Tech Guild Triumphs!

Hey all! I'm digging my way out of a mountain of computer towers to bring you the newsletter this week 🤣 I've got lots of fun stories to tell, so let's get right down to it:

Events on the Horizon

Dagnabbit, it's already 1:30am and I just realized I left the event calendar for last. So, no event calendar this week. Come see us at Muskegon Pride on Saturday from 11am-7pm. We're in booth 83.

The Great PC Harvest of '26

We teamed up with the White Lake Area Climate Action Council to host a Tech Take-Apart table at their annual electronics recycling event. We focused on computer towers, with two goals in mind:

• Taking apart all of the hard drives to make sure that the data was securely destroyed, and to get the amazing magnets inside.
• Rescuing any working parts that were new enough that we can use them in our community server project. (More on that later.)

We weren't sure how many computer towers we were going to get, or how old they were going to be. We figured that we would start with the hard drives, and move on to general disassembly if things were slow.

Things were not slow 🤣 I never got a full count, but I think we took in around 20-25 computers. A decent number of them were already missing their hard drives, which was nice to see from a data security perspective even if it meant we didn't get any magnets.

Most of the computers were understandably in the too-old-to-be-useful category, but it was still a lot of fun to explore the diversity of computer designs over the last 30 or 40 years. There's a principal in computing known as "interoperability", that values standardized connectors and form factors to make it easier for components from different manufacturers to work together. But within those standards, manufacturers have quite a lot of freedom to try new things. From the outside, most 3.5" hard drives look more or less the same. And on the inside, they all have more or less the same components. But out of the 10+ drives I took apart on Saturday, I don't think any two of them followed exactly the same design.

At the end of the day, we had a bunch of disassembled hard drives, and a bunch of still-mostly assembled computer towers. It was important to me that we not just take the bits we wanted and leave the rest for "someone else" to deal with. Once we took responsibility for a computer, I wanted to make sure we took full responsibility for recycling every piece of that computer as well as we possibly could. So we loaded them all up into Nate's car (sadly I forgot to get a picture) and brought them home.

My top priority since then has been disassembling the computers and doing a rough sort on their components. In particular, I'm trying to get rid of the steel and plastic computer cases as quickly as possible, because they take up the most room and I really can't overstate how full of computers my house is right now 😂

The steel will go to the metal recycling bin at White Lake Area Solid Waste Authority transfer station. Technically we could probably get a few bucks for it if we drove it down to Padnos in Muskegon, but we'd rather save the gas and help the transfer station pay the bills.

The plastic components are unfortunately headed to the landfill, which is a little bit heartbreaking because they're mostly high-quality ABS, and I could recycle them into some really cool stuff if we had a shredder capable of handling them. (If anyone out there works at a local fabrication/machine shop that could build us one or knows someone who does, let me know!) ABS is a durable plastic and it recycles fairly well, but most commercial recyclers aren't set up for it because it's not used in consumer packaging very often. One of my down-the-line dreams for a Commoner's Workshop building is having a space set up for small-batch plastics recycling that would let us turn ABS scrap like this into coffee tables, storage boxes, and other useful goods.

But for now, I have to accept that stockpiling material when I can't recycle it yet is not the path to a useable garage 😂

The circuit boards are mostly all going in one bin for now. Once I get through all the cases, I'll go through and do a more detailed sort of the boards. Eventually, we'll be sending them off to Boardsort in Ohio, a specialty electronics recycler that pays reasonably well for properly sorted and identified circuit boards. Given the amount of work it takes to fully disassemble a tower, I doubt it'll work out to much of an hourly wage, but I'm guessing we'll get fifty or sixty bucks back, and it'll help pay some of our hosting costs. If we keep at it through future electronics recycling events, I'm hoping we can eventually use our Boardsort revenue to pay for the equipment we need to start recycling plastic.

The non-ferrous metals are all going in one bin for now too. I'll be going through later to clean them and separate types as best I can. Most of these will probably get recycled through Padnos, but I doubt we'll get more than $10 back.

Most of the wire and cables will probably go to Padnos too. There's still some sorting to do there, and I need to cut all the connectors off as well. They get recycled separately.

I'm saving the fans I find in case we want to build some low-power air purifiers in the future. They are pretty universally grimy, and cleaning them is going to be kind of fiddly, but it's also the sort of job that can be oddly satisfying in the right circumstances.

I'm saving the power supplies and the floppy/optical drives for further disassembly down at the Market over the summer. Doing them in separate batches makes it easier to save all the cool little parts without needing 10 million boxes to put everything in.

(Speaking of cool little parts, I'll have to do an update in a future newsletter with all of the switches, motors, and overall doodads that I've been finding along the way. I don't have pictures of most of it yet, but there is so much cool stuff to be found when you start taking apart old tech.)

I'm saving off anything with a Windows 7 or later sticker to see if it has server potential. I'll go through those at the end once I've gotten all the scrap handled. Ideally I'd like to find at least 2 with decent processors and working motherboards, and then we'll load those up with any extra compatible RAM we find in the other machines.

So that's been basically all I've had time for this week 🤣 The giant pile of computers is already much smaller, and I think I'll be done with this "shelling" stage by early next week. Next comes a lot of detailed sorting, and hopefully a better sense of the recycling value we can expect when we send it in. Who know, maybe "Computers for the Commons" can be what finally balances the Montague Commoners budget 😂

If reading all this has reminded you of an old computer you've been meaning to get rid of, there's still time! Just bring it down to our Artisan Market booth between 9am and 2pm on Saturdays.

Recommendation Corner

It's Pride month, so prepare for this month's recommendations to get even gayer than usual😉 Since I've been doing a lot of books lately, I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite queer movies. The first one is "Pride", a name that it shares with a couple of other movies, so I'm going to go ahead and link to the correct one here.

It tells the story of Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, a group that raised money to support mining families during the 1984 strike by the National Union of Mineworkers. Margaret Thatcher had frozen the national union out of their strike fund accounts, so people who wanted to support the workers were encouraged to partner directly with affected mining communities. GLSM worked with three mining towns in southwest Wales and raised £22,500 for striking families. They also spent time with the families, driving them all over the UK to tell their stories and raise support for the strike. The solidarity built between the gay community and the mineworkers has been maintained for decades, and it's one of the stories I keep close to my heart in my organizing work.

This Week's Nails

I went back and forth about whether to do my nails this week, because I knew they were probably going to get immediately destroyed prying an expansion card out of a PCI slot. But with Muskegon Pride on Saturday, I decided I had to at least try. And I took the pictures basically as soon as the nail art was done so that I didn't have to worry about chipping it.

Have a good week! If I don't see you at Pride or around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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