Here’s a question: How do you dispose of/recycle unwanted tech items?

I’m looking at an every growing pile of items that I no longer need/want/use. Old mobile phone chargers, old mobile phones, old printers, dead harddisks and the like. I don’t really want to just toss them in the trash since I figure they’re using some not-very-environmentally friendly material, or so says my limited reading and research.

Are there local recycling centres that take in stuff like this? Or can we send the products back to their manaufacturers and hope that they’ll be disposed off in proper fashion?

Come to think of it, it’s quite a waste just to junk all of this stuff too. Some things are still sort of usable, like power adapters of gadgets long dead. Does anyone buy these things for resale? That would be a good avenue to look into as well.

If anyone has a lead, drop me a note all right?

Not Interactive, originally uploaded by ruiwen.

I really do hate software sometimes.

The Daily WTF - Souvenirs for stickers exchange, originally uploaded by ruiwen.

Sent in a few souvenirs hoping to get TDWTF stickers in exchange. Looks like they made it over safe and sound!

Saw them featured in today’s Souvenir Potpourri section. Guess that means I’ll be getting my stickers soon!

Yay!

[Incidentally, this post is my first direct post from Flickr. Just giving their direct-to-blog feature a test go. Nifty, though personally I'd prefer a little more editing functionality built-in. Does fine for text, but I'm not quite sure how to embed formatting or links just yet]

Talk about organic displays.

These fans must’ve put in more practice than the teams themselves.

I realise I’ve been hearing a lot about mobile social networks lately. Most prominent of the lot, or at least of those that I’ve heard of, are twitter and jaiku.

Basically, a “mobile social network” is one that you can take part in, even from your mobile phone. So there go the many hours spent replying to posts in front of your PC. Now at least you can go out and catch some sun and get a real tan, instead of a cathode-ray or liquid-crystal one.

And it’s interesting how much buzz these services have created. There are people predicting the death of twitter while yet others defend its usefulness and claim that it improves their social lives. Others like Mike Butcher, predict that 2007 will be the year of mobile social networking. In fact, the whole industry’s spawned its own little acronymn, MoSoSo.

Personally, I didn’t quite catch onto the concept of this microblogging (tumblelogging?) thing at first. But it seems like mobile social networking could well be the next big thing. After all, twitter (why not twittr really?) is spawning all sorts of hybrid creations, like the twaiku and twapper. I’m totawwy amazed.

Will MoSoSos be the next big wave? Probably. Who knows? There’s already a decent list of upcoming mobile services over on the Wikipedia MoSoSo page. Up to a certain point though, there’ll probably be a shakeout and then we’ll see what’s left.

In other news, SMS remains popular.