Wish we could get some of this going down here in Southern Cali...

Those folks up in PDX have really got it going on. I just ran across the web site for Free Geek, which is an organization that takes donations of computers and either recycles them responsibly (if they're too old) or refurbishes them, installs Linux, and then gives them away.

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There's also the Personal Telco Project, another group of geeks up there who run a free wireless mesh network. They basically provide free wifi for a lot of places in Portland. WifiPDX offers a related service for finding free wifi hotspots with your cellphone. Between the two of them, laptop-people (and the geeks in Personal Telco) get free wifi and businesses get free advertising.

I enjoyed the service at a couple different places while I was in PDX last year for OSCON. The service had a lot of cool features, like lists of events around the wifi hotspot and other cool stuff, though I think you have to actually be in a PersonalTelco hotspot to see those features. The maintainance logs for Old Town Pizza were pretty funny (to a geek, anyway).

Aside from the tech stuff, it'd be nice to have some decent PDX-style microbrew down here too...