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Hosting a website on a disposable vape
281–290 of 493 posts
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product! I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable. I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish…
> I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the envir…
This is backwards, it's not about eliminating the landfill, it's about recovering the materials which were previously not scarce but now are or will be soon.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#283The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.
The CPU isn't that fantastical for the 1980s. The Archimedes had an 8MHz ARM in 1987. It was expensive though and came with at least 512KB RAM. P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
Fair enough. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking exponentially about computer performance. Modify my original post to that 1980s 8-bit era of personal computing. I did intend to compare it on the basis of the RAM available, which as is observed in another correction puts this more in the VIC-20 era...
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#284I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#285Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Disposable vapes were banned in the UK. Which in practise has meant that manufacturers have added the cheapest possible charging port which is non-standard so nobody can charge them and no way to open them to refill them. https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/disposable-vape-ban-loo...
This is amazing, it reminds me of a biology article about a new life form that is not quite virus, not quite bacteria, but something that manages to blur the line between them.
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not mutually exclusive with what I said. Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
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Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#287Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…
Speaking of cheap and powerful, I’m looking for a dirt cheap android phone that has a decent camera. I used to ship out GoPros to my customers but I don’t actually need them to film in 4K, 1080p with a decent CCD would be fine. And lately new GoPro models have become a pain to setup, they require pairing with a modern mobile phone which my customers sometimes don’t have.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#288Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.
Disposal fees were a thing here in Ontario, the idea being that consumers should pay up-front for the cost of disposal, and therefore expensive-to-dispose things (like things containing batteries) should cost more.
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product! I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable. I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish…
> I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the envir…
Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape
#290Can someone please make a zyn tin container for these?