While procrastinating working on my fantasy baseball prep, I figured I could kick off some tasks which have been waiting to be taken care of for a while, and which mostly involve being started, then running in the background while I do other things.
So, for instance, I’m wiping the hard drive of my first G4 Powerbook (“TiBook”), which I bought back in 2001. It’s now been replaced twice and is not used at all. I’m being 7 times more paranoid than bbum and doing a 7-pass zeroing erase on the drive. Once that’s done, I’m just going to chuck it (by which I mean “dispose of it in an appropriate manner for computer hardware”, but which to me just means “get it the hell out of my house so it stops taking up space”).
After I do that, I’m probably going to do the same to Debbi’s old iMac, which is nearly as old as the TiBook and then we might ship it out to her sister who has wanted a Mac to play around with, since she sometimes encounters them but only owns a Windoze machine. That will free up a bunch of space in the closet.
A couple of years ago I chucked a bunch of old cables and stuff sitting in the closet. Among them was my last IOmega Zip Drive. This was a cool technology of the early-to-mid 1990s which I used mostly to back up my main computer’s hard drive, but it was essentially obsoleted around 2000 (if not earlier) thanks to high-bandwidth personal networking and extremely cheap “real” hard drives (all of which is a wordy way to say “FireWire hard drives”). However, I still have about a dozen Zip disks in my computer junk drawer (alongside my floppy disk copy of HyperCard), and it’s time to get rid of those. Since I no longer have the hardware to erase them, I guess I will either run a magnet over them, or take them apart and cut up whatever’s inside (if possible). Maybe both.
(Unlike bbum I have little anticipation that anything inside the plastic disk sleeves will ever be of any use to me, so out it all will go.)
After that, maybe I’ll audit some of the old software still lying around and start chucking some of that.
Either that, or I’ll actually get back to preparing for the draft.