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What to do with an old iPad

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Re: What to do with an old iPad

#41

Post by kjkjadksj »

quotemstr wrote: post #33

I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at pe…

This bug happens to the ipads we have set up as AV controls in conference rooms at work from time to time as well. I think I first noticed it 2 years ago and assumed it was an issue with the hub it was connected to.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#42

Post by lucb1e »

pdntspa wrote: post #29
lucb1e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic). The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the wor…

wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#43

Post by nickthegreek »

quotemstr wrote: post #33

I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at pe…

I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#44

Post by bitwize »

imglorp wrote: post #9
somat wrote: post #3

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this" And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare…

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

It's called HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript :)

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#45

Post by tombert »

Nextgrid wrote: post #38
nugzbunny wrote: post #8

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare. I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just…

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic) Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website. I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven w…

I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#46

Post by repparw »

nugzbunny wrote: post #8

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi. When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare. I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just…

judging by the .ar ccTLD he's from Argentina, same as me.

First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#47

Post by fragmede »

imglorp wrote: post #9
somat wrote: post #3

Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this" And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare…

Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.

oh man, between mosh and xpra at university, I thought that's how the future was gonna be.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#48

Post by wpm »

MBCook wrote: post #34
owenmakes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak.

And what OS would that even be? I’m not aware of any others.

No OS exists because everyone knows it couldn't be installed in the current status quo. Why would anyone do the work of porting $OS to old iPads if they knew it was fruitless? How could they even do it?

Apple needs to step TF out of the way. They sold this hardware, they got their money. Move aside and let people use what they bought.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#49

Post by doodlebugging »

I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out.

Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.

At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.

After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.

One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.

Re: What to do with an old iPad

#50

Post by hn92726819 »

quotemstr wrote: post #33

I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at pe…

Kind of a nasty solution, but if you have a smart plug, you could plug the iPad into it and have HAS toggle power for an hour a day (or whatever time). That way it's as if you unplugged the iPad yourself for a period.
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