EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think

EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Modern tech is so wasteful. Why’d you ever need all that stuff for.

    Back in the day I used to host all my stuff on a dinky little router (ASUS Wl500g, 300mhz 32MB RAM) with a powered USB hub and a spare USB HDD hooked to it. It handled downloading torrents overnight, hosted a few websites, an FTP/SAMBA server, an image/screenshots hosting and galleries for me and my friends, including that one script that generated a GIF of all my epic gamer stats on each access, a couple of bots, sent me weather reports via SMS, hosted a webcam to be used as IP security camera, and also a dumb printer so that it could be used by anyone on the network, besides working as my actual router.

    When it died* I moved all that stuff to an old UMPC. And nowadays, I host my shit on $30 smartwatches with Termux.

    Meanwhile, one of the commercial projects I’ve been working with lately, which is basically just a glorified image dump, with all the modern bells and whistles, doesn’t even launch if the machine has less than 32GB RAM… smh

    EDIT: * It was the HDD that died, the router itself is still chugging along, but with less duties as just a network switch for less demanding appliances

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      1 day ago

      Because we forgot optimization in a world that celebrates maximalists and constant upgrades to feed shopping addictions that make people feel more in control of their space in a world with less and less opportunities for self determination.

      When I remember I was the cool kid for having a 4GB flash drive that could fit all of my call of duty game and homework and I look at the 560GB games now that aren’t even as fun to play I think we have made some mistakes along the way that instead of prioritizing the experience of life we prioritize the ease of it.

      • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        W&O X9 Call. It’s a terrible watch, basically just a shitty android phone inside of a knockoff applewatch case. It runs Android 9 on 2" screen, 4GB RAM and 64GB of space (didn’t even test that one tbh), battery life - nonexistent (less than a day). But I’ve been looking specifically for stuff like this and bought a load of them at wholesale for like $28.5 a piece… and the specs didn’t even exactly match between all of them. Loaded them up with cheapest plans for IoT devices, installed termux, nodejs and moved some of my personal scripts over to them. One app/script per piece, no need for VM’s or containers 🤣 And they got their own links so firewall is also not necessary.

        None of them have static IP’s accessible from outside though, so for stuff I need public access to I jam that into the remaining RAM space on one of the few of my $1/mo lowendboxes that I’m using primarily as VPN servers. Got them all on tailscale, so I could theoretically use Funnel to route traffic from public internet to those watches (haven’t tried yet). And still to figure out some way for them to failover onto each other’s internet because the plans are extremely limited, will probably have to learn android app development for that when I get to it.

        There is also HK Ultra 2 which I believe is essentially the same thing, and I saw a few other variants on the market without even a brand name, so the only way to find them would be to search for “sim card” or sorting smartwatches category by bad reviews first 😂

        Ah, and also a disclaimer: I am not promoting this as a viable way to host things. This is just my personal exercise at hobo engineering