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

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231–240 of 264 posts

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

#231

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.

At what age do you disable the tracking? My parents' tracking of me in the 1990s was awful enough. I dread to think what they have set up I were 12 years old today.

That discussion has not come up yet. The kids are old enough to be able to switch it off themselves on their phone if they wanted to but so far they seem comfortable with it.

It works both ways: they can see at any moment in time where their parents are, which may be a soothing idea. With one parent travelling a lot for business the screen in the kitchen teaches them a bit about geography too. (What country is mummy in now?)

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

#232
I have a very old netbook running FreeDOS. I have installed nothing but nano on it, and I use it as a distraction-free writing device. I also have a black MacBook running Xubuntu, and it works great. Got a new, non-matching battery for it for about CDN$60, and I get three or four hours of use on a charge. Only issue is the wifi is sometimes flakey on newer routers.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I could only conclude that it was hacked That seems like a bit of a leap. Isn't it more likely to have been a software glitch of some sort?

Camera activated for a split second every once in a while, with no apparent relation to what I was using the phone for at that moment. And it hasn't happened again since I reinstalled the OS two months ago (though admittedly it took ~4 months to start happening the first time). Doesn't seem like a very big leap to me.

I could imagine some app (background service? Unsure) iterating through available devices and the OS or system services being a bit too eager to initialize devices upon iteration.

(Not saying that's what happened, but I can easily hypothesize a scenario where this only happens after a while, after some specific app is installed or configured.)

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

#235
Run BOINC(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a distributed, high throughout computing initiative that runs with volunteer computing. It helps solve cutting edge research problems in science.

It is easy to set up (just screate an account with scienceunited.org) and great to contribute to. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android!

Link: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, does mTCP ship an ssh client now, or are you building it yourself?

My mistake, mTCP doesn't include SSH client, there is a separate project [1] for that. [1] http://sshdos.sourceforge.net/

Cool, I'll try this on my XT clone one day to see the performance :-D

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

#239
Here is interesting DIY video of things one can create from an old laptop. Inside the video there is a link to creating a daylight lamp/panel from a monitor -- it's really great and looks like a daylight from a window due to specific materials used in monitors to evenly distribute light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLP_L7Mgz6M

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

#240
post #132

Old phones make for rather good CCTV/surveillance cameras. Anything made in the past 4-6 years will have great picture quality (during the day, mostly), Internet connectivity, alarm features, motion sensing, even object recognition.

What software do you use to turn a phone into a surveillance camera?

There's quite a few of them. Alfred and IP Webcam, for example
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