HPR0808: Interview with Yancy Smith

Cheapskate Computing

Transcriber's notes: This is probably 95%-97% accurate. I made sure to get most of the important parts, even slowing down the recording - but some stuff just did not come out clearly. We were in a very quiet room, but the Fuze's mic is not professional quality. Transcriptions marked with an asterisk * are my best guess / paraphrase. There aren't many.

The Carolina Free PC organization that Yancy mentions can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/carolinafreepc/

Audio notes: Volume normalization & removal of bias, and the noise of me pressing buttons on the Fuze was removed. There is no editing for content.

Broam: So hi, I'm here with Yancy Smith, he was doing a...like a donation project he called the "Scrapper Project" here at SELF, I just wanted to ask him a couple questions about it.

Broam: Hi Yancy.

Yancy: Hi. Um.

Broam: So tell me about it.

Yancy: Well basically we take the time*, we take old computers from labs and computer stores, they give them to me; I recycle them to someone else.

And a couple weeks ago I got clearance in talking Dave Yates, our president, said, "can we do this here at our function" here at SELF. and I sent out to all our club members and to most of my facebook friends, we didn't put on the general list, we just tryin' this out. We didn't have no donations this time, but some of us bought some stuff in, mainly me, brought some old stuff in, to get rid of because I don't have the room...and... it didn't turn out so well, but had a couple of bags to send with the Athens [?] team home, so they enjoyed that.

Broam: That's cool. I have some other questions here... let's see here... um. so professional. So is this mostly you organizing this on your own, or?

Yancy: Yeah. But I'm working with the Carolina Free PC Foundation. I emailed them, they said they would be glad to take, and they emailed me back. Emailed Athens a week ago, but they didn't get my email in time, but they said next year, talk to such & such and they would know who to talk to. I'd be willing to open it to anyone.

Broam: Okay. Is this the first year you've done this, or?

Yancy: Yeah, it's first time. It's an ad-hoc thing, our group - the club, Upstate Carolina Linux user group. ( www.uclug.org ), is a meritocracy, but I still asked for permission.

Broam: Cool obviously crossing off a ton of questions here and who are you going to give the donated computers to? Other foundations, or?

Yancy: Mainly, um, if there had been some this year, there would have been a three-way split - who needs what parts. I found out that the Carolina [group] wanted the hard drives and certain memory sets and things, they would have gotten that. Free PCs they had certain amounts that wanted, and the rest I would have taken home or send on to someone else down the road.

Broam: Ok. And uh, and did you look at any other projects - I know you contacted some people, but did you look at other, like, similar things that people have done on line, like, say Freegeek or Helios Initiative for anything like that, for ideas?

Yancy: Mainly it's between, um, I haven't heard of them too much; but like what I said I'm following the guidelines of the Carolina PC and some of the Athens stuff. I happen to know um, what we - I had contact with them last year and so if there's something they can use...

Broam: Ok. You said something in the Facebook post you sent me about Linux being required by South Carolina state law. Could you explain that a little more?

Yancy: Well it's... that was a misstatement. What I was saying was that by State law requires you to send off the parts and metals stuff, not in the trash they send it off to a scrapyard -

Broam: Oh, ok... yeah I...

Yancy: but the part about the Linux is I put Linux on there because it wipes the drive down completely and clearly because of the data retention laws, that's why

Broam: aaaah, ok.

Yancy: see a lot of the stores, I go into a thift store, like a Goodwill or a church store, they don't really wipe down the systems they build. They don't have the [expertise]. They just wipe* a couple directories and think it's sanitized. That is a dangeorus thing to do.

Broam: Yes, I know... (In retrospect, sounds kinda flippant, sorry. I meant to agree with him here. ed.)

Yancy: That and the license - any issues of rebuilding windows, I do that only when I have a holographic key. So it's just like even if I have a key I still put Linux on top of it, so if there's an issue with Windows, I can recover but also I still can introduce them to Linux, because games, software, photos...

Broam: Everything is free, everything is legally transferrable.

Yancy: Yeah. Especially there's an application called Photo...photo wall or photoroom, it's sorta like Apple's album* for all your photos. It's the coolest thing.

Broam: Cool! And I have one last question ...got any stuff for me?

Yancy: Um...

Broam: *laughter*

Yancy: Not much left. Athens took off with all of my stuff.

Broam: All right. Thanks a lot, Yancy. I appreciate your time.

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