Something I’ve been working on recently is collecting old and unused laptops from various people I know. Sometimes they’re shitty Chromebooks that can barely be used but sometimes they’re still perfectly good and recent laptops and people just got bored of them and decided to upgrade for whatever reason. I then put Linux on these laptops (even the shitty chromebooks) and distribute them to people at my college who need one.
With the date that Microsoft is stopping support for windows 10 approaching quickly, now’s a great time to prevent e-waste by upgrading to Linux or collecting people’s previous laptops as they upgrade. You can also get distributions that run better than windows on low-end hardware. Even if you don’t know someone who needs a laptop, you can always do something like host a Minecraft server to make use of it.
Also, you can do this to phones too. There are plenty of custom ROMs you can load on Android phones to squeeze more life out of them. Let me know if you want recommendations.
Anyway, I hope that this can inspire more people to try and repurpose electronics to prevent them from becoming e-waste.
Something I’ve been wanting to work on is repairing old analogue electronics and putting those to use, like VCRs and the likes. While I totally get why we’ve moved on from older formats like VHS, I feel tossing that generation of electronics aside when they still work perfectly fine is a bit of an injustice considering how durable a lot of those were made.
Something that’s especially stood out is the old CED format. Have never seen a player despite having seen the discs out and about sometimes, and the ones online never seem to be in working condition.