Archive
Critical Exposure’s Spring Exhibit a Hit with MRC Macs!
The Washington, D.C. non-profit group Critical Exposure is celebrating it’s 8th annual spring exhibit – Zoom In: National Lens, Local Focus. We are thrilled that they are using Macs donated by MacRecycleClinic for the exhibit, which features photography and writing by D.C. youth who are creating real change in their schools and communities.
The exhibit is at the Pepco Edison Gallery at 702 8th St. NW (a block from the Gallery Place metro).
A Thank You From The Blair HS PTSA
Posting this letter from Blair High School (Silver Spring, Md) PTSA “Prize Patrol” chair Christine White for the school’s popular After-Prom celebration. MRC donated computers and other prizes for the celebration – designed to keep students safe and secure after their Prom.
To Dave Ottalini and the MacRecycleClinic,
Thank you so much for your generous donation of two refurbished laptops, satellite radio and digital bank for this year’s After-Prom. We always know that the laptops are going to make a couple of Blair kids unbelievably happy (and this year is no exception!) but you’ll also be happy to know how incredibly popular the satellite radio turned out to be, with more than a hundred kids anxious to compete for the radio in our mini-raffle!
Extremely generous contributions like yours from friends and family of our Blair community are what makes the After-Prom festivities such a huge success, and what keeps our kids safe and healthy on the one night every year that our hardworking teens look forward to spending a fun and entertaining night together celebrating the many memories and good times of their four-year high school experience!!
We know how challenging it can be to juggle all the many worthy community causes that you service as part of the MacRecycleClinic, so we definitely want to let you to know how much we appreciate your continued support over many years to our students at Blair. Thank you again.
– And thank you to the Blair PTSA for the volunteer work all your parents contribute to the school (and to all parents frankly who give so much to their own school’s PTA/PTSA organizations – they all do good work!)
Critical Exposure Picks Up Their Towers
Adam Levner – the executive director for Critical Exposure, a DC non-profit – came by this past Monday to the MRC to pick up their 6 PPC Mac tower computers. He also left with two Canon Powershot cameras, an Ethernet hub and lots of cables, monitors, keyboards and mice.
We also wanted to mention their 8th annual spring exhibit this coming Wednesday that will show off all the great multimedia projects their students have created. Get more information at www.criticalexposure.org.
Tower Computers for Critical Exposure
MacRecycleClinic has been working for a few weeks to get a number of PPC towers ready for a Washington, D.C. based non profit called Critical Exposure.
We found out about this non-profit that “teaches youth to use the power of photography and their own voices to become effective advocates for school reform and social change” through Bethany Swain, a former CNNer and current lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Bethany’s students have gone to Critical Exposure’s offices to mentor their students. One of the Merrill Journalists as they are called, Louie Dane, wrote a retrospective for the Merrill News website.
When we get a request like this – the first questions we always ask at the MacRecycleClinic is what do you want to DO with the computers and what software would you LIKE to have. The answers to those questions provide the focus we need to put together the “package” they receive.
In Critical Exposure’s case, their students want to do multimedia – video, photo and audio editing. So on top of the “regular” OS X install we do, there were some additional things to add. Since none of these machines can go higher than OS 10.5.8, we had to make sure that the software we included could work with the last PPC Tower from Apple before the company moved to Intel. We would have loved to provide Intel machines with Final Cut Express (donations welcome), but folks are holding on to their Intel towers these days because Apple has not come out with a new update in quite a while. And FCE is hard to come by in numbers (Apple no longer offers it in fact).
That said, these machines run a good, stable and powerful version of the Mac OS and are very capable computers for what Critical Exposures students would like to do. There may be issues with third party software – Flash, Adobe Reader, etc. but not enough to make that much of a difference. These machines are ignored by hackers as well – one less worry.