Found laptops on the street fully abused and often smashed to bits. Recently pulled a 160gb SSD out of one. That’s worth keeping, as well as the RAM, often.
TV tuners/media players: they sometimes have internal hard drives. I recently pulled a 320gb 2½″ HDD out of one. Even though that’s likely too small to serve as someone’s laptop system, anything bigger than 120gb is big enough to store a copy of the whole Debian system including all apps (5 blu-rays merged these days).
All DC powered electronics: it’s useful to cannabalize the female barrel connector. There are many universal PSUs with a collection of male tips, but never female tips. The female tips are useful for making your own barrel adapters, instead of cutting and soldering your OEM PSUs.

Discussing ways to reduce waste and build community!
Celebrate thrift as a virtue, talk about creative ways to make do, or show off how you reused something!

I recently pulled a color LCD from a vape. I can’t believe ppl throw this stuff in landfill.
However, having trouble driving it in the sense that I have no idea how. I have an esp8266 and started looking at arduino but if you have any advice lmk.
LCD has a FPC 10-pin cable and I know the original MCU that drove it, but thats it
TBH I don’t know that much. If it is a wider ribbon (40-50 pins), it is parallel RGB (5 or 6 bits per color, clock, power, etc). But for 10 pin cable, it probably uses some protocol to communicate.
Since it’s from a vape, it has to be widely available. I would find the model number (even look for similar LCDs on ali or ebay), then find the specs/datasheet/documentation - it should specify which pin is which and what voltages and signals they expect.