post on the Ubuntu support forum…

I now firmly believe that computer recycling will not work until it’s required by law, and until it’s free. There are various charities that will pick up your happy, working computers for free, but they’re not interested in old or broken machines. There are commercial carting companies, but they charge a big fee just to show up, which prices it way above what anybody will want to pay. I happen to think there’s a small business to be made here.

I did have a funny conversation with a guy who works at one of these commercial companies. After we spoke on the phone, he sent me a quote. I then replied with the following email:

Thank you for the quote.
As we are simply a private residence with only a small number of items to discard, the cost you have quoted, roughly $220, is prohibitively high when it is acceptable for us to put the items into the regular trash stream. Therefore, we will not be pursuing recycling as discussed.

He then replied…

Well in that case you have to do what you got to do, we are a business not a
charity, although we are all about the environment and keeping things out of
the trash. We cannot force you to do the right thing, just keep in mind if
your equipment is found in the trash and they trace it back to you, there
are going to be heavy fines. Good luck.

I couldn’t let that blatant falsity stand…

I understand that, and it is regrettable to contribute to waste for us as well. I have to correct your information: it is not a crime for private residents to put computer items into the trash in NYC: see http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/electronicsrecycling.shtml. Otherwise, we would of course be using a removal service such as yours.

So he said…

Well if your computers have no business use whatsoever than yes you are
correct. However I simply try to help people realize that the throwing
hazardous things in landfill only hurts in the fight against Global warming.
You justifying your email and mine don’t help the environment. Thank You.

The discussion continues to be ludicrous. They’re not helping global warming, strictly speaking, and they certainly are not educating anyone. The direct effect of throwing away electronics in a landfill is a problem of toxic metals leeching into the water supply. The indirect effect is that recycling and reusing products is far less energy intensive than producing them from raw materials. The net effect there is a function of what is being recycled and how, but that is almost exclusively the case.