- One friend at work gave me a $80 pair of gaming headset made for PC/PS3/360. They light up green, and have KILLER bass thanks to their 60mm drivers.
- Another friend at work game me a slim PS2 with all cables, a controller, an 8MB Sony memory card, and 3 games for it, including Kingdom Hearts 1. Also with this stuff was a Sega Genesis system with all cables, 2 controllers, and about 14 random games. He even threw in a silver PSP-2001, and it had a 4GB MemoryStick, and the UMD of The Simpson's Road Rage.
- One guy got onto the metro train with me, and I sat on the seat facing sideways, with two extra seats next to me. He had a bike and a laptop bag, set his laptop on one of the spare seats by me, and hung up his bike in the bike zone. He stood by his bike so nobody would steal it, and a few stops later got off. Well I got off at the end of the line about an hour later, and I was the only person left on the train... And just then noticed he left his laptop behind (I had been playing DSi, and hadn't noticed he left it when he got off). It was quite old, Pentium M with 1GB of DDR1 memory and AMD 6150 graphics. But what it lacked in processing power, it made up for in how comfortable it was to type on. It's an absolute dream to type stories up with. having no way to contact the owner, I wiped the drive in my desktop, put the drive back in, and installed Linux Mint on it and used it as a Word Processor and music machine. (I absolutely kept the laptop. I figured he didn't want it if he left it on the train. Nobody would be so dumb as to simply "forget" something so expensive and important if they still wanted it.)
- I was working at a hotel as a janitor, and found a $224 pair of headphones sitting on top of the paper towel dispenser. The hotel had been quiet for hours and everyone was in bed, so I kept them.
- My stepdad works for nvidia, and has worked on various graphics chips. He worked on the Fermi chip, and gave me a prototype dev card of a GTS 450 1GB. It was considered unfit for public release because the chip's single-use fuses that "burn" the chip ID had been set with the internal chip name "GF106" instead of "Geforce 450 GTS". As a result, this card couldn't be sold to the public. If you tried instaling the drivers using the traditional installer(s), it would fail because the chip had the incorrect ID. Drivers had to be manually installed via Device Manager. Linux had zero issues with the card.
- My stepdad also worked on the Tegra 4 chip inside the first Nvidia SHIELD Portable. As a result from working on the project, everyone working there (on the project) got a retail unit free as a "thank you". He gave it to me for Christmas in 2013.
- My close highschool friend gave me her Samsung Galaxy S4 when mine died. (She didn't need it since she switched phone companies.)
I got all of the above for free^
- One time I went to a Shari'S restaurant (
www.sharis.com) to buy an Oreo pie. It normally cost around $13. Well I was about to pay for the pie when I also ashked the guy if he could make change for a $20 bill. He first gave me $19 change for the pie, and the $20 back in smaller bills... I basically got the whole Oreo pie for $1 instead of $13!
