tech and society

For a lot of people cash is getting harder to come by nowadays. Chances are you have a few items that you wouldn’t mind converting into money or gift cards, stuff you aren’t using anyway. But where to go? And, maybe it sounds like a lot of trouble to haul everything across town to trade it in.

The good news is that it’s easier than you think to recycle your old electronics, scrap or otherwise, for maybe more than a few bucks. You can run your old gadgets through the following sites:

Buymytronics.com includes free shipping when you sell your unused electronic devices to them. They take just about any desktop or laptop computer, smartphones, PDAs, and gaming equipment, working or not. Very simple interface to help you determine what your old gadget is worth.

NextWorth will accept all kinds of old electronics like cell phones, cameras, iPods & iPhones, gaming consoles, e-Readers, laptops, video games, GPS units, media & audio players, DVD Movies, etc., although you will get a target gift card in return rather than cash. Still, chances are you have all kinds of unused gear that you could convert into new cool stuff!

If you have an old working or non-working iPod or iPhone, you can try Tunecycle and their automated process for determining how much they will give you for it, depending on its condition and whether you can provide accessories with it.

As an example, even a 1st generation 8GB iPhone working/in good condition/with no accessories is worth $68.

Apple also has a program for recycling your old computer, and depending on the condition of your iMac, Macbook, MacBook Pro or iPhone/iPod Touch, or old PC, they might give you credit towards a purchase if the unit is in working condition. (I have first hand experience of this recently, and I can confirm that they would at least take even an old unworking iMac at an Apple store to recycle, though they gave me nothing for it).

If there is a downside to electronic recycling for money I don’t see what it is. Trading in electronic scrap for cash means you’ll feel better about doing your part to help the environment, and the money will help your bottom line.

OK, maybe a better title for this post is: insider trading tip-offs. What does it have to do with programming and web development? A Canadian law student and programmer has created a website that will tell you, supposedly within two minutes of the SEC making the information public, when an insider has made a trade in any company you’d care to follow. Simply enter the ticker symbol and leave your email, and you’ll receive ‘instantaneous’ alerts. Yahoo! HackU was the original inspiration for this idea, and I guess it’s too useful not to continue. There is another proprietary system that gives insider trading info, but it’s neither free nor real-time. Talk about one programmer taking the bull (as it were) by the horns and doing something really subversive. He even makes the source code and YQL tables available, allowing anyone access to real-time SEC data:

“The main RSS scraper for this application is a YQL statement that trims down the SEC’s feed and spits it out in JSON.”

Bingo. The site is a triumph of simplicity.

A little background: insider trading is by no means necessarily illegal. ‘Insiders’, often officers of a given company, are certainly allowed to buy and sell stock issued by the company for which they are officers, but they must do so within strict guidelines established by the SEC. Sophisticated traders/investors often use insider trading stats as one of dozens of indicators that might help them accurately forecast stock prices.