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.”

BAN’s e-Stewards Program designation is awarded to North American electronics recyclers who uphold the highest standard of environmental and social responsibility. This includes tracking materials through to final disposal, ensuring no hazardous materials are exported to developing nations, sent to prisons, landfills or incinerators. In addition to designating an organization’s current practices as responsible, BAN mandates regular audits to ensure that the standards are maintained and improved over time.

According to BAN, 80% of recycled electronic goods from the developed world are exported to developing countries where they are processed in primitive conditions, severely endangering the environment, workers and communities. “In an industry rife with fraud and false claims, only e-Stewards can prove they are responsible and ethical,” Pucket said.

“We’ve followed these principles and practices for years,” said Liane Kocka, Free Geek’s Recycling Coordinator. “We know we do the right thing with the electronics we receive, but becoming an e-Stewards Recycler provides the highest form of independent verification, to us and to our donors.”

“Reuse is the highest form of recycling, and that’s been Free Geek’s main focus for the past ten years,” said Dave Haskins, Free Geek’s Production Coordinator. “We are able to reuse over a quarter of the items we receive. That may not sound like much, but it’s many times the reuse rate of most recyclers. What this translates to is Free Geek giving away more than 2,000 computers to volunteers and nonprofits this year alone.”

Read the full text of the e-Stewards Pledge.

Then we have just the volunteer internship for you! Free Geek’s awesome Hardware Grants Program could use some extra support in giving computers out to community organizations. Please check out the volunteer internship description for more information and an application.

We’ve set up a brief online survey. It’ll only take a couple minutes, and it’s completely anonymous.

So whad’ya waiting for? Chime in!

http://www.tinyurl.com/ThriftStoreSurvey

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! Free Geek is an Open Source kinda place (heck, I might just submit that!). We want our new slogan to come from our community, and we want it to excite the whole community.

Here’s the deal. Roll it around your head, and when you get those few, perfect words together, send ‘em in. You can submit your entry via http://www.freegeek.org/sloganoff or by tweeting your idea with the tag #geeksloganoff

We’re hoping to have a winner in time for our 10 year anniversary (how cool would that be?), but this thing is open until further notice.

Open your audio cd extration program by going to Applications>Sound & Video> Audio CD Extractor.

Go to edit>preferences

Under output format select CD Quality, MP3 (MP3 Audio). Then click the close button.

Back in the main window (sound juicer) select the tracks you wish to extract and click the extract button.

Click Me!

First download and extract the windows driver for the card you are trying to use (hint: use google).

Next install ndisgtk, either from Add/Remove or by command line:

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

Then look under system>administration>Windows Wireless Drivers or use the command line:

sudo ndisgtk

In the window, select “install new driver” and browse to the location of the windows driver and select the file ending in .inf

After this you should see an icon on the left hand side of the ndisgtk window, listing the name of the device and “Hardware present:Yes”

If it does not see the hardware as present try an alternative version of the windows driver (ie the one for vista instead of xp).

Once the driver is properly installed and detected it should work as normal using the ubuntu network manger.

If you need to log in with a username and password, choose a service type of “FTP (with login)”, but if you do that, consider using a service type of “SSH” instead, which uses the secure sftp protocol and which most systems out there will support.

Enjoy!

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!