It is interesting to receive donated USB flash drives and where they’ve come from. It is clear this website finds people from all over the world. Most donations come from people inside the United States and we can only assume that is related to the inexpensive shipping cost to send us recycled flash drives.
For this round of postings to say thank you, we used chatGPT to insert the state bird for the associated location of those who donated. A lot of interesting bird names, most of which we are not familiar with. If you have donated and interested to hear your state’s bird name, look no further!
These free flash drives are donated to help kids in need of portable computers in the form of a computer stick.
Ursell – Katy, TX (Northern Mockingbird)
Nathan Sobczak – Elma, NY (Eastern Bluebird)
M Clark – Orinda, CA (California Quail) *Mentionable: Once and For All (www.onceandforall.biz)
Unknown – Munster, IN (Northern Cardinal)
Nathan Roaih – Reno, NV (Mountain Bluebird)
Naomi Ford – Mansfield, CT (American Robin)
Chris Rawlings – Cambridge, UK
Chris McGunnigle – Hackettstown, NJ (Eastern Goldfinch)
Judith Labounty – Fort Smith, AR (Northern Mockingbird)
Gogley – Oviedo, FL (Northern Mockingbird)
F Henry – Boston, MA (Black-capped Chickadee)
Janet Williams – Fenton, MO (Eastern Bluebird)
Ursell – Katy, TX (Northern Mockingbird)
The Binyamins – Bronx, NY (Eastern Bluebird)
Chris Ball – Matthews, NC (Northern Cardinal)
Makamae Edayan – Kapaau, HI (Hawaiian Nene)
Michelle Long – Bridgeville, PA (Eastern Bluebird)
Unknown – Salira, CA (California Quail)
The other reason we listed the state bird after each donar’s location, is that we find it challanging to simply re-write the same “thank you” each month for all the donations… but since we are on the topic, Thank you.
For those of you considering to donate USB flash drives to our cause, you may ask yourself how is the recycled USB drive handled before going out to SugarLabs?
Below is a picture of some drives being digitally cleaned and erased before going out the door. We use Nexcopy duplicator equipment and with this gear, there is a D.o.D. erase function [Department of Defense grade function]. The USB erase function writes random ones-and-zeros to the entire memory space. So anything on the drive, whether it be inappropriate data, personal data or even virsus’ the erase function wipes them out.
Once the drive is completely written over with random binary data, we use a format function in the duplicator equipment and format the drives as FAT32. Not all drives will pass the erase function or the format function and those drives are taken out of the recycle process.
We have used the above procedure for years and very confident in the process and outcome. To donate your USB flash drives, you may visit our USB donation page to get the three step process.
For all of you who have donated, thank you! Please remember, if you include a note with your donated flash drives with a website link or blog address, we will be happy to post that link in this news room section of our site.
The month of July we received many donated drives. Here is a quick post to those who sent drives in and included their information on the envleop. Remember, if you want a mention or link back to your website, please include that information with your shipment.
Those who sent in, include:
Nadine Lai – Edmonton, Canada
Bennett – Raleigh, NC
James – UK
David Waro – Madison, WI
A. Harris – Forest Grove, OR
K. Saca – Alamo, CA
Mark Hank – Burnsville, MN
Unknown – Boston, MA
Remember, whatever you send in, we will use a Nexcopy USB duplicator to erase all the content on the drive. This process is done so that no data could be recovered or found on the drive after we give it away to SugarLabs.org
This week Recycle USB received 13 total drives for donation. Thank you for sending the drives. They will be sent to Sugar Labs on our next shipment out.
