Otherwise it will go in the next council cleanup.

Your council still accepts TVs? Mine refuses to take TVs and PCs, so of course those are now dumped in the bush, beside roads, etc.

This forum has no PM system which is unfortunate.

There is one here but it was turned off about 18 months after the forums opened due to abuse and issues with advertising. There are no plans to turn it back on. Members are invited to use e-mail to exchange personal details, etc.

Your council still accepts TVs?

Certainly does. Our council offers up to 4 free pre-booked pickups per year. They will take any household appliances.

I remember the days when it was a case of anything goes. I remember piles with gas cylinders, mattresses, white and brown goods - all with the doors still on them, building materials, car tyres and fibro. I think the only things that couldn't be chucked was anything that two blokes couldn't lift such as car engines and gearboxes.

Ryde Council (for some reason I still get their council cleanup information via the Strata manager for the flat I used to live in) barely accepts more than old furniture, fridges, stoves and tree branches now. They still take lightweight scrap metal but the scavengers assure that the council is not overburdened by it.

Robbbert:

Can you use this. It's a throwaway I use for spam-likely sites

horpst aat Gee Male daht cahm

This "encrypting" process is remarkably effective. You should be able to "decode" it
Of course it won't fool a human data miner, (an English speaking one at any rate) but avoiding giveaway words like a**ress in the text is also remarkably effective

GTC
People can say what they like about Blacktown Council, they give you up to 12 free "cleanup" collections a year. They take most household items (including mattresses and e-Waste). It's supposed to be limited to a "small box trailer load " but I've seen people put out ridiculous amounts of stuff, and it's always gone the next morning.
Their main trick is that you fill out a list of what will be put out, and different contractors come at different times to take it.
It costs $60 to dump a mattress at the Eastern Creek Refuse Transfer Station, but there's no limit to how many you can put out for collection, as long as you tell them beforehand.
Where I live, apart from garden refuse, just about everything disappears the night before anyway. It seems if it has even a gram of metal in it someone will take it.
That doesn't completely stop illegally dumping, but there is far less of it.
By the way, if you've bought a new mattress and you want to quickly get rid of the old one, a good trick is to carefully remove the plastic cover from the new one and put it on the old one, and put it out the front. It will probably be gone in less than an hour. Something about plastic wrapping makes the mattress look more valuable

Keith, what you describe has been my experience over many years, but that has now changed both here and in neighbouring municipalities.

I think you'll find most councils provide 3 or 4 free clean-ups per year, but many are allergic to e-waste. Given that the rubbish usually all ends up at the same place -- in Sydney at least -- it must be a council-by-council political decision. I guess some councils realise that banning such items, without providing an easy alternative, only leads to them being dumped elsewhere. Also, many residents can't be bothered reading (or can't read) the clean-up instructions anyway.

With large items like mattresses and fridges, I arrange for the delivery guys to remove the old ones as part of the deal. I don't want those items hanging around my place between clean-ups.

Took a stab at the address, sent a test email, didn't bounce, but no reply either.

'horpst' plus the obvious tail shows as a valid address here: https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/

Thanks for that link. Well it's up to Keith for the next move then... he's got until Friday to collect.

I've sent you a reply. I forgot to mention, the Horpst address also shows the name "Dave Murdoch" on replies.

Hi Keith

The thread has strayed somewhat from the original but I like your idea of putting one of those little digital STBs inside the TV.

Does the STB have IR remote? If so, I have a stack of (obsolete) programmable controller cards that can be programmed to interface to contacts on the mechanical tuner, read them and work out what key(s) to send to the STB. They are easy to program using a point-and-click approach but to do so you need a Windows machine that will run a 16 bit application. I also have software that can capture the IR remote if it isn't already in the library.

Interested?

Ian

Ian Robertson
I've actually got a pile of the "click-wheel" type bi-phase switches that are used for digital volume controls, and I had the idea of fitting some sort of belt drive to the shaft of the tuner to drive one of those. The idea is that if necessary the tuner could still work in its original manner.

" I have a stack of (obsolete) programmable controller cards that can be programmed to interface to contacts on the mechanical tuner, read them and work out what key(s) to send to the STB"

I'm not sure what you mean. Mechanical tuners don't have any contacts that tell you what channel you're on. My idea was that the "clunks" of the mechanical basically press the up or down buttons and you use the STB display (or the TV screen) to tell you what program you're watching. You only get 13 channels on a VHF tuner anyway.

Here's the plan, it involves trashing the tuner and bypassing vision and sound IF.
Pull out biscuits from the tuner and removed windings from a 5 pin section of them.
Choose a common and strap the remaking 4 contacts to encode numbers 1 to 13 or whatever you like, as a binary number.
Re-route the associated stationary contacts to 5 wires.
Connect wires to logic inputs of the card.
Program the card to poll and read the contacts ignoring 0
For each number, program the card to send the required numbers to the STB. You just need an IR LED - I have these in a neat stick-on moulded part.
I'd be happy to write the program, it's pretty trivial.
You could remove the unused valves. The video output of the STB is the right polarity to connect directly into G1 of the video amp. The audio goes straight to the volume pot. There should be 2v pp from the STB video out when there's no 75 ohm load. That should be enough.

I'm currently in Canberra, babysitting a sleeping grandchild, so doing this from my phone.
I'm warming to your digital tuner idea. Might do it myself to a Philips portable. Wish it was the earlier model with the big clunky tuner, like your P1!
Would be good if the STB also had USB playback, you could program the card to invoke that when a certain channel was selected.
You might have to do some tuning of the program to cater for the behaviour of the STB. To avoid intermediate channels being detected while you are rotating the knob, the program should detect the same number on 2 consecutive polls before the channel change is initiated. But of course after that it should not send the number again if it hasn't changed.
The card needs 5 volts regulated at about 2mA and an RS232 port connected for programming.

Ian