First, an anti hate-mail caveat: Some of this kit is still useful in a professional context. If you use this stuff every day, you know who you are -- please don't write in. But for the rest of us, these hunks of plastic are just taking up space and electricity.

Printers

Buying a printer is like buying a timeshare in a vacation home. It looks cheap until you figure out all the extra costs, and that you don't ever use it after the first year. Outside of an office or a photographer's studio, they're obsolete -- myriad online printing sites will take care of your photos, at a better quality and lower price than you'll get at home.

Still printing articles to "read later"? Get over it. Almost any cellphone has a good enough screen to read text. If you have an iPhone, you can even use the "Instapaper" application to automate the process -- hit the Read Later bookmarklet and enjoy the article later, away from your desk. The forests will thank you for it.

Scanners

Related to printers, only even less useful. Slow, clunky and noisy, scanners used to be good for digitizing photos and text. Now, your camera or even your phone will do the same. Almost nobody uses film anymore, and for those who do, the lab will pop a CD of your photos, already digitized and dust-free, into the envelope along with the prints.

If you regularly scan text documents and use OCR (optical character recognition) to make them into something other than dead trees, you can forget that, too. The average cameraphone can take a clear enough picture to read the text, and from there you can either email it to a service like ScanR (which converts your pictures to editable PDFs) or just drop it into EverNote, a cross platform application which does the same. Your filing cabinet has never been so empty.

Built-In Optical Drives

This one is a qualified entry on the list -- you sometimes still need a DVD or CD drive to actually get information onto your computer. Once it's on there, however – in the form of an OS installation or a ripped CD – you don't need it anymore. Putting an optical drive in a notebook seems, well, old fashioned.

In fact, a modern optical drive just isn't that useful anymore: Hard drives are so cheap that backing up to multiple DVDs is pointlessly slow and painful. CDs don't need to be burned when you can just email a MP3 file, and actually taking a DVD on a trip to watch on, say, the plane, is an extravagance your laptop's battery won't appreciate in this day of fast DVD rips and movie downloads. Buy a MacBook Air or a netbook and keep a $20 burner around for emergencies.

Fax Machines

Still sending faxes? Hi grandad! The fax was useful when it was the only way to move documents around faster than mailing them. Now it's pointless. Most documents never exist in paper form anyway, so you'll need a printer just to get started with the sending. And if you fax directly from your computer, that's no excuse, either -- why not just email the PDF?

An email is as trackable as a fax, and harder to fake (I may or may not have altered faxed documents for previous employers). It's also a lot harder to lose, and a lot easier to find if you do. Granted, a trip to the fax machine buys you a few minutes away from the desk, but then, why not just quit the office altogether and work, like I do, from the comfort of your bed?

Landline Phones

There's one big reason that people keep a landline at home: 911 calls. The landline runs off power from the telephone line itself (a neat precursor to power over ethernet) so if there's a blackout, the calls still go through (unless you have a cordless handset, of course). And because a landline is tied directly to a single address, the emergency services know where you are.

But a cellphone is always with you, even when you're hiding under the bed from burglars or murderers. What if your battery dies? Borrow another phone -- there's always somebody around. And if you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and things get ugly, a landline won't help you anyway. What about coverage? It's true that cellphone coverage in the US is not exactly ubiquitous, but again, if you're out in the sticks with no signal, you're unlikely to find a landline anyway.

The emergency services still know where you are, too. Your rough location is tracked by the cell tower routing your call, so you'll be directed to a local call center. With GPS enabled phones, things will only get better.

Burglar alarms? File under the caveat above. If you have a dedicated line, fine. Just don't rent a second one just to hook up a handset you don't need.

There's one other problem with a landline, or rather, with your brain: You don't remember anyone's number anymore. Stick with the mobile, and learn to be less paranoid.

Anything else? What junk do you have at home that does nothing but collect dust? Tell us in the comments!