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Archive for April, 2011

Silver Spring Patch Covers MacRecycleClinic

April 14, 2011 Comments off
MacRecycleClinic Volunteers - by Patch reporter Ben Gross

MacRecyleClinic volunteers - Photo courtesy Silver Spring Patch

Thanks to the Patch’s Ben Gross for visiting MacRecycleClinic’s Monday Night Clinic a few weeks back. His article appeared online and starts:

According to the EPA, between 2005 and 2010, more than 250 million computers became useless, with less than 10 percent of them being recycled. In fact, more than 85 percent of the computers “thrown away” wind up in landfills.

At the same time, many individuals and families lack the financial resources to have a home computer. One local company has found a way to address both problems at once – Silver Spring’s MAC Recycle Clinic.

(The Patch got a little excited with the caps – but we’re thrilled to have the story out there!)

If you’d like to read the entire story – the URL is: http://bit.ly/fo9KqX

If Apple Replaces Aluminum with Carbon Fiber Can it be Recycled?

April 11, 2011 3 comments

Apple filed a patent for a carbon fiber case in 2009. There were lots of rumors of Apple devices using the material but they all proved to be false.

News reports this week have Apple hiring a composites engineer named Kevin Kenney (who has consulted with Apple and has expertise with carbon fiber bicycles). Carbon fiber is a terrifically strong and lightweight layered material that would likely be a good replacement for the aluminum the company now uses for its laptops and i-devices. You can read more about it in Apple Insider and 9 to 5 Mac among others. Of course, a Google search also indicates that Apple has been testing carbon fiber for a long time and even filed a patent in 2009. But the real question for those of us who have to deal with older machines is – can laptops or idevices with cases made of carbon fiber be recycled as e-waste?

Read more…

UConn vs. Butler: The Recycling Final Two

April 3, 2011 Comments off

Update: Congratulations to the Huskies for winning their third national championship tonight (Monday, April 4) over Butler.

UConn and Butler are in the men’s NCAA National Championship game Monday night. Both are excellent basketball teams. But how do those schools match up where recycling is concerned? The University of Connecticut is a large school located in Storrs, Connecticut – closer to Boston than New York. Butler is what’s called a “mid-major” – a small school located just outside Indianapolis, Indiana.

Read more…

Quick Shoutout for Prosoft Engineering’s Great iPad Service

April 3, 2011 Comments off

Update: April 10, 2011 – I got four disks back on Saturday – two PC, Two Mac – as Gordon Bell says they ran the CF Card through both versions of their software. It appears that all the jpgs that were damaged have been restored – great news! Again – I offer my thanks to Mr. Bell and everyone at Prosoft for their help in restoring my photos. We’ll certainly point folks who come into MacRecycleClinic’s Monday clinic to them when Mac users with corrupted flash cards come our way.

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I wanted to give a quick “Thank You” to Prosoft Engineering / The Data Rescue Center in Livermore, California. I tried to upload photos from a Compact Flash card to my iPad 1 and a number of the photos got corrupted. Prosoft – through its JoeSoft subsidiary – offers a program called Klix that is designed for digital picture recovery. I purchased the program – but it was only able to recover one of the photos on the card.

When I reported the problem to the company, owner Gordon Bell sprang into action – and asked me to send my old 8GB card to him so they could check out the problems associated with importing photos into an iPad (via the USB dongle and a Sony card reader in this case). Gordon sent me a new – and better – 8GB card in return. Excellent service! I may not be able to get those photos back, but I will continue to be a customer of JoeSoft. (In fact I already own Drive Genius 3 to help keep my hard drive healthy.)

Not a lot of research has been done on issues related to the direct import of photos into the iPad – let us know if you have had any and we’ll compile them here. This could well be an issue our folks at the Mac Recycle Clinic might come up against in the future, so any information – and how you might have dealt with it – would be appreciated.

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