At the corner of Prospect Avenue and Terrace Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn last December, Y and I saw this passageway opened to an underground passage way. I didn’t look closely at the raised metal cover, so I’m not sure if it was ConEdison, MTA, or another utility. No workers were around, so they didn’t offer a clue either. Looking below inside, the walls of the passageway were covered with spray painted graffiti.
On our walk to the subway on the way to City Tech yesterday, Y and I found this Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) compact computer left out on the sidewalk. Originally priced about $1000 as a barebones system in 2018, it features Intel® Core™ i7-8809G Processor with Radeon™ RX Vega M GH graphics, two SO-DIMM DDR4-2400 RAM slots, and two M.2 slots for storage. It has numerous input and output ports on the front and rear. For something about the size of a hardback book, it is significantly heavy–I’m guessing its cooling system has a lot of copper. I didn’t have my hex drivers at school, so I wasn’t able to open it up to see how it is configured for RAM and storage. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a PSU, so I don’t have a way to power it up either. There are some compatible PSUs for sale on eBay, but they range from $150 to 185, which is too high for me to gamble on a possibly dead system. While I wait on a bargain on a PSU, I’ll add the NUC to the Retrocomputing at City Tech collection that I keep in my increasingly small office space.
