HN Reader

I like the idea of using old phones for infrastructure-lite applications, taking advantage of their low power requirements and built-in UPS (which, yes, has its own drawbacks which can only be mitigated to a certain degree).

I have a number of old android devices that I'd like to use for ...something cool like this, but my existing homelab infra could just add an extra VM or container to do this without any likely additional power draw. It's still cool and I want to do it though.

My only query about this cool project is why not wifi? Whilst I'm sure there's a good reason for the author (and I can understand having esoteric specific requirements because I have my own "things"), but it would negate the need for a docking->Ethernet device, which feels to me like unnecessary addition of a device that requires power. Also, bandwidth / throughput probably isn't much of a limitation given the device that's being used. I think I'm mainly interested in the author's specific reason for this requirement (I'm a BA, these questions are my bread and butter).

Comment to author: Gotta add the Pixel 5 to your homelab inventory! Also, nice site, layout and information.

The power efficiency is fascinating - modern phones are basically ARM servers optimized for battery life. Pixel 5 probably draws <5W under load vs 50-100W for a typical x86 server. For a personal blog, that's 400-800 kWh/year savings. The environmental impact of reusing vs recycling electronics is under appreciated.

Pedantry: A _reused_ Google Pixel 5. It was not broken down and reconstituted.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is in order of environmental impact, so reusing is an upgrade!

My number one concern is how do I avoid the spicy pillow problem... If I could have phones run off of USB without a battery, I would love to do that.

Seems completely reasonable given how many people are doing similar with RPi and other similar boards and chips. A Pixel 5 is more powerful than a lot of them, with the screen often being the biggest power drain. I'm curious what tweaks can be done to minimize power use overall as I'm assuming heavy loads could heat up the phone a bit.

Looking at the underlying block arch (Hugo), seems to be written in Go an should be pretty good for serving the content overall.

Aside: I've become a pretty big fan of SSG, and have been wanting to build a desktop mostly markdown based blog editor that then publishes to Cloudflare infrastructure... Just been lazy about actually picking it up (thinking Tauri/Rust + React/MUI for the app) with git integration and optionally direct or github action for push. I can't recall the name, but MS actually had a nice gui blog editor that integrated with a few engines a couple decades ago, but long since abandoned.

So, uh, hi. This is my blog post. I'm just some guy that blogs and gets like 5 reads per post, so I'm a fish out of water here. I didn't even have a HN account until today.

To answer a some questions: 1. Still running on the Pixel. I never had a reason to change it. 2. It is on a residential internet connection because, well, I never planned on having any volume of readers. 3. I'm just some dude that does random projects at home after work. I'm not even in tech. I actually own a construction contracting biz.

How does DNS work with a setup like this? I assume that ISPs generally don't want people hosting servers on residential connections.

Somewhere a Google exec is demanding to know why they allow such reuse of Google's property ... and is there some way they can serve ads on it.

This message was sent from a Pixel 5 still in great condition!

It's the best phone I've ever had, it's the perfect size and has a fingerprint reader on the back. Everything I've tried since it has been a regression.

Also impressive: two simultaneous front page posts on HN!

Is a phone plugged in 24/7 actually more power-efficient than a slice of a mega-optimized cloud server?

I think about battery being the very dangerous thing to leave on 24/7, especially if that’s some remote location (like attic), or at home, but when you do not work from home. It may be dangerous, plus the battery may die pretty quickly.

My first idea, to mitigate risk of fire, it’s possible to locate some hand made sand bag above the phone, so in case there’s fire, the sand would neutralise it. Also, I’d try to emulate charge-discharge cycles by enabling and disabling smart socket. I wonder if that’s possible to automate using the phone itself. E.g. when it reaches 20% it enables smart charger, and disables it upon reaching 80%. So it can do it in perpetuity. Since the screen would be off all the time, I guess one charging cycle would be once a few days. Which is twice or thrice better than average user who charges their phone once or even twice a day. So, theoretically, a Pixel with a new battery might survive a few years, if not 5 years, off one battery. Then a user might replace the battery. So, theoretically, rubbing it a server is entirely possible, I guess. Otherwise, super cool. I’d love to try this myself now. I guess that may be a perfect solar-powered server. For it, maybe one doesn’t want a smart charger. Just let the sun charge the thing whenever there’s a sunny day.

Here is a blog I wrote if anyone is interested in using Cloudflared & Termux without modifying the OS!

https://mitanshu7.github.io/html/SSH_into_Android_with_Termu...

Related: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2024/11/28/the-fairphone-2-is-r...

Pretty wild how readily available compute has become. Sure not AI level compute but between modern consumer hardware and the mountain of free tier stuff out there I’ve always got more than ability to use it effectively

Question might be is it still hosted on a phone... DNS resolves to a residential ISP range, and the site seems to be holding up quite well still, so not sure

I like this. We are surrounded by old phones that are more powerful and energy efficient than a raspberry pi we should use them!

I had a web server running on my jailbroken iPod touch back in 2009/2010. It’s neat but not entirely novel, or practical.

I feel we are being so wasteful with our gadget.

Even outdated smartphone like samsung S9-S10 or Iphone X is way overpower than your average SBC(Pi4, Pi5), yet we mostly can't do anything because OEMs decided to make our life harder to recycle them.

A similar VPS from Digital Ocean (8GB RAM, 4vcores, 160gb storage) is $48/mo so this seems really cost effective. I'm not really sure how much more performance the vcores have vs a mobile chip but for a blog web server it's probably not a huge issue.

Neat, I have been wondering if its possible to use the usb of a phone with suitable adapters to run keyboards, mice and ethernet, for the same end goal. This shows that its indeed possible. I think I should try going back to that idea again.

Does anyone know if this is possible with an iPhone 6s?

Repurposed, not recycled.

(I did something similar for Android tablets, repurposing them into an automated, digital photo frame).

Can you stresstest it ? How many simultaneous connections can it handle ?

Title needs "(2024)". It's been over a year and whether the blog is still running on a recycled Pixel 5 is unclear.

This is why I am such a big fan of the Micro PC's by HP, Dell etc

Very efficient but enough grunt to do multiple things at once and have great hardware and driver support.

Running a blog on a pixel is next level efficient

Impressive. The page loaded very quickly for me here in Singapore. Is it still running on the Pixel?

Termux is great but every time I used i ran into issue because packages didn’t behave properly, needed some weird workaround to even install, some package required didn’t exist at all (it’s up to termux developer to port Linux package to termux).

I would be extremely cautious about running a website over something running in termux, you never know when it’s going to break.

One of the solution, without root, was to run a completely emulated Linux distribution through termux and then install packages on that distribution. Things would work just as fine as on a regular server albeit the loss on performance and increased energy expenditure, which is something the author seems to care about.

Android is great in the way you can do many things with it but it always sucks hard compared to what a real device ,not artificially locked down by Google, can do.

I don't quite get how he's actually serving the page. Does `hugo` contain a webserver, I thought it's a static site generator

Anyone else find it kinda funny to have a "fully offgrid" website? That's an oxymoron, right? How can it be off grid if it's literally connected to the grid?

I understand they're using grid to mean electrical grid, but still funny.

Pixel 5 does not support USB-to-Ethernet adapters

Are there any phones that do support such adapters

I currently use an old phone as a battery for a RPi

How long can the power bank plus the phone's built-in battery last when the solar panel goes down?

Not sure how reliable an old android phone is. You achieve the same thing with an old bad but much better reliability.

there was another post from this blog earlier today that led me to check it and I've been scanning posts since. my kinda hackin', and yours too if you're into low power, recycling, self-*-ing ... very cool stuff

I clicked just so I could experience this! This is awesome!

Heh, my n270 netbook it's back (it resurrected itself after three days off and not turning on). I can post to HN with Dillo, read Reddit news an posts thru nntpit and SLRN as a Usenet client (and I use the actual Usenet and Fido over NNTP with SLRN too), I can IRC, telegram (nchat), post into Mastodon with tut, images with nsxiv. email (that was expected), music (any format), videos (420p and maybe 720@30 without isssues), read ebooks... and everything from cwm, xterm (unicode font with Unifont) and tmux. Mosh for flakey SSH connections.

Pros of using an old device?

- near no modern distractions

- VI keys (hjkl and friends) everywhere. Nchat, telescope, mupdf...

- No mice related RSI.

- batch read emails, news, newsgroups and forums. Connect once, download and upload every email and comment.

- offpunk cachés everything too, from gopher to the web. Offpunk --sync and read everything offline.

- gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev, enough for tons of cases, even translating English into Spanish for some odd words here and there

- telescope if I want something faster over gopher/gemini/web with stargate.gemi.dev:1994 as the proxy. No ads, no trackers, no cookies, no nothing. Just the text and nsxiv to view the images as they are linked too.

- florb for Open Street Maps. Enough for GPX track editing and lurking out places and some trip.

- megafast speed. Oh, you have an i7 with Plasma/Windows 11, or worse, Gnome3? Try it against cwm as the window manager, xterm, and CLI tools. No GUI will match the speed of a TUI interface, ever.

Cons:

-no modern gaming, but who cares. Mednafen, slashem, text adventures, csokoban... there are tons of old but charming games out there.

- no JS web. But florb does it fine for Open Street Map. Maybe if I wrote some Street View client with curl/libcurl and some basic equirectangular (360 degree panorama) viewer, I would be more than fullfilled. People used to see these images on Pentium II's computers and up, you know, from 'multimedia CDs' which were from thematic/educational (as a book/magazine, but with interactive content) to software which were the literal depiction of Street View with Apple's QuickTime VR.

-SBCL for Common Lisp works so-so, under i686 just GNU/Linux, under OpenBSD it's a bit restricted unlessyou recompile it, and it will last for long. No bordeaux-threads for SBCL, and ECL drives me mad sometimes.

- GNU/Linux it's sending 32 bit support to /dev/null, but Hyperbola GNU and Parabola (among GNUinos/Devuan and others are still making your old computers usable).

If my netbook can do that... older ARM devices being far more powerful than an n270 can do crazy stuff with very low power. That's why PostMarketOS needs to suceed. I wish I would resurrect a Tokyo Techbook (ARM wm8850) with it too...