Episode: 650
Title: HPR0650: Dumpster Diving
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0650/hpr0650.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:23:22

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Music
Hello everybody and welcome, this is episode one of the Cheapsgate Computing for the
Fruble Technology Consumer.
I'm your host, Bro.
Well today in this beautiful evening commute through Damascus, Maryland, I'd like to talk
to you about dumpster diving.
And dumpster diving, the sport of champions, the sport of frugality, the sport of college
students really, because you can call it a sport, it's more like a giant treasure hunt
they find, but you have to be careful what you get.
So the first thing you remember with dumpster diving is that somebody threw this stuff away
for a reason.
It might be because it's busted, it might be because it doesn't work, it doesn't work
for them, they upgraded, what have you.
You really hope that it was ignorance.
But whatever problem they have with whatever they're throwing away, you can solve and make
use of.
So the first thing is obey your local laws.
For example, the recycling center in Mike Hone County has a very clearly posted no scavenging
sign.
As soon as the electronic equipment hits the dumpster, hits the ground, what have you.
So if somebody leaves it there, you can't touch it.
You can try to coax it out of their hands beforehand though, that's fine.
So don't look suspicious.
Be happy to talk to people, answer people, tell them what you're doing.
If they ask, cops show up, be cooperative, within reason, you know, you're here to get
some trash.
It's been clearly abandoned on the side of the road.
And of course, if you have any other questions, consult your local laws, consult a lawyer.
I'm not legal advice.
It's okay.
We have stumbled across a dumpster that has, let's say you live in a college town and see
end of the semester, people are throwing stuff out.
You find a nice find near any of your apartment complexes dumpster.
It's the first thing you do.
You start picking through it.
You generally want to wear old clothes because you are rooting around in trash.
You're going to want a nice pair of gloves, especially depending on what's in the dumpster.
If it's just household trash, usually this stuff's in bags, most of the food's going to
be contained.
You can pick things apart.
It might be a little staining.
Sometimes you'll get a lot of glass bottles or neon glass tubes.
You got to be careful with sharp objects.
You don't know what people throw away.
You can throw away razor blades for all you know.
So use some caution.
Wear gloves, thick leather, thin rubber, whatever you can get a hold of.
You may want to wear two if you're really concerned about the state of what's in there.
Wear old clothes that, you know, if they get stained, you don't mind burying them or
throwing them away and never wearing them again.
If you're going to transport this stuff home, you're not just going to carry it home.
You need to quarantine the vehicle that you're taking this in, you know, drop cloths, plastic
tarps, painters cloths, big, flat plastic sheets that they give you to keep paying off
your car, but while you're painting the walls, they're great for this purpose and usually
not all that expensive either.
You can do quite a dumpster driving.
All right.
So we've got this, let's say we find a couple computers in the dumpster and we take it
back to your house.
First thing you want to do is quarantine it.
You don't know how long it's been there.
You don't know if it was throwing the dumpster today, a couple days ago, you don't know
there's food mixed in.
You don't know if there's bugs mixed in it, vermin, other insects, that type of thing.
So you want to quarantine.
You just don't want to put it in the middle room with your pets or kids or other roommates
and where food is being served.
Now you want to put it in like a workshop area where it's off the beat and path and until
you clean it and figure out what's going on with it, nobody's going to touch it.
Second thing to do is to test the hardware.
You need to verify its operation.
And the best way to do that is known working components.
If you want to test cables, you have a known working power supply and known working,
say power cables, a known working device that can tolerate not taking a good cable or
something you don't really care that much about.
But you know works.
An old TV, for example, for testing signal cable or hand can old TV for testing if you
have a VCR still outputs or a computer, you know, you can even monitor and see if a
video card still works.
That type of thing.
So after you've quarantined and tested it and verified that it works, it's time to check
your hat color because these systems generally store data in the case of like game consoles
and VCRs.
There's not much release though except maybe some home movies and people tend to throw
out non-working, non-usable because that tape anyway.
And it's usually just bad, you know, recordings and shows from the 80s that most people don't
care about.
But hard drives are another story.
So if your hat's gray, that's the easiest one, you just debat it.
You don't care.
You may look around to see what's on it.
But generally if your hat's gray, you're just going to wipe it and get on with your
life.
If you're a white hat, you might try to figure out who owned the system beforehand and
given a little user education moment and then you're going to wipe it.
If your hat's black, well, you've got physical access.
So I don't really need to tell you anything more.
You know all you need to know.
But in addition to cleaning the data off the device or not in the case of the black hats
out there, you need to clean the device itself.
And generally this means some light solvents, maybe some strong solvents for the cases I
would not use strong solvents on electronic components.
Inviting the disaster.
And things like air compressors.
So quick word of the solvents we like to use for a light, light solvent, a weak solvent.
We like to use 91% rubbing alcohol, isopropyl.
And by we, I mean a couple of friends and I who are accomplished dumpster divers, and
I'm hoping to have this friend on as a guest and later shows, but it's kind of hard
when he's not in my car.
We definitely prefer the 91.
It evaporates fairly quickly because it is mostly ice prop alcohol, it's only 9% water
and other sorts of additives and impurities.
70% which is the most common concentration we can find.
I guess you can find some 50% too and you can find like mentholated rubbing alcohol.
But don't use that for cleaning stuff, please.
Minty fresh does not refer to a state of a system.
The reason is because there's too much water in it, and water takes a very long time
to evaporate.
So you have to wait for the stuff to evaporate, but 91% rubbing alcohol, any excess liquid
left on the components will evaporate off very quickly and so you won't have, when it's
effectively salt water or electrolytics, transmitting electrical signals across signal lines
that should not be bridged.
So that's the main thing that we like to use to clean off sensitive electronic components.
And usually it doesn't leak very much, water is very good at leaching, but if it's not
on for very long, then you're usually okay.
If for things like label residue on cases and things like that, some people like goo gone
or some other type of very harsh, solvent, some people like lime away for hardware deposits
on cases, I don't really have any brand recommendations.
Don't use that stuff on PCBs.
It's not good for it.
Some may even argue that 91% rubbing, the isopropyl rubbing alcohol is not going to be used
on PCBs.
But you know, if you ruin a PCB, what's the worst that can happen?
We just throw it back in the trash or responsibly recycle it because a lot of these things have
heavy metals in them.
So to that, uncompressed air about that or should say compressed air, you want a good compressed
stream, legendary dust bunnies are quite legendary.
We've got quite a few nasty ones.
I have stories about what happens when you mix cigarette smoke deposits and cat hair.
Let me tell you, I don't eat cheetos very often as a result because this smell was unmistakable.
And I mean unmistakably close.
But a little compressed air stream is always good for getting out those sorts of loose dust
and making sure fans spin and things like that.
But make sure it's clean air.
You can't just take this thing to a gas station and use their air compression mic.
It's metal, you might get droplets of oil.
And I talked really about bridging components.
Those two things will do it very, very well, depending on what kind of oil is in there.
All right, next thing, software licenses.
Well, these stuff has been thrown out.
You could probably make a case for the original hardware and software was abandoned.
But unless they all show throughout the certificate of authenticity and original install media,
don't trust it.
You just don't.
You don't know what viruses or malware, key loggers, programs not under the user's control
or programs under the user's control.
You never know, it could be a honey pot plant.
Rare, but possible.
What's going to call home, what's going to report it to install?
And what's going to call home, what's going to report it to install?
No good, trusted working software that you have a license for.
For me, that's free software.
That supports software freedom that I could get under a free or open-source software license
that I can install on as many computers as I like, which is good because you pull four or five out of the dumpster.
Yeah, you've got these low-end computers for free and trying to put a good working trusted software install on it
is a little difficult when you have to pay for a license.
All right, things like that.
You need to know how to supply your own software.
I can't tell you where to get it.
My only recommendation is use something you're familiar with.
And if you get really esoteric hardware, netBSD will probably install on it.
Because you're probably going to find some esoteric old hardware.
I found hardware that looks like it was pulled straight out of main frames.
And with that, I would like to bring an end to the strict content about dumpster.
I mean, I just want to share some good dumpster-dive stories.
The first dumpster-dive story is what I call the epic dumpster-dive story.
But by as far as epic dumpster-dives, it really wasn't that epic.
It was just a three-hour movie.
And it could be shot in real time.
You wouldn't have to cut anything out.
A friend and I had found a dumpster where we work that wasn't populated with our employer's equipment.
It was populated with fellow tenants in the building's equipment.
And it was obviously corporate because they had corporate installs at any virus.
And there's the jointed domains that it does.
But there's probably good seven or eight machines in there.
I think seven worked for Pentium 4s, three dual core, or no, dual processor, slot one motherboards,
and one Pentium 3.
My memory is a little fuzzy.
Of the Pentium 4s, I think one is still working.
So, you know, there were problems with the motherboards and possibly the chips.
They just stopped working.
You know, the most peripheral still work is fine.
The dual slot motherboards, they were tie-in S1834s.
And when you look at a hardware, piece of hardware, and it says revision F on it,
you kind of think, what came before F?
Was it A, B, C, D, E, F, or was it 0123456789 A, B, C, D, E, F?
In this case, it was just A, B, C, D, E, F.
And still, if you're at the sixth revision of a motherboard, it means it's really popular or really bad.
In this case, it was really bad, but those motherboards failed at night.
And I'm scrapping them for parts and recycling them.
One other of the tie-ins, the A, S1832, the last dual slot motherboard,
got shipped to a friend in Ohio, and I believe it is still in service as a firewall distribution,
or a firewall deployment.
It's running six smoothwall or monowall, or something like that.
The Pentium III got replaced with a P38050, dumped as much RAM, and as good a video card as I could find in it.
And it became my primary desktop for about three years,
running things like Ubuntu and XM2, and they would run just fine.
The 3D acceleration was kind of a pain in the butt, because I think I'm a TNT2 in it.
So I just used the 3D driver, although a new phone would probably work these days.
And there was lots of miscellaneous cables and add-in cards, not too many hard drives,
and we just went till we could find.
But that kept us going for a while, and I got a lot of good cases out of it.
And I met a friend in Frederick, Maryland, an older gentleman,
who, as his hobby, puts together cobbled systems out of parts and gives them away on free cycle,
little education about the canoe Linux system he installs, he installs XM2,
and says, for 20 bucks a month, you can have internet in this area,
and it's the low-end DSL, what have you.
And it just gets bundled with your phone line, and they have a working internet machine for 20 bucks,
so I gave him a lot of my spare components.
Before that, I lived in my parents' town, which is a college town in Central Pennsylvania,
and that's all I really need to say about it, you'll figure it out.
It's quite absolutely named, let's put it that way.
And every six months or so, until they recently introduced this recycling program for electronics,
where you could just dump it every time any day you wanted,
every six months was what was, what was, what was locally called, RIFRAF Day.
So every six months, we'd hop in the car and drive around and look for electronics.
And at this time, I think it was, I was probably 16 or 17,
so I give you some background into how long ago I was doing this.
We found some 386 and 486 systems.
And one of those was from a government contractor in the area that had some somewhat sensitive documents,
we'll say human resources documents, there was a deleted document that I managed to recover
some pieces of information from that looked like it was a sexual harassment incident report.
And it didn't really have names, I think it just said the victim.
It had Mr. Whoever was the perpetrator, I don't care, it wasn't important.
That was a fun find, but that one also got deband and recycled,
because I had no use for 46.
And beyond that, I think I found a couple of Mac systems.
I found a Mac 2SI, I think, that was fully working, keyboard, mouse, monitor,
all of it worked just great.
And even had the poor woman's homework on it, I kind of felt bad for the woman,
but I felt worse looking her up and saying, hey, you threw out all your schoolwork, she still want this?
I wiped that drive too and reinstalled it with a fresh install of some system software,
it was Mac, so it wasn't like you could run a lot of free software on it.
That one may have just gotten recycled.
If you're not going to grab technology items from a dumpster dive, be aware of things like bed bugs.
There's a huge bed bug outbreak in New York City, and they like to crawl into things
and eat people while they sleep.
They might crawl into a warm, nice computer power supply or computer UPS unit,
which tend to get a little warm.
UPSs are known to attract ants as well, especially if there's a nice reliable food source nearby,
which would be eating at your desk.
It's disgusting, do it at the kitchen table.
But be aware that this stuff got thrown away.
But if you know what to look for, it's fine.
You can definitely get some good technology, although it's definitely going to be on the low end
and possibly slightly busted for next to nothing,
or nothing at all, next to nothing being your time investment,
and any additional peripherals or replacement parts that you need to get the system to work.
That's all for this episode.
I'll speak to you next time on my commute home.
Take care.
Thank you for listening to After Public Radio.
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