From the garage of my friend's uncle comes some more old tech.
First up is a Dell OptiPlex GX1. It's one of those older, late-'90s Dells with a desktop form factor. The specs appear to be a 500MHz Pentium 3 CPU with 128MB of PC-100 SDRAM and a 6.4GB hard drive. I can't figure out anything else about it just yet: while it was preloaded with Fedora Core 3, I don't know any of the username/password combinations to actually log into it, and I can't seem to get the CD drive to read burned CDs. It's a good candidate for another Debian netinstall with LXDE. After that I might either turn it into a router or sell it; I don't know which.
Next up is a pair of HP OfficeJet K80 multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax/etc's. One seems to work well, with the exception that the scanner bulb stays on all the time, and the internal speaker is dead. The other one doesn't have any ink in it, so I can't test the printer portion (I was too lazy to swap the cartridges), but it was still able to send a fax and scan properly. One interesting thing is that the printers have both USB type-B and Centronics parallel heads, which it turns out can work independently of each other, meaning that one computer can be connected via USB and one by parallel. It seems like this might be useful for running the parallel side on a JetDirect LPD queue and the USB side on my laptop. It's likely that I'll keep one and sell one, or sell both if I can't make any space for it (the K80 is huge).
There's supposedly also an Atari 800 over there that I'd be willing to see and get a kick out of.
In other news, I cheaped out on component video cables when I built my HDTV earlier this year, opting instead to use RCA audio cables I got at a yard sale for 25 cents each (actual component cables of the same length, by comparison, can run $30). The problem is that these generate a lot of noise at the higher resolutions like 1080i. Yesterday I took a roll of aluminum foil and some vinyl tape, and with them insulated the cables. Doing so got rid of the crosstalk from my Ethernet hub that showed up on the screen. Some of the minor fuzziness remains, though I'd sooner guess that it has more to do with the cables being too thin and not being rated for component's 0.7v signals than with interference.