What do you do with your old gadgets?

AGaGu is committed to wringing every single breath of life from his old kit, even those items that currently reside in The Pile, a dangerous wife-troubling stack of ageing electronics that Guru hasn’t yet brought himself to dispose of. He is determined, for example, to cover every corner of the vast Guru homestead with phone-powered security cameras, running IP Webcam (£2.38) on Android and piping that footage to an old PC running open source software iSpy (free) for recording. It’s not the simplest system – to be honest, GaGu will probably get Guru Jr. to do the complex software bits of it – but it’s recycling in action, and means none of that precious old kit has to cross the threshold.

When the time comes to actually remove old stuff, Guru favours the most altruistic methods possible. You don’t have to; you could attempt to wring a bit of cash out of your old stuff on eBay, but given that every one of its policies favours the buyer over the seller, prepare to be bitten if your purchaser proves to be less than scrupulous. You could also chuck your phone (for example) at a service like Mazuma in exchange for a token pittance, but who knows what they’ll do with it on the other end.

Guru’s real payment is the warm glow he feels inside, both from the red wine and from the satisfaction of bunging old computers to computersforcharities.org, or collections of miscellaneous gadgetry at his local charity shop chain. Check with yours before you send electricals, as many aren’t equipped to test them before sale. Everything else, once it finally leaves The Pile, will be properly recycled by Guru’s local council in accordance with the exciting-sounding WEEE directive, because GaGu doesn’t need another environmental lawsuit on his hands after what happened to those oily seabirds.