Wired.com takes a tour of SIMS Recycling Solutions in Roseville, California, on Thursday Feb. 19, 2008. Photo: Jim Merithew

It’s 2012. You just got a new laptop, smartphone, or TV for the holidays. Heck, maybe you received all three. But now your old gear is destined for a bookshelf or closet where it will just gather dust — or peg you as a compulsive hoarder.

If you don’t mind putting in a little bit of effort, you can get rid of last year’s gear (or even gadgets from a bygone decade) in an eco-friendly way. And you could even earn some cash in the process.

Whatever you do, just don’t throw y...

The original Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes. Photo: Dave Anderson

Dave Anderson looked into a desk drawer filled with tiny computers. Each was no bigger than a hardback novel, and their chips ran no faster than 600 MHz. Built by a little-known company called Soekris Engineering, they were meant to be wireless access points or network firewalls, and that’s how Anderson — a computer science professor at Carnegie Melon — used them in a previous research project. But that project was over, and he thought: “They’ve got to be good for something else.”

At first, he decided these tiny machines could be...