Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

I'm using deja-dup https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/DejaDup

Enterprise ThinkPads are amazing machines. They're very sturdy (although the X230 notoriously has a weak screw holder in the top left (or is it right?) corner that will almost always break and make that corner of the case a bit wobbly. Annoying but not critical. And the i7 top of the range version that comes with the 180GB Intel SSD... Well, the SSD is bad and can be thrown out. It has a bug in its firmware that was never fixed by Intel and never acknowledged by Lenovo so no recall, and no fix. Just throw it away and replace with a 256-512 GB SSD.

And the parts are cheap and plentiful. Get the docking station if you can, I paid 30$ for two a few years ago (top of the range dock, the one with all the connectors and 2x video out)

Also, the IPS upgrade is well worth it.

I use a couple of X220s as my work laptops, as I find the keyboard far superior to the X230 and all later models (it's the last classic ThinkPad keyboard prior to the chiclet designs). The hardware is still mostly sufficient for my needs (just don't run Electron apps...) and the case and the keyboard are much better than anything I could buy new these days. Apart from the displays, it feels like laptops have mostly regressed over the last decade and continue to do so at an alarming pace (just compare the T490 series to the T480, for instance).

I’m still runnin a 2012 (non retina) without any issues, and I plan on keeping it until it literally won’t boot. What’s funny is I was initially annoyed as I got it a few weeks before they announced they were releasing the first Retina display models (discontinuing the non retinas), however getting the last non-retina generation was a blessing because that’s was that was when they also began making upgrading MacBooks nearly impossible (non upgradable ram/and I believe some weird half SSD/half disc drive that didn’t come in >512GB or something like that). So getting the last (upgradable) MacBook Pro was the better deal because two or so years ago I upgraded the RAM to 32GB and because it was also the last MacBook to have a CD drive (that I never used) I was able to rip it out, put a $5 hardrive bracket in it’s place and threw the original (I think) 750GB or whatever HDD where the CD drive used to go, and popped in a nice 1TB SSD into the main disc drive, and nowadays it’s almost always plugged into a monitor so I wouldn’t really even be using the retina anyway.

Sadly though, I think I got the last generation of great MacBooks, and as much as I love it I fear for the day it finally dies, because I’m probably not getting another MacBook unless something changes, and there still isn’t a laptop out there that comes close to the good MacBooks (I know good one’s exist and I’ll manage, but they’re still not the same)

I've a 2012 MacBook Pro as well, and Chrome is unusably slow on it (OS X). Safari runs okay. Mine has 4 GiB of ram, and a spinning disk. The combination means it's hitting swap constantly, and hitting swap thrashes the disk on top of it. When I get the money to upgrade the ram to 16 GiB and upgrade to an SSD I'm hopeful it's be more usable, but for now it runs a terminal well enough.

The terms you're looking for are Linux Live USB, or netboot. Both often make use of local RAM disks.

One way is to burn a CD/DVD live image that has your configs added and configure it to mount a mergefs(iirc) on top of the read-only /home so all writes go to /tmp/merge.

If I can get 2 years out of a phone, I'm "happy" (it lasted longer than I expected it would).

Yes they are getting really expensive and hard to find, I looked for over a year to find one in a decent shape and top specs, paid a lot but it was a dream of mine for a long time.

The best place to get them is Japan, model 70 regularly sell at ~$50-60 there.

€150 is expensive? From what I remember of that thread a few weeks back, everybody on HN is pulling down $400k + 250k options.

Since the GP mentioned it is a machine from 1998 I would expect it to be PII with a clock above 200MHz. Since the Moore's law actually worked in the 90's that machine will be a lot more powerfull than that 586 (from 94-95 I guess).

On top of that curves and chacha20 could be used for ssh to reduce the CPU load.

The 110CT model is relatively fast with a 233MHz processor so the overhead isn't an issue from what I tested so far (BBS over SSH).

I use a Xircom RealPort Ethernet 10/100+Modem56 (REM56G-100) PCMCIA card that has a packet driver for DOS and a TP-LINK TL-MR3040 mobile router that has a ethernet socket, mTCP does the rest on software layer. Yes, a lot of people install Linux on their Librettos, but I wanted something oldschool and be able to play DOS games.

I sent it to guys that regenerate laptop batteries, but next time I will do it on my own because you basically replace the cells, weld them together and its done - here [1] you can find detailed guide for Libretto.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:frP4SG... (from cache as it doesn't seem to work right now)

Many older laptop batteries are simply a set of 18650 batteries wired together. I've "fixed" about 30-40 batteries. (1) Carefully take the battery pack apart, (2) Visually inspect the cells for any that are bulging or just, otherwise, look wrong -- take these to the electronic recycler, (3) charge each cell in an 18650 charger (mine is a Micro USB unit that charges very slowly), (4) test in a multi-meter, toss any that are bad, (5) put them in a low-drain device for a few hours[0] and throw out any that under-perform.

In a typical "failed battery" there's rarely more than one dead cell in my experience. And I've had packs with as many as 9 cells.

From there, it's a matter of putting it all back together. There's soldering involved, and you have to be extremely careful -- hit the battery with the temp required to melt the solder for too long and you have a seriously dangerous situation on your hands. I use two 3D printed clips and alligator clamps to hold the wire, wand and battery at distance from one another, battery on the bottom, wand on the top, wire in-between, and a 120mm fan, requiring me to only hold the cable to the wand and the length of solder.

Can't caution enough that it's exceedingly dangerous soldering this kind of battery. I originally built the rig because I wanted to improve the quality of my soldering -- I'm pretty terrible with an iron, but I made several changes after I had a small number of batteries start failing after repair and a few searches led me to believe I may have damaged them[1] with my poor soldering skills. My rig involves two 3D printed clips, one to hold the iron exactly where I want it, and one to secure the battery. The cable to the iron has a length of wax lace on it to let me pull it back up/remove the iron from the rig with a yank at a distance.

I use an alligator clip to hold the wiring in place and a long length of solder so that I can stand an arms length away. The iron "drops" in -- it's mounted on top, battery on bottom, wire in-between -- so I can heat it up an inch or so from the battery, I place tip of the length of solder in its spot and "tap" the wire of the iron to drop it into place. When I see it melt the tip of the length of solder and the small amount that's on the wire, I pull up on the string to move the iron away, wait a few seconds so the 120mm fan can cool things a little, and put a new battery in.

Goggles, gloves and a nearby fire extinguisher of the right kind are a really good idea. I also do the work in a large, mostly empty, shed with doors that, when opened, eliminate nearly an entire wall and work directly on the cement floor.

A lot of devices use 18650s and not all 18650s are the same. The one powering your drill might be able to handle higher drain than the one that came out of your laptop; don't mix those up. I was given a cardboard box full of dead laptop battery packs from the same model, so I was taking cells from a similar source each time.

[0] I use an adapter that lets me power a Raspberry Pi via an 18650.

[1] And likely made them into a fire hazard on their own.

Well I don't really want my home IP anything to do with my websites (don't want to deal with dynamic IP or whatever) so I just route traffic to a GCP instance (pretty small one) that routes to the internet (meaning cloudflare).

GCP instance is like the main Wireguard peer and I can easily add my laptop to the VPN so I can remotely ssh into my server.

I do intend to release it and also open-source the code at some point. It's not entirely in that state yet, but I'll probably throw it up on a Show HN when the time comes.

Did you use WiFi? An old Wifi router can easily add half a second of latency. Even high end Wifi endpoint still adds a few ms of latency which can be significant considering that short distances (20 miles) of fiber has sub ms latency. A software router or switch can also add up to a ms of latency. Could also try SSH (tunnel) instead of VPN as SSH encryption might be faster.

From my (limited) experience RDP is significantly better than VNC in terms of sluggishness and glitches. The second thing is that both VNC and RDP will try to transmit those parts of the screen that changed since the last frame rather than simply sending full "screenshots" for every frame. As a result the final effect highly depends on what are you using the remote desktop for.

Since my work is mainly coding in IDE and working with several ssh sessions, I almost exclusively work with text which is much easier for a great remote desktop experience. On the other hand, when I tried watching videos over remote desktop it was really bad.

The other things that you might consider is UDP vs. TCP, especially since some routers can handle long UDP connections badly. Since you are using VPN tunneling, you should probably avoid TCP over TCP scenario: if the VPN connection is using TCP, then I would rather use UDP for remote desktop connection. I would aim for UDP over UDP, but in a situation where the router can't handle UDP properly you could try TCP over UDP (that is VPN: TCP, VNC: UDP). You could also try to tune mtu size in tincvpn config.

Though it's not exactly cheap. Some of the boards are often over one or two hundred dollars

I was given one with a black stripe down the screen. I opened it up and wiggled a ribbon cable... and the line disappeared. Used it for a few years afterwards and gave it away still working

From the recommendations I've read, replacing the backlight with your own LED strip is easier than trying to get the backlight of the original TV working properly again (if it's not already); and sometimes even worth replacing if it works as getting just the backlight to turn on can be annoying (not exactly a standard, some take "strange" voltages or are hard to figure out, no specs).

Yes, it is edge-lit. And since the original power supply still works, I was able to use the existing LEDs. I'm not a huge fan of the spectrum/quality of the light though, so I may replace the existing edge lights with pleasing LED strip lights.

My country have close to 100% green electricity and I need the heat a big part of the year. According to the scientists it is better for the climate to run the projects distributed this way than to use mainframes.

I hacked together an Android app specifically for the purpose, so it doesn't really answer the original question about generally available projects. (I haven't got round to releasing the code as it's rather bespoke, but could do if you're interested.)

If you're looking for an off the shelf solution, I turned an old Android phone into a baby monitor for keeping track of crying when I'm on the other side of the house. There's plenty of baby monitoring apps that do anomalous noise detection and raises an alert.

> turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks

Anecdote:

6 months ago I got a OnePlus 7 Pro and installed LineageOS (continuation of CyanogenMod) on it. The 7 Pro has very small screen borders and no notch (iPhone) / punch hole (Samsung); instead a motor makes the selfie camera pop up & retract from the top of the phone. I also never updated LineageOS because it went from an unofficial build to officially supported so updating would require a complete reset.

About two months ago I noticed that the camera would pop up every once in a while for seemingly no reason.

I could only conclude that it was hacked; worse, I would have never noticed on a 'normal' phone without a pop-up camera. Was my phone also recording me the entire time?

I don't know what the vulnerability was - it could have been a remote exploit in Android itself that's also exploitable on your phone, or it could have been from an app that I had installed (the only apps I had with network usage + camera permissions were Firefox, and the latest version of WhatsApp from when I bought the phone (no updates since I don't have Google software on it, I just downloaded the WhatsApp APK when I set it up)).

You've said that you don't have any sensitive data on your phone, but still be careful.

I updated LineageOS and since then the issue has disappeared. I update the OS about every week now to hopefully prevent this from happening again.

Maybe it was just moved somewhere else, but still it appears they just do not leave the very old versions available on the official ftp's and mirrors. As of now it looks like the oldest available repo is the one for Jessie.

Rooms without windows do exist. So do rooms with their windows blocked off for various reasons.

Windows also can’t inform you that while it’s lovely right now, there’s a storm front that will be pouring rain in a few hours.