Hi folks. I'm refurbishing old donated laptops for locked-down / isolating pupils at Tewkesbury secondary school and its affiliated primaries. Goal is to help families that don't quite qualify for the existing government/schools scheme, the borderline / squeezed middle / just-about-managing etc. For example I have provided for a girl whose single mum "works too many hours" to qualify for the government scheme, and a child whose dad's employer went bust and suddenly that family finds themselves skint in reality whilst doing okay on paper.
If anyone knows of similar schemes in other local areas, please let me know, as I get asked a lot, and I can't refurbish all old laptops for everyone everywhere. Alternatively if anyone wants to start such a scheme, e.g. for Cheltenham or Gloucester, I have some hints / lessons learned:
Also, I am replacing HDDs with donated brand-new cheapo SSDs (Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop on PC only needs 6GB so a £15 60GB SSD works a treat), and now have accumulated quite a pile of old HDDs (more than 20 at last count). I've wiped/reformatted the HDDs with FreeDOS but as we all know that won't stop a determined hacker from recovering data, and I suspect there is a fair bit of personal data on these old HDDs.
Once lockdown is over, Andy J has kindly volunteered to take an angle grinder to the platter of each, although I thought that might make for a fun post-lockdown event at the space when this is all over, if anyone else wants to assist!
Hi folks. I'm refurbishing old donated laptops for locked-down / isolating pupils at Tewkesbury secondary school and its affiliated primaries. Goal is to help families that don't quite qualify for the existing government/schools scheme, the borderline / squeezed middle / just-about-managing etc. For example I have provided for a girl whose single mum "works too many hours" to qualify for the government scheme, and a child whose dad's employer went bust and suddenly that family finds themselves skint in reality whilst doing okay on paper.
http://www.cotswoldjam.org/lockdown/
I know there is a similar scheme in Winchcombe:
https://www.facebook.com/WAMYouth/photos/1847050492123705
If anyone knows of similar schemes in other local areas, please let me know, as I get asked a lot, and I can't refurbish all old laptops for everyone everywhere. Alternatively if anyone wants to start such a scheme, e.g. for Cheltenham or Gloucester, I have some hints / lessons learned:
http://www.cotswoldjam.org/lockdown/details.php
Also, I am replacing HDDs with donated brand-new cheapo SSDs (Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop on PC only needs 6GB so a £15 60GB SSD works a treat), and now have accumulated quite a pile of old HDDs (more than 20 at last count). I've wiped/reformatted the HDDs with FreeDOS but as we all know that won't stop a determined hacker from recovering data, and I suspect there is a fair bit of personal data on these old HDDs.
Once lockdown is over, Andy J has kindly volunteered to take an angle grinder to the platter of each, although I thought that might make for a fun post-lockdown event at the space when this is all over, if anyone else wants to assist!