Since moving to the island, we no longer have curbside trash pickup. Instead, we put our trash in Timmy the Titan and drive it down to the transfer station where we can put it into various bins or “the chute” from where, presumably, it gets trucked to a landfill.
Some of the other transfer stations on the island also have little attached thrift stores, so instead of just landfilling or recycling your cast-offs, you can donate them so they can find a new life. HA is good at thrifting, as is her son. I’m not a big fan of shopping in general, and that extends to thrift stores, but I do find the occasional bargain. With HA’s help (and Barbara’s), the best half of my wardrobe was bought for pennies on the dollar.
HA and her son and I were out for a scenic drive when she asked me to pull into a transfer station. There was a thrift store there. I was walking around, marveling as I am wont to do at the panoply of things folks throw away. I found two shirts I liked. Then, out of the corner of my eye…
…I saw the exact same model (tp-link Archer A7) of wireless router that I am using to (1) bypass my ISP’s router (which fails in strange ways) and (2) as a bridge at the end of 500 feet of fiber optic cable down at the studio. So why would I need a third? Because we currently have guests staying in the new garage and while there’s lots of WiFi signal over most of our five acres, the garage is a big not-spot. The Archer has features that the older router I’d tried for this purpose lacked (5GHz, MIMO) and I knew that it could be flashed with OpenWRT firmware (moving me another step away from closed, proprietary solutions that can be weaponized) and giving me a more performant, configurable, and nimble router.
I had to find a working power supply (the $3 router had none, but I had several appropriate boxes I’d hoarded), perform a factory reset, use the router’s internal firmware update feature to install OpenWRT, then configure it as a bridge. I then had to run a long cat6 cable under the house, and I mounted the “new” router on the side of the house that faces the garage. Money! (OpenWRT also supports mesh routing, but I believe in using cables wherever possible).
So a $3 purchase, a few hundred dollars in engineering time, and the garage has access. There’s also one less hunk of plastic and electronics in the local landfill.
—2p