Free Geek granted two PCs, one laptop, one printer and peripherals to L’Arche Nehalem for use in their residential facility. This is the third time we have granted hardware to this caring and inclusive organization!

Free Geek will be closed on Saturday, September 4

Working out on the job. You love it. You also like people and teaching them how to move big stuff and disassemble little stuff. You like warehouses. You’ll want to look into our Recycling Internship. We would love you forever!

Free Geek upgraded our phone system - yay! If you experience any difficulties calling in, please let us know. Thank you for your patience as we sorted this all out.

This month the Free Geek Community Technology Center became the first Oregon nonprofit recognized as a Basel Action Network e-Stewards Recycler, the gold standard for ethical practices in electronics recycling.

BAN is an international nonprofit organization that advocates for environmental justice and responsibility in the handling of electronic waste. “It is an expensive and complex process to recycle electronics so the poisonous byproducts do not hurt people or the planet,” said Jim Pucket, BAN’s Executive Director. “We congratulate Free Geek on passing our rigorous review.” » Continue reading “Free Geek Designated “e-Stewards Recycler””

Pen the Next Free Geek Slogan and win $200!

We’ve tried on our share of slogans over the years. The closest thing we have to an official slogan right now is “Helping the Needy Get Nerdy Since the Begninning of the Third Millenium.” It started out as a quote from an article about us, and it kinda just stuck.

A lot of folks love it. But a lot don’t. Most of these folks seem to stick on the word “needy,” since we help everyone get geeky. It’s true! Free Geek represents a lot of things to a lot of different people. Which is what makes it so dern hard to sum it all up in a few words.

That’s where you come in! » Continue reading “Geek Sloganoff!”

FreeGeek forgot to update our keyring package in time, so FreekBox users may be experiencing issues with running the update manager. If you are receiving an error message regarding GPG signatures not being verified when you try to install or update packages please check here for information on how to correct the problem.

If you submitted a web-form to us anytime between April 27th and May 9, we did not receive it due to a technical glitch (we won’t bore you with the details). This includes all hardware grant applications, requests for information on volunteering, requests for event participation–anything you may have submitted to us via our website.

We sincerely hope this message finds you, and that you contact us again. It’s not that we’re being flakes. We can all blame technology together.

Requests sent via email were mostly unaffected. If you emailed us and we didn’t get back, that probably is us being flakes. If in doubt please resend.

All apologies for the inconvenience!

Well, here it is. It only took a couple-few years to get here, but we’re ready to roll out our brand new site. Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and skills to make it so. (And a special thanks to the fine folks from slashdot.org that helped us stress test the site after going live. We’re back now.)

It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be tweaking things a lot in the weeks to come. In addition to the new look, the goal of this site is to make it easier to maintain and keep up-to-date. That is why we’ve chosen to use WordPress as our platform; we want this site to operate as a blog because things move pretty fast at Free Geek, and we need a site that can keep pace.

Please look around. And tell us what you think about the new site: The look, the layout, the content. Did you find what you were looking for? Anything we’ve neglected? Something broken? Please let us know.

Oregon E-Cycles
Free Geek is participating in Oregon E-Cycles, a convenient way for Oregon residents to responsibly recycle their computers (including laptops), monitors, and televisions. The first 7 of these items are always free to recycle with Free Geek, but if you have 7 or more of these items, please call us beforehand to determine if you qualify for free recycling on everything! Read more here.