Dumpster Diving

[Edgedamage]

Edge

Where was this dumpters?

Outside my apartment building.

[SirPeale]

Nice, Edge!

Yeah, the DD site was down for a while because the site owner was using the space for other things.  Hopefully it won't go down again.

[Edgedamage]

I have yet to find a snes.

[Harry Potter]

For all people in Melbourne, everyone is lining their front lawns with crap (again) on Toorak Rd, near the Coles Myer building in Tooronga. Not sure if there's anything useful but a friend phoned me the other day that he saw an arcade cab (minus monitor) around there. Would have grabbed it if I didn't already have one.
Have fun.

[Sephroth57]

wow the internet amazes me, i can kind of understand looking for computers and tvs and stuff. but on that site, they got people like

"here is my list of finds!!

*random stuf blah blah*

potatoes (3 were green)
onions
2 green peppers"

im like WTF you want me to give you 5$ go buy some vegetables at the store you friggin weirdo. theres people like asking if its ok to eat food out of dumpsters, its like yes go eat anything you want, the gene pool needs cleansing...  

[Nephus]

yeah, I dug through that forum for a while and found a guy complaining that he wasn't finding 30lbs of salmon in the dumpster he usually found it in each week.

Seafood... left outside for an unknown lenth of time... in a dumpster...
Can you see a Darwin Award comming from this guy any time soon?

[thumbninja]

wow the internet amazes me, i can kind of understand looking for computers and tvs and stuff. but on that site, they got people like

"here is my list of finds!!

*random stuf blah blah*

potatoes (3 were green)
onions
2 green peppers"

im like WTF you want me to give you 5$ go buy some vegetables at the store you friggin weirdo. theres people like asking if its ok to eat food out of dumpsters, its like yes go eat anything you want, the gene pool needs cleansing...  

Exactly.

If you are on the internet, you can afford food that is clean. When I was 10 my family had to resort to "dumpster diving" for food, and it was not all fun and games! What seemed like a perfectly good box of Cheerios had maggots. I realized this halfway through a bowl of cereal. Ugh. That turned me off to Cheerios for about a decade, and I still can't touch regular flavor Cheerios.

Pavlov would be proud.

That said: people throw out perfectly good stuff all the time. I see no reason not to profit from this. This is especially true of computer stuff. I'm suprised there aren't more tales of great dumpster finds on this site, considering you only need a 100mhz or so PC to play classic games in MAME.

[Mameotron]

Well, diving in store dumpsters may or may not be legal, since the dumpsters are almost always on store property.

However, it IS legal to go through anyone's trash that they have set out for pickup.  Oddly enough, there was a court case about this where I live recently.  Some private detectives got loads of info on a guy getting a divorce simply by taking his trash after he set it out. The verdict:  If you set it out, it is up for grabs.

[Snarbald]

Today I got one of those 5 foot tall gumball machines from work. A month or so ago some genius put it outside for a tent sale that later got rained out. Everyone was so worried about getting DVDs and stuff covered up that no one noticed the water running down the inside of the gumball machine and colored water coming out the bottom. Rather than clean out the machine, the bosses would rather just buy a new one and throw the old one out. So I had to take it apart and throw a few pieces in the dishwasher and now I've got a big gumball machine in my living room.

[SirPeale]

If you are on the internet, you can afford food that is clean.

Not everyone pays for Internet.  My local library offers 'net service.  I'm not in that number, I do pay for my 'net service, but I pay for it with the proceeds from DD'd items.

That said, I do eat DD'd food.  It's not like the food is sitting naked in a dumpster.  Most of it's packaged.  There's this natural food store not far from me I used to get food at, and we didn't have to buy groceries (except little things once in a while) for about six months.  

The supply went away, and we found that the store started donating everything to a soup kitchen

Oh yeah, I've got to go shopping later on, can I have that $5.00 to get some vegetables?  

[SirPeale]

im like WTF you want me to give you 5$ go buy some vegetables at the store you friggin weirdo. theres people like asking if its ok to eat food out of dumpsters, its like yes go eat anything you want, the gene pool needs cleansing...  

No one's saying eat anything you want, you should always be careful with what you eat, whether it's directly from the store's shelf, or from a bag in the dumpster.

It's good that you have enough money to never worry about going hungry.  Not everyone is as lucky as you.

Truth be told, even if I had more money, I'd still DD for food.  

[Mameotron]

im like WTF you want me to give you 5$ go buy some vegetables at the store you friggin weirdo. theres people like asking if its ok to eat food out of dumpsters, its like yes go eat anything you want, the gene pool needs cleansing...  

Yeah, send me $5 for food while you're at it.  Wait until you're married with kids and you'll really miss those days when you had a disposable income.

[ChadTower]

As another person who's DDed out of necessity in the past... I wouldn't go back to doing that unless it was again necessary.

[GGKoul]

Any other new finds?

[Gunstar Hero]

One man's trash is another man's treasure!

[spidermonkey]

I recently did some curbsiding in my town three days before the bi annual "clean up day" and grabbed the following..
Sega Genesis system with two factory controllers and two rather obscure and cool looking aftermarket controllers. Sime kind of foot pedal controller for maybe a music game that Sega made. A Mitsubishi 4-head hifi vhs.(works perfect) Two Wico command control joysticks with fire buttons on top for an Atari 2600. They are the bat style instead of the balltop ones.  An "Everex Explora" desktop pc with an AMD K6 processor. (haven't opened it up yet to see what kind of goodies are inside yet but it does work) Also found a Gateway desktop with a Pentium ll 400mhz and a  DVD burner. This one seems to work fine too. Both good for running the classics. Last but not least a fairly large pair of "Koss" computer speakers complete with wiring and power pack. Some pretty good finds for about an hour and a half of digging through piles. Going back out tomorrow after work. Only two more days before the garbage trucks start picking up everything so I'll be out good n' late tomorrow night. Couldn't go tonight because of rain. Hopefully people covered up their good garbage for me.

[SirPeale]

I found two DVD players the other night.  One was a VHS/DVD combo, which works perfectly (cosmetic flaws) and the other didn't work.  I took it apart, only to find that someone must have left a disc in the player and picked it up, it was jammed in the drive.  Five seconds later it was working fine.  The DVD in question was 'Enough'.

[Crazy Cooter]

...you should always be careful with what you eat, whether it's directly from the store's shelf, or from a bag in the dumpster.

HAHAHA.  That's some words to live by right there.

[spidermonkey]

Alright, 2nd night out garbage pickin produced the following..
A Thrustmaster digital "Millennium 3D Inceptor flight stick. (don't know if it needs drivers or not so I'll have to connect it and see what happens)

A "POWMAX" 400w atx power supply.(not tested yet)

A 100W "Delta Electronics" model DPS-100TB-1  power supply. (from the looks of the connecters I believe its an earlier "AT" model and not an "ATX" ) seems to work fine.

A Data transfer switch that has a two position A/B round selector knob on the front. On the back it has three PS/2 ports. The ports are labeled "A"  "B" and "input-output. What are these things used for ?

And lastly a Sharp GF-7500 boombox. the radio part works but the cassette deck gobbeled up my favorite Dream Theater tape. Oh well..the tape was replaced with a cd long ago so no biggie.

Thats all Folks...untill I muster up the nerve to wallow in an actual dumpster. I guess I'm a newbie since so far I only resort to curbside picking.  

[GGKoul]

curbside picking.  

I'm a curbside picker as well.. just not with the wife...

[DrewKaree]

A Data transfer switch that has a two position A/B round selector knob on the front. On the back it has three PS/2 ports. The ports are labeled "A"  "B" and "input-output. What are these things used for ?

it lets you switch between either two input devices or between two pc's...usually used to test stuff out, or in the case of OLD peripherals, to allow you to use them on the same PC.  

I used to have a SuperDisk drive that supposedly had a printer pass-through, but there was no human way to make the printer work while hooked up through the SuperDisk port, so I used one of these for switching between the printer and the drive.

I also use them to test out new (to me) PC's.  It allows me to use my current keyboard, mouse, and monitor (KVM box) to test/set up the beaters people pass on to me.  You have an excellent find there, my friend!