What to do with an old laptop

Posted on LinkedIn (in Croatian language), Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Your old laptop doesn't belong in the trash or needs to be "recycled". All it needs is a little attention, a screwdriver and €15 for an adapter+SSD from a popular Chinese shopping site. 🛠️

Proof? My first laptop from 2004. Today, it runs the latest Linux Debian and:

• powers the most popular Croatian Reddit bot
• generates daily sequences for my word game (which nobody plays, but I'm not giving up) 
• hosts a proxy server I use to scrape sites that think they can block me
• hosts an RSS aggregator that filters information chaos into something resembling order 
• ... what else could I add? 🤔

The original HDD gave out - it was the only part replaced. The rest of the hardware still works and serves its purpose flawlessly. We write off equipment as useless far too quickly! So this weekend, dust off your "old clunker" and spin up that home server. 😉 Bonus: fewer heavy metals and forever chemicals in the environment.

The most popular Croatian Reddit bot in action

fastfetch

Dead HDD (left) and modern replacement (right)

2026.10.23

For about a week, I have been running a daily mailer script on the machine. I wanted my own solution rather than relying on a mailing list provider.