Richard Kettlewell

Our computer junk pile contains the following:

• WOC PC. Intel DG965SS motherboard. Intel Q6600 2.4GHz 4-core CPU. 4GB RAM. Onboard ethernet, VGA. No storage.
• WOC PC. Intel DH61CR motherboard. Intel Celeron G550 2.6Ghz 2-core CPU. 8GB RAM. Onboard ethernet, VGA (& DVI but it didn’t work last time we tried it). Wouldn’t boot to X in Linux (don’t know if this is a software or hardware problem). No storage.
• Dell Optiplex 960. Variant unknown. Onboard ethernet. Onboard VGA & DP. Video card with 2x DP. DVD drive but no other storage.
• Samsung SyncMaster 172v 17” monitor. VGA input. 1280x1024
• Dell SP2000W 20” monitor. VGA & DVI inputs. 1600x1050. Integrated webcam & USB hub. The green pixels in one column are always on.
• Pair of DECT phones.
• Keyboard, broken foot.
• Keyboard, sticky control key.
• Internal DVD drive.
• USB floppy drive.
• Ancient mice.
• Ancient PDAs.
• Miscellaneous cables.
• Even more miscellaneous computer junk than the above.

Does anyone want any of it?

I have the following things to give away, mostly related to the Sinclair QL:

• Large pile of Sinclair QL World magazines
• Large pile of Quanta (QL User Group) magazines and associated handbook
• QPTR Pointer Toolkit manual
• EasyPtr 3 Development System Manual
• QDOS/SMS Reference Manual
• QL Macro Assembler Manual
• QL Macro Assembler microdrive cartridges + manual
• Minerva Technical Guide (for versions up to 1.79)
• The Code Machine manual (assembler for ZX Spectrum)
• flp-level-2 manual
• QMENU Manual
• Digital C SE Manual
• The Editor SE Manual
• Superforth Manual
• Lightning SE Manual
• IDIS Disassembler Manual
• Supercharge BASIC Compiler Manual

Would suit computer history enthusiast with more spare space than me.

Terms: you collect from north Cambridge.

More books that I’m not going to read again (or possibly at all), plus some duplicates:

Bede - The Ecclesiastical History Of The English People AME
Bill Bryson - The Lost Continent WA
David Langford - War in 2080
Jack Vance - Cugel's Saga
Jack Vance - The Dying Earth
Jack Vance - The Eyes Of The Overworld
Maureen Dowd - Are Men Necessary?
Max Brooks - The Zombie Survival Guide
Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver JNH
Nicholson Baker - The Size Of Thoughts IDB
R U Sirius and St Jude - How To Mutate And Take Over The World
Robert Cowley - More What If? JNH
Robert Cowley - What If? JNH
Timothy Leary - Design For Dying
Haynes Manual For Peugot 205

Please comment if you want any of them. You collect from here or Station Rd, or possibly the pub.

Miscellaneous bits. Most have not been used in years, so no idea if they work.

• 3 button Logitech serial mouse (M-CE15-)
• 3 button Logitech PS/2 mouse (M-S35)
• 3 button Logitech PS/2 mouse (M-CAA43)
• 2 button Microsoft PS/2 mouse
• Optical Logitech USB mouse with scroll wheel (M-BJ58)
• Optical USB mouse with scroll wheel
• Modem cable
• Longer modem cable
• Mystery cable: 9 pin 'D' female to what looks like a 3.5mm jack. I have no idea what this was for.
• 4 PS/2 mouse to serial port adapters
• Serial mouse to PS/2 port adapter
• Two AT keyboard to PS/2 port adapters
• USB mouse to PS/2 port adapter
• Three ethernet cables that only support 100Mbit/s (two at a meter or so, one longer)
• Linksys LNE100TX 10/100 PCI ethernet card
• 3Com 3C905C-TX-M 10/100 PCI ethernet card
• PC keyboard with AT connector
• PC keyboard with PS/2 connector

Ancient computer. Hasn't been used for years.

• Mini-tower case
• External ports: serial, parallel, sound, USB.
• MSI MS-6385 motherboard (3 PCI, AGP, 2 IDE).
• Unknown CPU
• Unknown RAM
• No drives of any kind.

Old computer. Was in use until recently.

• Mini-tower case
• External ports: LAN, VGA, sound, USB.
• ABit NF-M2S motherboard (2 PCI; 1 PCIe x1; 1 PCIe x16; 4 SATA)
• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+
• 1GB RAM
• CD ROM drive
• No hard disk.

You collect from King's Hedges (or Station Road, for the transportable things).

I don’t think I’ll read these books again (or in some cases, at all):

Anderson, Poul - The Long Night
Beigbeder, Frédéric - £6.99
Bury, Stephen - Cobweb
Dann, Jack & Dozois, Gardner (ed) - Space Soldiers
Ellison, Harlan (ed) - Dangerous Visions 2
Herbert, Frank - Dune Messiah
Rohan, Michael Scott & Scott, Allan - The Ice King
Simak, Clifford - Why Call Them Back From Heaven?
Towsend, Sue - Number Ten
Varley, John - Millennium
Varley, John - Wizard

Claimed:

Elton, Ben - Stark
Robinson, Kim Stanley - Green Mars
Silverberg, Robert - Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert - Recalled To Life
Silverberg, Robert - The World Inside
Silverberg, Robert - Thorns
Sterling, Bruce - Distraction
Vinge, Vernor - Tatja Grimm's World

Please comment if you want any of them. You collect from here or Station Rd, or possibly the pub.

I have a spare computer. It is about ten years old (so won’t run the latest games l-) If anyone wants it and will turn up and take it away it’s theirs.

(In the unlikely event that more than one person wants it, they can bid for it, make representations as to why they are a better cause, etc.)

Specifications:

If you really need a floppy drive I may be able to find a working spare, but it is 2010...

Appearance:

1. It's very high volume. Fortunately I was warned of this in advance and set up filtering arrangements pre-emptively.

2. You have to mess around with Yahoo's web interface just to subscribe. I know there's a lot of poor mailing list interfaces out there but you can certainly do better than this.

3. The (global) member FAQ suggests combining multiple items into one email (s11). Based on my experience I don't believe this is good advice.

Firstly, some of the responses are at best vague on which items they wanted. In practice this meant I favoured the people making more specific requests and wasn't in the end left with excessive vagueness to guess at, but still, life would have been rather easier without that step.

(When one is giving away useful things for free I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the requester to make some effort to be specific!)

Secondly I'm not convinced that it achieves the intended effect of saving the readers' time. It's stated as cutting down the number of emails but of course message count is only a proxy for the real scarce resource here: human lifetime. Certainly a worthwhile goal, given there's thousands of readers, but only good advice if it actually succeeds.

If all the items offered (among a group of messages) are in the subject lines then you can read them straight off the list of subject lines and carry out bulk deletion: I can read N lines and perform a single UI action to delete them all.

But for each messages where the subject line says "various items" you have to specifically select that message and read the individual line items. That's an extra UI action to select the message, and a pair of visual shifts (from subjects to body and back) for each such message.

So if there are N items and and M "various item" messages, you've got N+M+1 UI actions (including the bulk delete at the end) and 2M visual shifts to process the lot. N's a given, so to minimize reader time and and effort spent all you can do is minimize M.

My immediate personal experience, theorizing aside, was that I quickly started ignoring 'OFFERED: various items' rather than digging into the details of what they were. That doesn't help anyone.

4. You can give away things I thought were unshiftable - my old monitors went out the door last night.

5. It really helps if you get your own address right.

Anyone want a CRT monitor? I have a 19" NEC, a 17" Panasonic and a ?15" Samtron looking for a home. all now gone.

You collect from north Cambridge.

Duplicates, books I don't want to read again, books I'll never read, the detritus of CUSFS raffles from years past. Friends can have what they like for nothing, anyone else is invited to make me an offer.