What can I do with old technology products that were once high-end but are now probably too old to be useful? Computers of course, digital cameras from 10 or more years ago, iPods that hold a charge for all of five minutes, iPod docks that still use the old connector rendered obsolete by Apple four or five years back, hand held GPS units from 2002 that can’t even store a map … is there a good home for these, where someone else can get something useful out of them? Or should I just bin them? I don’t care about getting money - but once upon a time these things were expensive, and it feels too wasteful to just throw them in the garbage.
Surely there must be some kind of “We’ll take your old technology products” recycling centre or whatever around.
ha … I have boxes of crap like that that I just don’t want to throw away. I finally gave a whole pile of them to the recycle truck last week. They get broken down for scrap, not reused.
If you have any that are actually in good condition and more-or-less usable, look out for second hand shops (二手, believe it or not). There are a couple in Danshui, including one near Kooks that has a lot of electronic junk.
That GPS unit … does it have a PC interface (USB or serial)?
It’s this one: Garmin eTrex Summit. There’s some kind of port at the top, but I don’t know the name: four flat pins in a line. If I ever had a cable for it, it’s either long gone or in the rat’s-nest-o’cables box. (THAT stuff is annoying - at least I can know “OK, this camera I know I will never use again.” Fine. But the unidentified cables? No idea.)
The port looks like the right side of the picture below:
Ya want it?
Exactly - that’s the sort of thing I’m hoping to find. For the techie inclined, the iPod speaker dock still has decent speakers; I assume it wouldn’t be too hard to wire in some kind of a different connector. Other things may not be useful in and of themselves, but there must be useful parts.
I guess I could just leave them beside the garbage and recycling bins in our apartment complex. We’ve done that with all kinds of bigger products and they often disappear within an hour, so somebody’s getting use out of them. And sometimes I see discarded furniture reappear years later, presumably because someone else eked a few more years out of it, which is great!
Yes, I know I need to make sure to format the computers properly.
Definitely. I’ll pay you for it. See PM. Why not just list your crap on here and see if anyone’s interested? You’d be amazed what people will buy even if you think it’s useless.
I have a 2G Ipod I can’t throw away simply because in the Ipod lives the best ever DJ set I’ve ever heard (Talvin Singh Breezeblock) and I can’t extract it, neither can I redownload it because it doesn’t exist anywhere anymore. The Ipod can only be played in a 1G Altec Lansing in motion dock. Kinda cool.
There’s a used computer store on Bade Rd. in the Guanghua Market area of Taipei. A couple doors east of Burger King on the 2nd floor. You could also donate them to your local Tzu Chi center.
Bumping because this old thread popped up in the “Suggested Topics” section: my university actually has an electronics recycling/reusing program, and that’s where I got rid of most of the stuff. I have no idea what happens to the stuff after I hand it over, but at least it helps me get rid of the electric razor I stopped using ten years ago, but never wanted to put in the garbage because I’m pretty sure those rechargeable things aren’t supposed to go in the garbage.
