No, no, not the things that run around causing women to stand on chairs and scream in 1960s sitcoms (to paraphrase Douglas Adams), but the computer ones.

From our transistions through the various ages of mice, we’ve got a number of old filthy-rollered mice lying in cupboards around the place. As I mentioned on the old mouse mats post, we usually use track pads these days or optical mice if we need anything a bit more precise, so those old clogged up ones are just going to waste.

Any ideas? For either the whole mouse or any of its parts?

(Photo by weirdvis)

Another suggestion from Em:

Thanks for the light bulb ideas – really great.

Cheers, Em

We use them until they’re dead too and I worry about reusing them if they’re food gacky – but any suggestions anyway, particularly if the gack level is low?

(Oh, and I’ve also had an email from a chap called Antony who wants to find a company that makes cardboard boxes from recycled cardboard – if anyone has any ideas, leave a comment below or email me and I’ll forward along the message)

Now that the lovely internet is here for our every need, I can’t remember the last time I used a phone book. But still, every year or so we get phone books, Yellow Pages, Thompson directories…

They sit on our shelf for a little while, gathering dust and taking up space, then, during one of his many ill-timed cleaning frenzies, John will suddenly want to get rid of them and won’t rest until they’re out of the house or at least relocated to somewhere not in his frenzy path.

So any ideas on how we could reuse or recycle them? What do you do with them?

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As I’ve said before, we go through quite a lot of compact discs. John tends to buy them in 50 or 100 packs and sometimes gets them on a fancy spindle thing.

If you can’t quite see it from the photo or know what I mean, it’s a plastic base with a spindle sticking out the middle, with a clear(ish) lid over the whole thing.

The spindle thing is useful for keeping the blanks in one place but once you’ve burnt them all, it gets to be a bit of a pain to have to sort through the whole stack whenever you want a particular disc.

So any suggestions about what we can do with the spindle box – and its lid – when we’re done with it?

We have an old gas cooker without an integral flint so we go through a lot of matches. We tried one of those clicky flint-on-a-stick things but got too annoyed with it to continue so we went back to good old flame.

We throw the used matches on the compost heap but every few weeks, we have a empty box too. We buy cook’s matches so they’re quite big boxes – any suggestions on what we can do with them?