Gadgetory

so have you got some old electronics lying around and not sure about the proper way to dispose of them here's your first hint as much as you may or may not have enjoyed that silly little bit that we did there that was not it the Logitech G 303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with delta0 technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your setup check out the link in the video description to learn more now it's no great secret that to reduce your consumption or reuse that which has already been consumed is better in terms of ecological impact than recycling it but sometimes it happens that you might have an unfortunate run of bad luck that causes oh I don't know three motherboards in a row to spontaneously die through no fault of your own or here's another scenario you've got devices that technically still work but have come to the point where absolutely no one not even your weird uncle who keeps milk crates of electronics in his garage is willing to use them so the first question I usually get is why can't I just put my old CRT TV or motherboard or harddrive in the garbage and the answer is that while you actually technically can because most garbage collection services frankly don't have the time or willingness to dig through your trash bin to see what you put in there there are a lot of good reasons why you shouldn't number one is that it keeps chemicals and heavy metals managed correctly a waste can contain mercury lead cadmium arsenic lithium and a wide variety of other harmful or dangerous substances number two is that precious material such as aluminum from casings copper from wiring or even gold from contact points can be recovered through the disassembly of old electronics this lessens the need for harvesting new raw materials from the finite supply of resources that is our planet Earth and number three even if you're not a tree hugger or whatever this should matter to you if you're a taxpayer is that it keeps these items out of landfills which means landfill space is conserved lowering the cost of your local waste disposal services and in the long term even the costs associated with things like increased water filtration if any of these metal and up in the water supply so then okay that sounds great Linus why aren't people doing this then great question and the answer is pretty simple it's time-consuming and tedious work to safely disassemble these products to the point where they can be reused in place of raw materials which means it's actually quite expensive to do so here in BC Canada we have what's called an environmental handling fee that gets charged on items that can be returned for free recycling and while there's plenty of debate to be had about a mandatory fee at the time of purchase on all items I'll leave that to the philosophers but is quite possible your region has a similar program that you can take advantage of and even if it doesn't you may discover some random and unexpected ways to dispose of this stuff as well bottle Depot's for example in my area are the returned point for most a waste and IKEA of all places has their own in-store drop-off for household battery and light bulb recycling go figure and if your area doesn't have anything like this there are services like think recycle comm that do charge for the items that they can't get any value out of but can actually pay a bounty for some other items and they'll do things like refurbish toner cartridges and they'll accept and even pay by the pound for phones iPads and laptops even if they're completely non-functional all you have to do is put at least fifteen items in a box and ship it off to them if you have enough of the acceptable items versus complete junk they're even willing to provide you with a free shipping label but wait if this video has inspired you to run out and responsibly dispose of your electronic waste there are a couple of things you should do first number one see if it still works hey we've got a local program called free geek that is willing to take a lot of old computer and electronic stuff and distribute it to people and organizations that need it like I said at the beginning reuse is better than recycling and number two while you're at it thoroughly wipe any personal data off of your devices before or recycling them while most people don't even want to see that selfie sex tape you made that night after graduation or whatever anyone who does want to see it you probably don't want them seeing it so do your due diligence and on the subject of digital security it's fairly common knowledge among the tech savvy that even in a perfect world text-based passwords without additional authentication factors are just not very secure and there are a lot of companies out there trying a lot of different things to improve this which leads us to today's episode sponsor true key by Intel security it's a password manager that removes the hassle of passwords across all of your devices computers phones and tablets with support for Windows with chrome and ie support iOS and Android you can log into apps and websites with your face fingerprint or by swiping a notification on your personal smartphone and it always knows that you're you with multi-factor authentication only a combination of being on a trusted device passing facial recognition and/or swiping a notification on your smartphone can unlock your passwords and you can add extra factors to pass words you'd like to really lock down or fewer for websites that you'd like to access faster and that don't hold any valuable information your true key account syncs across all of your devices so be sure to download it to your phones tablets and computers you can find a link for where to try it out in the video description thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop on Amazon instructions up there by buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our awesome community forum now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our tour of our server room where I show some of the hardcore gadget Reve that makes the whole operation tick around here thanks for watching guys see you next time you