Dumpster Diving!

Okay, so I tried this wednesday... I went to our local chain electronics store "Media Market", what a stupid name... and encountered a padlocked gate. I inspect the padlock, see that these idiots left the serial number sticker on it. I call Abus (lock company), say "Yea well I've got a door in our house's communal celler, it's padlocked with 1 of these hugeass things, how do I open it I lost my keys.". The service rep asks for my number, Ipretend to rifle thru my desk, give it to him. 2 days later the keys are mine.

Last night I snuck in there, did the photo-in-front-of-the-camera trick, and started digging... MOTHER LODE!

  • Micro-ATX board for AMD xp / N-Force 2 chipset
  • 6 sticks of DDR ram, of which 2 stics of 512/128 are functional
  • a SHITLOAD of wiring
  • a CCFL with a burned inverter... the 8-inch CC is fine
  • a P3 600
  • a RAID card where the third IDE channel won't work
  • an 80 GB HD with 61 broken sectors, but otherwise functional
  • various writable media
  • 2 KEyboards, w/broken keys, repaired in under 1 hour
  • 1 14" monitor

DAmn... I'll drive over to celle to the other media market in 5 hours (1 am). Wish me luck!
 
That's a nice haul, but there's no way I would open a lock to get to a dumpster. That lock obviously means they don't want people in there, so they could bust you for trespassing(at least).
 
The question is, did they know I was in there? hehe

And I opened the lock the normal way, and had latex gloves on...

No way 2 trace me hehe. I had the keys delivered to a po box.

But yea, there's always some risk left... paranoia sets in... angst
 
Originally posted by Morpheus256
i never knew scsi was obsolete......
Click to expand...

As a mechano-optical drive interface it is. The whole point of SCSI CD burners was to reduce the number of buffer underruns, IDE drives with buffer underrun protection make that pointless, especially when contrasted with the much higher cost of SCSI.

Originally posted by Benny Blanco
If they work, how could they be worthless?

It has a 20gb hard drive able to store probably about 22 cd's. I'm guessing that the hard drive can be swapped for a bigger drive as well. It has 12 cd burners that may not be 52x, but if they do the job, then that's all that matters. If it works, which it appears it will, then it's hardly obsolete.
Click to expand...

Ok Benny, you're a dumbass. You obviously don't understand what a production environment is.

My whole point was explaining why some company would throw away those drives, it apparently went right over your head. :rolleyes:

The company who pitched those towers probably replaced them with IDE drives that are at least 4X times faster, don't have buffer underrun problems, and were several thousand dollars cheaper. The new towers are entirely based on firmware and don't have whole computer, operating system, burning software in the loop to cause problems.

It's like comparing an old 486 to a present day system, sure the old computer might still power up, but what are you going to use it for? The old system is worthless in it's original role to any company that wants to stay competitive.

From your blurry pictures those drives look like Matshita's; I had at least 60 of those sitting around until we threw them because they were taking up to much space. Doing the job is not all that matters when you're paying people to operate the drives and have a deadline, at that point speed becomes quite a large factor.

That is why those drives were thrown out. Not everyone is coming from a "Oh, this is cool" standpoint, there are often more practical matters to consider.
 
Originally posted by Little Grabbi
The question is, did they know I was in there? hehe

And I opened the lock the normal way, and had latex gloves on...

No way 2 trace me hehe. I had the keys delivered to a po box.

But yea, there's always some risk left... paranoia sets in... angst
Click to expand...
i call shens i require pictures of the stuff gained also po boxes are traceable

so you used illegal methods of access to dive an off limits dumpster. way to comit a felony genius:rolleyes:
you know the photo taped to a security camera thing doest work as it would just cause an blacked out camera

also never beleive every thing you see on tv

i recomend you dont do it agian becasue so far i believe you have commited the following crimes well in the US at least

Fraud, Tresspassing, Theft and if the value of the items stolen is above a certian ammount the theft is upgraded to grand theft, also Breaking and Entering.

also dont assume that since you covered all the classic movie things that your untraceable
 
Every page I read, every post I read the more I want to go diving. I feel embarrassed though. I don't want to go diving alone either....Man, I've got some good stores around too.

Anyone want to meet up in the Stratford Somerdale, NJ area for a dive?
 
I'm not sure if what you did would count as breaking and entering, but it was unlawful entry for sure. I'd cut your losses and never go back there again (maybe the laws are different in Germany, though).
 
Originally posted by Talon Blackrazor
Ok Benny, you're a dumbass. You obviously don't understand what a production environment is.

My whole point was explaining why some company would throw away those drives, it apparently went right over your head. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Company? Buddy, these things were found on the curb in the backstreets of BRONX NY in front of someone's house, a crackhouse probably... The company is called "FIVE FINGER DISCOUNT, INC" and the merchandise being "produced" is bootleg music cd's.
Originally posted by Talon Blackrazor
From your blurry pictures those drives look like Matshita's
Click to expand...
They are princo 12x10x32x with burnproof underrun protection.
Originally posted by Talon Blackrazor
Not everyone is coming from a "Oh, this is cool" standpoint, there are often more practical matters to consider.
Click to expand...
Which takes me back to your original post:
Originally posted by Talon Blackrazor
No idiot, those boxes are worthless in a production environment.
Click to expand...
What the **** do I care what they are worth in a production environment? THIS ENTIRE THREAD is about **** that is thrown away but STILL useful. And ultimately, this is why you were a **** who has now progressed to being a ******* ****.
 
Originally posted by t0x1k
Every page I read, every post I read the more I want to go diving. I feel embarrassed though. I don't want to go diving alone either....Man, I've got some good stores around too.

Anyone want to meet up in the Stratford Somerdale, NJ area for a dive?
Click to expand...
Yeah I was pretty embarassed when I started diving. A lot of times I would just go out and drive by the dumpsters or something and not even get out and look. After I did that a while I started getting braver about it and now it doesn't even phase me. I'm still a bit worried about the cops though, even though I'm pretty sure it's not illegal.
 
Let me retract and apologize (to blackrazor) for my namecalling as morpheus is surely right that namecalling/personal attacks are not necessary.
Originally posted by SpangeMonkee
ooh ooh.. I always wanted to try the multiple drive burning in Nero..

What OS is installed..?
Click to expand...
No video card, and no OS as far as I know. I believe it boots off the ISA card and the interface is the display at the bottom of the front there. It has 5 buttons and a pretty intricate menu.

Gonna try it out here in a little while :)
 
lemme know if the second one works ;) Obviously you would be keeping the first one.

Dane
 
Originally posted by Little Grabbi
Okay, so I tried this wednesday... I went to our local chain electronics store "Media Market", what a stupid name... and encountered a padlocked gate. I inspect the padlock, see that these idiots left the serial number sticker on it. I call Abus (lock company), say "Yea well I've got a door in our house's communal celler, it's padlocked with 1 of these hugeass things, how do I open it I lost my keys.". The service rep asks for my number, Ipretend to rifle thru my desk, give it to him. 2 days later the keys are mine.

Last night I snuck in there, did the photo-in-front-of-the-camera trick, and started digging... MOTHER LODE!

  • Micro-ATX board for AMD xp / N-Force 2 chipset
  • 6 sticks of DDR ram, of which 2 stics of 512/128 are functional
  • a SHITLOAD of wiring
  • a CCFL with a burned inverter... the 8-inch CC is fine
  • a P3 600
  • a RAID card where the third IDE channel won't work
  • an 80 GB HD with 61 broken sectors, but otherwise functional
  • various writable media
  • 2 KEyboards, w/broken keys, repaired in under 1 hour
  • 1 14" monitor

DAmn... I'll drive over to celle to the other media market in 5 hours (1 am). Wish me luck!
Click to expand...

Any chance you don't need that AXP board and would pif?
 
It looks like he'd have to ship it from Germany ;)

The cold streak here in Chicagoland is supposed to break sometime in the next week, so I might go out and do some diving then.
 
Ok, this seems to have gotten a bit out of hand.

This is why I got involved in this thread.

Originally posted by bleedingcancer
very good find what idiot would put that in the trash or the street
Click to expand...

To which I replied

Originally posted by Talon Blackrazor
No idiot, those boxes are worthless in a production environment.
Click to expand...

as a simple reason why these boxes would be out in the trash.

Then we got

Originally posted by Benny Blanco
Oh, and whoever said they are worthless, is a homo.
Click to expand...

Then I addressed exactly why someone would throw these away.

Morpheus tried to slide in his two cents

Originally posted by Morpheus256
i never knew scsi was obsolete......
Click to expand...

not really caring how relevant they were to the topic.

Benny didn't get my point
... again.
Originally posted by Benny Blanco
If they work, how could they be worthless?
Click to expand...

So I expounded on it, during which I called him a dumbass, a direct corolation to his "homo" comment.

Morpheus, bless his heart, must have delusions of grandeur and fancy himself a mod.

Originally posted by Morpheus256
Talon Blackrazor, personal attacks like that are not really necessary or tolerated.....
Click to expand...

And then we ended up with this.

Originally posted by Benny Blanco
What the **** do I care what they are worth in a production environment? THIS ENTIRE THREAD is about **** that is thrown away but STILL useful. And ultimately, this is why you were a **** who has now progressed to being a ******* ****.
Click to expand...


This doesn't track right. I never said they were worthless, there was quite a large caveat in my original post.

This whole thing started because I tried to explain why somebody would not be an idiot to throw those towers away. As a diving find, they're one of the best I've seen.

Now isn't this whole thing just a tad ridiculous? :rolleyes:
 
Ahh, I think I see now...

See, when you said "No idiot,..." that looked like you were calling bleedingcancer a idiot. I see now that you meant the person putting them on the street is no idiot, for said reasons...

Well that's why I called you a homo. Anyway glad that's straightened out, lets go play some nintendo now :D
 
wow could you see this poor sticky being deleted because of a few people... 181 pages that would be a shame.

NOW BACK TO THE DUMPSTER.

Killermac
 
Diving request:

On the off chance that someone lives in Germany (Munster/Soltau/hemannsburg-region):

Wanna dive?
 
Don't mess with Talon, he's right.

Lighten up!

"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

don't part them out, individually those parts are cheap, they're much more valuble intact.

and don't pull the HD's, you'll probably never find the software and drivers for it!

http://www.dataspacesys.com/ds_jagdup.htm

Morpheus256: i never knew scsi was obsolete......
Click to expand...

20+year old 50pin SCSI-2 tech gives 20Mb burst, are you still using ATA33 drives?
 
Sorry to bring this thread up but I have been doing some diving in the UK, best places for some of you UK folk is:

Maplins - If they have a back alley, the bins are never shut up or anything.

Maplins has been my main source of everything, I got a whole load of stuff from there, external CD-rw badly damaged outside shell any other questions pm me.
 
Originally posted by weebling1
20+year old 50pin SCSI-2 tech gives 20Mb burst, are you still using ATA33 drives?
Click to expand...
I don't know much about scsi, but I know that this setup pumped out 3 full length (79 minutes) audio cd's in UNDER 8 minutes (on "slow"
12x burners).. so as far as I'm concerned, the scsi in that box is pretty damn good :p

by the way THANKS FOR THAT LINK :)
 
Originally posted by Hoth
Sorry to bring this thread up but I have been doing some diving in the UK, best places for some of you UK folk is:

Maplins - If they have a back alley, the bins are never shut up or anything.

Maplins has been my main source of everything, I got a whole load of stuff from there, external CD-rw badly damaged outside shell any other questions pm me.
Click to expand...

Nice, thanks mate, there are a couple near me, I'll be sure to check them out. A tip for you is to try the bins of charity shops, I've got a shedload of stuff from my local ones recently, including loads of books which I'm listing on Amazon. Sold my first today! It seems that the shops get loads more stuff than they can sell, so the rest goes in the bin, even some really good stuff!

Rich :¬)
 
defitnetly the best thread ever....going to dig out some old jeans and sweatshirt and hit every damn dumpster in NC this weekend :D
 
After saying for awhile that I would try this....me and my friend decided to go out last night. We stuck around our side of town to start. We went behind this little mini-mall near my house, I wanted to check out the paintball store dumpster.
So we get there....hop in the first one. I find this bag full of little nic nacs. In-the-box christmas ornaments, misc spongebob stuff, and some sweet lookin purses (GF's birthday comin up :D). On on the next one.....jackpot. Inside we found about 3 bags of paintballs, a few broken ones inside but other than that perfect. Also some army/navy "survival tabs"....I guess theyre emergency food rations in a pill, all fresh sealed, $25 a bottle the sticker said. Also a 4 pod camo paintball harness, 1 VL pod, a Custom Products barrel display stand, and some army issue boxers.
Alrighty on over to staples....They had one of those really tall ones, so me and my friend hopped right in. We found about 15 Maxwell CD-Rs brand new..in the cases. 1 clear computer desk rollmat...sittin on it right now :D. A few billion day planners and a lil bit of paper. Also inside there were tons of ink toner cartridges...I opened some of them but it looks like they were all used. I thought they had to recycle these?
So earlier in the night we decided to
try Officemax, so we took a drive behind only to see a few guys unloading stuff into the back door. So we decided to go back later.
We came back to Officemax, parked our car in the back. We walk out of my car only to see an employee walking to the back to throw some trash away. I can imagine we must have looked suspicious...parking in the back....wearing gloves. So we kept on walking around the building...to make it look like we were there for other reasons. So we chill around the front for awhile then decide to go back. As were walking back....I peek over the corner to see a cop car parked right behind mine.....crap.
So we run into the nearby Shop-Rite buy some sodas, and plan out our story to the cops. We were gonna say we were lookin for some boxes, and ran inside the store to get some sodas real quick. As we walk out the door..I see the cop driving away from the area and out onto the highway.....whew! But then I think wait....cant they leave tickets on your car window?! So I rush over....no ticket, thank god.
As you can imagine we decided to leave that part of town and go see my GF for a few minutes. Did that and decided to try one more place. Maybe some of you know the corporation Pfizer (makers of Viagra)? Well yea they have quite a few offices around my city. So we gave it a shot, I was a little nervous doing it because of the tight security. I drive around the back of the building and see 2 dumpsters...decided to leave my car running...just in case:D. We walk on over...and wow. A PILE of computer monitors and systems sitting in a pile of snow.
So we rummaged through the pile. Most of the towers were gutted and werent very appealing. But the monitors..wow. I picked out 2 Samsung 17" Syncmaster 710s's which looked to be in good condition. Threw em in my car...and decided to call it a night. I'll let you guys know the condition of the monitors once they dry out :D . Overall I'd say it was a good night, im doin it more often.
 
Scored pretty well tonite. Was hanging with a bud over at his condo/complex. Lo and behold amongst the dumpsters and garbage a small emachines midtower poked its head.

Brought it home to discover that it was probably thrown out because of a loose ide cable. The thing works perfect and was very well kept...it was dust free on the inside as well.

-emachines micro tower and psu
-celeron 400
-2 x 128=256 pc133 sdram
-Win98
-some BX mobo w/integrated ati video & integrated sdram onboard ?! (anybody know about these?).
-4.3gb HD, wasn't wiped but don't feel like creeping thru his trojans/spyware
-pre-soundblaster creative sound card
-10/100 nic
-24X cdrom
-floppy
-great condition
- i wished it was a slightly more powerful system... :eek:
 
Thats a nice score, sounds like a very usable system with the 256mb of RAM. PC100 and 133 have gotten expensive lately.

Sounds like you could reinstall windows and make a quick buck off that system :)
 
Driving down a street, i noticed a moniter at the side of the road. Brought it home, it works, and displays a good picture, execpt for a few black dots in it.

Only thing is, ive never seen a moniter like this one... anyone know who makes it? It's a 17", 15" viewable.

pic1
pic1
pic1
 
Hope this helps tower. On your monitor, I did an FCC ID lookup and the company that came up was Royal Information Electronics Company (AKA RIC). It says they are based out of Taiwan, but your monitor was distrobuted from their Fremont, CA Plant.

Thats all ive found. Hope that gives you a little more info on your mystery monitor!

https://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/oet/forms/731/731_Form.hts?mode=print&RequestTimeout=500&application_id=68401&fcc_id='HSUTRLDH-1764'
 
I had no luck last night whatsoever :(. Our last hope, CompUSA, had a compactor! That makes two Best Buys, two Circuit Citys, one Office Depot, and one CompUSA in the area that ALL have compactors, and Office Max was empty. All the other dumpsters we checked were just boxes or regular trash.

Compactors are evil :(
 
I used to work for a maintenance company that did most fix-it work for Public Storage. The one perk of the job was cleaning out the units of people who never paid their monthly fee.

A few units were freaking goldmines. However, it's hard to load a piano into a untility van . . .

This one unit I ended up snagging a meat slicer (yes, like from the grocery store), an awesome Coleman sleeping bag and camping stove, both retailing for well over $100 a piece.

I also found this nice pen, which I've never used, but it's nice.

I knew the universal code to unlock the front gates, and there were a number of times I wanted to just rent a uhaul, go there and have my way with the units. Yea. . . fun stuff.

edit: I forgot about all the pharmacy rep stuff. The Public Storages in downtown Chicago had a crazy amount of tossed stuff from drug reps: pens, notepads, backpacks, clipboards. I once found an unopened case of A-1 steak sauce. . .that was cool. However, since it was food, I decided against taking it home.
 
this is by no means a dive, but while i was at work, i found a sandisk 128mb memory stick lying on the ground, cleaned it up and tested it. WORKS LIKE A CHARM!
 
man after reading some of this thread, i only WISH i could find newegg.com's HQ dumpster lol. but im on the other side of the country :(
 
Bad_Boy :
man after reading some of this thread, i only WISH i could find newegg.com's HQ dumpster lol. but im on the other side of the country
Click to expand...

Nah!, they're most likely dedicated "computer recycling technicians" like us :)
 
Holy shit I had a damn scare tonight!! Fucking wild animals!! So there's two dumpsters out at the office equipment shop around here and they usually have some good stuff out there. I went out there tonight and checked the first dumpster, and I heard something in the second dumpster, but I figured it was just the trash settling. I looked in the second dumpster and I saw an interesting box so I grabbed it, but then I heard something rustling and moving around in the dumpster!!! I thought a fucking raccoon was going to jump out at me or some shit. Holy shit I was scared. I ran to my ex and drove the fuck out of there and didn't look back. Man. I never even saw what it was but I heard something moving around and that was enough for me. It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't alone tonight, but I don't want to get attacked by some rabbid piece of shit raccoon and then have to drive myself to the damn hospital. That shit won't stop me from going back, though.

Lesson: try to avoid diving alone and if you hear something in the dumpster than leave and come back another night. Whatever is in there isn't worth getting bitten by some damn wild animal. Can you tell I'm freaked out/pissed off?
 
good thing my pet raccoon was in there staking out for me. i heard there was a laptop tossed :D

AJ
 
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