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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

nns.ee

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Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#71
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-) My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

Amstrad PC 1512 here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512).

I remember they were saving up for many months to get this for me.

When (many years later) I had a P3 (or a P4?), I would switch on my Amstrad and feel warmth in my heart, as if I was hugging an old friend.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#72

Does the modem have access to GPS? If so, it would be interesting to implement theft protection or things alike. Do binaries built with "GOARCH=ARM ARM=7 GOOS=linux go build" work?

Author here! Seems to work fine: https://arse.ee/4uQ6R5Ck.png

edit: And yes, the modem has access to the GPS data, which is passed from the modem to the main OS.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#73
post #18

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz." You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs. [0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

Wow, that's probably about the same ram & cpu as my desktop 16 years ago.

My Athlon in 2003 was partnered with 256MB of RAM and a Geforce 2 MX 200/400.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#74
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with a Pentium I, 166Mhz, 16MB, 1GB HDD, and I'm not even that old. I imagine we have folks here that started on a PDP :-) My P1 would stutter while playing MP3s :-))

I really appreciate that CPU manufacturers started adding dedicated hardware for things like decoding MP3's. Not sure about the machine learning hardware they put in it nowadays, but then, that's mainly Apple who do a lot of that for e.g. your pictures (so they don't have to send it to their servers).

A Pentium II was more than enough to decode MP3's in parallel.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#75

It's amazing that posting this on HN has not melted it down. Are you using an edge CDN like Cloudflare to provide caching?

Perhaps I'm not being very generous, but I'm often kinda surprised when sites do meltdown from the HN effect -- although I recognise it depends on a lot of factors.

It usually seems to be stock CMS platforms that melt down. Where generating a page means a bunch of database queries.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#76
Fun part about LTE modems is that they usually pack not one, but two OS in them: Android as well as VxWorks that actually handle work with cellular.

So your connection usually going like that: Carrier -> HW -> VxWorks -> Android-based OS -> your device.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#77

impressive latency.

It uses USB networking, not the cellular network, so that's not unexpected.

Yeah the blog is slightly misleading. The binary web server is running on the ARM core of the modem only. It's not as though mobile providers are starting to allow web hosting across their LTE network.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#78
post #26
post #14

doesn't sound very secure seeing all those processes running under root...

What difference does it make if it's just serving static HTML?

Well none, but if it's the hardware responsible for managing your wireless connectivity on your mobile phone, you might not be happy about the possibility of that being compromised.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#79
post #70

Now it just needs to charge / run from solar and it can be dropped anywhere with signal. I wonder what sort of wattage this thing draws.

For a while I've really liked the thought of small little cheap hardened devices that could be surreptitiously dropped to act like wifi extenders as a "guerilla mesh". Of course there'd probably need to be some thought put into making them safe and look harmless enough not to trigger any kind of severe response if found. But imagine taking a bag around town and dropping "disposable" devices with low enough power use…

I would love to see someone run the electricity draw numbers on a theoretical build of this, accounting for solar panel output, battery longevity, and how long it could theoretically stay online based how long the sun is up each day.

In my head I'm thinking an air tight tupperware container with a pi zero inside, setup for meshing. It would be cool if it was fairly flat and had panels on both sides, so you could throw it on a roof top and be reasonably sure it'll land with a panel facing up to run.

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