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

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

#181

Post by HenryBemis »

newhouseb wrote: post #175

In an attempt to be more present with one another away from our phooes, my partner and I have (ironically) started using old phones as single-app devices. For example: we have a "spotiphone" which is an old iPhone with a shattered camera that has only Spotify installed that we use in our bedroom to control music/podcasts. Similar thing for where my partner meditates (but it's an old iPod touch). Our real phones are u…

I too am using an old ipod just for Spotify. I have a decent stereo system that also has dock for for ipod/older iphones, and that ipod is the official "media player"!

From my laptop I can control it from afar, so it's been docked there for years.

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

#183

Post by everdrive »

I have an old hand-me-down laptop from a relative. It's from 2011 and is a Core i5. The screen is terrible, but otherwise it's perfectly capable.

I couldn't call it a "project," but I've installed a music player (Rhythmbox, but pick whatever software you like) and hooked it up to some premium speakers. It's the best music player I could hope for -- it can play literally any format, doesn't phone home, and uses very little energy.

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

#184

Post by reaperducer »

I had an old laptop with a broken hinge. I ended up flipping the screen all the way around, velcroing it to the keyboard side, loading a bunch of personal pictures into a slide show screen saver and then mounted it on the wall in a picture frame.

I have an old iPhone with an app that uses the camera to watch for motion. If something happens, it takes a bunch of still pictures and stitches them together into a herky-jerky video and stores it for later.

I keep it on top of the kitchen cabinet to make sure the lady I pay to feed and play with my cats when I'm away does both things. So far, so good. It's hard to get people to actually play with pets when you're away, no matter how much you pay them.

I think the app is called "GorillaCam." I don't think it's on the app store anymore. But it reminds me that when the iPhone first came out, it didn't have the horsepower to do video. But not too long after the App Store came out there were third-party apps that would use the phone's still camera to make poor quality videos.

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

#187

Post by the_pwner224 »

lqet wrote: post #133
mjstone wrote: post #35

I have my old Galaxy S1 sitting in my cellar listening to the beeps from my washing machine. It sends me an email when the wash finishes. (I can't hear the beeps from upstairs.)

My Samsung Galaxy S turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks, I am still using it as my day-to-day smartphone for these reasons: * These things are seemingly indestructible. In 10 years, the only problems I had was a deteriorating battery (which I replaced once) and a broken back cover (which I replaced by a 2,99 EUR one from eBay). The screen is…

> 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.

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

#188

Post by prashp »

reaperducer wrote: post #184

I had an old laptop with a broken hinge. I ended up flipping the screen all the way around, velcroing it to the keyboard side, loading a bunch of personal pictures into a slide show screen saver and then mounted it on the wall in a picture frame. I have an old iPhone with an app that uses the camera to watch for motion. If something happens, it takes a bunch of still pictures and stitches them together into a herky-j…

Cool! I use my old laptop as a cat camera too. I use the integrated webcam to take a photo every 5 seconds, and then I send it through a lightweight CNN to classify of there is a cat in the photo. If there is I get an email with the photo as an attachment! Great for when we are traveling but our cat is left at home, we get some nice photos of her eating or stretching

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

#189

Post by cookiengineer »

rezgi wrote: post #13
MrGilbert wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a x230 last year as my non-gaming computer, and I really like it. I bought it for 117€, it was pretty beaten up. The display is the cheap TN panel, has a light spot in the center, and the keyboard doesn't match my locale. However, it has the top-level i5. (i5-3380M, I think). I also bought a docking station at a bargain. This year, I bought a new IPS display, a matching keyboard and a new screen bezel for it…

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…

Using a t440p base as my laptop, best laptop for the buck. bought it as a 4300m model with a dual core. now it has an IPS display, better coreboot+bios update, 32gb ram, i7-4712, 2x 512gb ssds plus a 4tb hdd. all together cost me less than 600eur. hackintosh compatible if necessary, though it's running Arch these days.

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

#190

Post by speleding »

An old monitor + previous generation Raspberry Pi: hangs on the kitchen wall to display Find My Friends in kiosk mode. Connected to a timer so it's on in the afternoon until dinner so you can see the family come home. Really cute to see your children move as little picture icons across the map towards you from school.
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