7 ms·

64bit computing on a budget

173 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

notpushkin 3y ago
If anybody is trying to unlock a Xiaomi phone but doesn't have access to a Windows PC, this unofficial unlock tool port has worked well for me: https://xiaomitool.com/ https://xiaomitool.com/
rr808 3y ago
I'd love any major competition to Android & iOS. Microsoft is resurgent these days, can I get my windows phone back?
- glogla 3y ago
  Interesting idea. On one hand, I think the world's attitude towards the tech companies has changed sufficiently that Google's "sinking Windows Phone by making Gmail and Youtube not work on it" trick might not work out for them this time. On the other hand, given the sorry state of Windows - all the privacy issues, integrated ads, forced upgrades, whatever else - the Windows Phone would probably end up being terrible experience.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    Gmail was usable on Windows Phone in the built-in mail app, YouTube had some okay third party apps, but in my opinion what really killed Windows Phone was not having Google Maps. People underestimate how critical this app is. Why do you think Apple created their own mapping app out of nowhere? They were terrified that Google could turn off the switch and cripple iOS overnight after watching Windows Phone wither on the vine. There were additional things that caused Windows Phone to fail, but I really feel Google Maps was the first nail in the coffin.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Microsoft itself is an Android vendor these days: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl Maybe there’s a long game here where the Surface line will become all-Windows one day again.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Microsoft did partner up with Amazon to provide Windows users with Android apps. It's not entirely unimaginable that the Amazon Store + Bing Maps + Outlook + Edge + OneDrive + Office can become an alternative to Google Play + Google Maps + Gmail + Chrome + Drive + Docs.
  - kotaKat 3y ago
    If I recall correctly, the Surface Duo was supposed to be a Windows device (hence the odd selections like native UEFI and lack of certain hardware that would be on a contemporary Android device in the same class eg NFC). Microsoft was getting frustrated they couldn't get a good Windows experience on the metal and ended up contracting Movial, a software/embedded engineering firm, that they ended up partially acquiring to basically accelerate the Android port to the hardware and get it shipped. https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-acquires-the-surface-duo-development-team-from-movial/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-acquires-the-surface-duo-d... At the same time they were rushing the half-baked Android release out to the Duo they were all together working on what they actually wanted to ship in the Duo 2. (I was a Day 1 Duo user. I promptly returned it only two months into the ownership experience.)
- faraggi 3y ago
  Absolutely but I'd hate for it to be windows. I'd love a good, OSS Linux phone.
  - kwanbix 3y ago
    Isn't Android good OSS Linux?
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      Google is slowly cripling everything opensource and replacing it with its own closed source stuff. Many, many apps won't run without google blobs on the phone and it's all by design.
      - arsome 3y ago
        You can always swap those our with other apps from f-droid or something though and if you're willing to run an open source phone you're largely going to be dealing with the same problems in that department - lack of apps. And that's not to mention MicroG which makes many such apps work anyways.
        ajsnigrutin 3y ago
        This is true for eg. a browser, alarm app and an irc client. If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.
        CuriousCosmic 3y ago
        > If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain. GrapheneOS seems to do pretty well with this. It is a bit more involved and you have to check the docs but you can generally get banking apps to work just fine.
      - 3y ago
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > Microsoft is resurgent these days, Where is it resurging?
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Windows Mobile the OS was so good. What let it down was that it was lacking many critical apps.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Never used Windows Mobile, but WindowsPhone 7 & 8 were great. Moving to Android was a major step town in ergonomics for me.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      Once I learned that Android was supposed to be a BlackBerry OS clone that got pivoted at the last minute in a panic to compete with iOS it all makes sense.
  - xp84 3y ago
    Hypothetical: now that the web technologies are so much more powerful than they were 10 years ago, wouldn’t we all be much better off if most things ceased to be “Apps” anyway and became websites? The interesting thing I see is that most companies that ship a Mac app (that isn’t a game) now ship a web app in a thin Electron wrapper. And even though at least on iOS things seem slightly less HTML-ish, nobody uses any standard controls/UI anymore anyway, because everything must be branded and distinctive. I would kind of love to have a few competing OSs which were each supportable by essentially a checkbox in the cross-platform mobile app tooling people already seem to be using.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      I don't know why you were downvoted, you are absolutely right. Lots of apps could be web pages and they would be tiny and have much better control of permissions and updates. Apple knows this which is why they try to make sure it doesn't happen and threaten their app store.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Microsoft didn't help by resetting the ecosystem 3 times with backwards-incompatible changes. Windows Phone 7 wasn't compatible with earlier Windows Mobile apps, Windows Phone 8 wasn't compatible with WP7, and Windows 10 wasn't compatible with WP8.
- samstave 3y ago
  What you don't want a Facebook Phone? But it had that nice littel round LCD on the front to show your face icon for anyone calling you!
zeristor 3y ago
Just as the Raspberry Pi supply seems to be opening up a lot. Although Zero2Ws are a bit tricky to get hold of
a1o 3y ago
I would prefer just Linux... But if someone is looking for a challenge I wonder when arm64 hackintosh will appear.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  I’m not sure that’s going to be viable. From my understanding there are some unique features of the M1/M2 architecture that aren’t commonplace. The unified memory, certain specifics of the system on chips, and a couple of extra instructions that Apple added to facilitate Rosetta 2 support. Intel Macs were largely generic PCs with a different firmware and a few custom chips thrown in here and there. Apple Silicon Macs were a big departure from this.
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
I feel these used/screen-broken phones are an under-used ressource that have usually a much better specs/prize ratio, but are held back by the lack of documentation (and lack of support from distros? Raspberry Pi OS is quite solid). Has anyone turned one of those into a home-server? If so, which steps have you followed?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I think the problem is more there matter of booting a replacement OS on them, and getting drivers on a supported (read: gets security fixes) kernel.
  - mcny 3y ago
    Personally, my biggest qualm is the spicy pillow syndrome. Spicy pillow means the battery swells up so it is no longer safe to connect to power unattended (to say the least). I tried using nexus 4, then nexus 5 phone as a ip webcam, always connected to power. Result spicy pillow. Tried using an iPhone 6 as a two step Authenticator so I could see the two step code at a glance from my computer by keeping the screen always on, connected to power. Result: spicy pillow. Tried a ZTE phone as another webcam again, same result. Ah but wait, the battery in the zte is user removable so can I use this phone which gets USB-C power without a battery? Yes, with an asterisk. I still need to connect the spicy pillow on boot and once booted, it will happily run from the 65W laptop charger with USB-C. Seems like certain things like flash photography will be too much for my charger to handle but for an ordinary IP webcam, it works just fine. It runs android, is several versions out of date, is connected to the Internet, yada yada. What I personally want when/if this EU directive that requires manufacturers to use user replaceable batteries takes effect is the next step that requires devices to be able to boot and operate (at least actions that are physically/electronically possible) without a battery as long as the device is connected to power. Something like how laptops used to be? They still ran just fine without a battery. The OS and firmware make no assumption that a battery exists to boot. This possibly requires the use of a super capacitor, something like the dash am in my car? I don’t know enough about electronics…
    - 3y ago
Tepix 3y ago
You don't need Windows for "computing"… seems like overly complicating things.
- cpach 3y ago
  We all know that, don’t we? They probably just thought it was a fun project. To each their own.
- chuckSu 3y ago
  [dead]
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  With the ads/news showing up on my computer, I can't imagine any reason you'd want Windows (11) outside some crappy software that is windows only. Apple was a 'never buy'. Google has turned into an 'avoid if possible' Microsoft is now a 'avoid'. Maybe I need to try harder with Linux and degoogled Android, I have worked hard enough on making Windows tolerable. I can't imagine Linux could possibly be worse(although I still have my USB/wireless mouse disconnect randomly on rpi4 and haven't been able to fix it)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Having followed this blog for a long time, I can assure you very little on it is about the easiest way to compute.
  - scruffyherder 3y ago
    thanks? lol
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      We're on hacker news; it's an unambiguous positive:)
kazinator 3y ago
In 2023, you can get 64 bit PC's in the back alley dumpster.
- windowsrookie 3y ago
  Exactly. Brand new Intel N100 (Four 12th gen efficiency cores) desktops are selling for ~$120. Intel 6th gen desktops can be purchased for the ~$30 he spent on the phone and don't require the many hours he spent trying to boot an OS on it. 64-bit Core 2 Duo machines are still perfectly usable and people will pay you to take them.
  - scruffyherder 3y ago
    Instead, I got one with a different CPU architecture, at a comparable price which was my goal. The unlock took the most amount of time. The larger point is a comparison of AXP64, and ARM64. AMD64 hardware is pretty much easy to find, and not all that interesting. Not to mention it takes up no space.
lockhouse 3y ago
Are there any decent ARM64 computers with good mainline kernel support that are easy to purchase for less than $50? Nearly everything I’ve seen is either unobtainium, only supported by very specific kernel builds, expensive, or some combination thereof.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  Indeed. I thought it was a fun distraction, as it's not often you get to recycle some old junk, and mix it with new software. This thing with a cracked screen had zero viable future.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  If ARM wanted to make themselves relevant in the face of RISC-V and Apple M1 in-house supercores, they could come up with a reference ARM PC platform accompanied by a hardware certification program. It could look a lot like the Windows ARM devkit.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
> Turns out that the phone was still locked, the seller had neglected to logout from his Xiaomi account. Even worse though he had forgotten his login and password. I thought this bit was phrased a little too kindly. While it's unclear whether it was the case here or not [0], usually when you buy a locked phone off eBay and the seller has "forgotten" to log out of their cloud account and has "forgotten" their password (and login too, to boot!) it's because the phone was stolen. [0]: OP claims "seller went above and beyond" to get the phone unlocked, which I initially interpreted as "figured out the locked account info" but then continued to read and learned that the use of an unlock tool was involved.. making me once again doubt the veracity of the "forgetful seller" story.
- randkyp 3y ago
  The unlock tool would only work if it successfully authenticates with Xiaomi's server with matching Mi Cloud ID as the one previously registered to the device. So I very much doubt that it is stolen.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  I was worried it was stolen, but it was not. I reached out to him, and he did contact Xiaomi, but that went nowhere. So he gave me a password to try and it worked, so I could log him out after giving him the account number, and he could then retrieve all his lost data, so it was a win/win. He had migrated all his google data but didn't realize there was more to it than that. It was innocent enough, not every used phone is stolen. But it's something to be mindful of, that a 'working phone' may in fact be locked.

173 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

If anybody is trying to unlock a Xiaomi phone but doesn't have access to a Windows PC, this unofficial unlock tool port has worked well for me: https://xiaomitool.com/ https://xiaomitool.com/

rr808 3y ago

I'd love any major competition to Android & iOS. Microsoft is resurgent these days, can I get my windows phone back?

glogla 3y ago
Interesting idea. On one hand, I think the world's attitude towards the tech companies has changed sufficiently that Google's "sinking Windows Phone by making Gmail and Youtube not work on it" trick might not work out for them this time. On the other hand, given the sorry state of Windows - all the privacy issues, integrated ads, forced upgrades, whatever else - the Windows Phone would probably end up being terrible experience.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Gmail was usable on Windows Phone in the built-in mail app, YouTube had some okay third party apps, but in my opinion what really killed Windows Phone was not having Google Maps. People underestimate how critical this app is. Why do you think Apple created their own mapping app out of nowhere? They were terrified that Google could turn off the switch and cripple iOS overnight after watching Windows Phone wither on the vine. There were additional things that caused Windows Phone to fail, but I really feel Google Maps was the first nail in the coffin.
pavlov 3y ago
Microsoft itself is an Android vendor these days: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl Maybe there’s a long game here where the Surface line will become all-Windows one day again.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Microsoft did partner up with Amazon to provide Windows users with Android apps. It's not entirely unimaginable that the Amazon Store + Bing Maps + Outlook + Edge + OneDrive + Office can become an alternative to Google Play + Google Maps + Gmail + Chrome + Drive + Docs.
- kotaKat 3y ago
  If I recall correctly, the Surface Duo was supposed to be a Windows device (hence the odd selections like native UEFI and lack of certain hardware that would be on a contemporary Android device in the same class eg NFC). Microsoft was getting frustrated they couldn't get a good Windows experience on the metal and ended up contracting Movial, a software/embedded engineering firm, that they ended up partially acquiring to basically accelerate the Android port to the hardware and get it shipped. https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-acquires-the-surface-duo-development-team-from-movial/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-acquires-the-surface-duo-d... At the same time they were rushing the half-baked Android release out to the Duo they were all together working on what they actually wanted to ship in the Duo 2. (I was a Day 1 Duo user. I promptly returned it only two months into the ownership experience.)
faraggi 3y ago
Absolutely but I'd hate for it to be windows. I'd love a good, OSS Linux phone.
- kwanbix 3y ago
  Isn't Android good OSS Linux?
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Google is slowly cripling everything opensource and replacing it with its own closed source stuff. Many, many apps won't run without google blobs on the phone and it's all by design.
    - arsome 3y ago
      You can always swap those our with other apps from f-droid or something though and if you're willing to run an open source phone you're largely going to be dealing with the same problems in that department - lack of apps. And that's not to mention MicroG which makes many such apps work anyways.
      - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
        This is true for eg. a browser, alarm app and an irc client. If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.
        CuriousCosmic 3y ago
        > If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain. GrapheneOS seems to do pretty well with this. It is a bit more involved and you have to check the docs but you can generally get banking apps to work just fine.
    - 3y ago
ekianjo 3y ago
> Microsoft is resurgent these days, Where is it resurging?
lockhouse 3y ago
Windows Mobile the OS was so good. What let it down was that it was lacking many critical apps.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Never used Windows Mobile, but WindowsPhone 7 & 8 were great. Moving to Android was a major step town in ergonomics for me.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    Once I learned that Android was supposed to be a BlackBerry OS clone that got pivoted at the last minute in a panic to compete with iOS it all makes sense.
- xp84 3y ago
  Hypothetical: now that the web technologies are so much more powerful than they were 10 years ago, wouldn’t we all be much better off if most things ceased to be “Apps” anyway and became websites? The interesting thing I see is that most companies that ship a Mac app (that isn’t a game) now ship a web app in a thin Electron wrapper. And even though at least on iOS things seem slightly less HTML-ish, nobody uses any standard controls/UI anymore anyway, because everything must be branded and distinctive. I would kind of love to have a few competing OSs which were each supportable by essentially a checkbox in the cross-platform mobile app tooling people already seem to be using.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    I don't know why you were downvoted, you are absolutely right. Lots of apps could be web pages and they would be tiny and have much better control of permissions and updates. Apple knows this which is why they try to make sure it doesn't happen and threaten their app store.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Microsoft didn't help by resetting the ecosystem 3 times with backwards-incompatible changes. Windows Phone 7 wasn't compatible with earlier Windows Mobile apps, Windows Phone 8 wasn't compatible with WP7, and Windows 10 wasn't compatible with WP8.
samstave 3y ago
What you don't want a Facebook Phone? But it had that nice littel round LCD on the front to show your face icon for anyone calling you!

zeristor 3y ago

Just as the Raspberry Pi supply seems to be opening up a lot. Although Zero2Ws are a bit tricky to get hold of

a1o 3y ago

I would prefer just Linux... But if someone is looking for a challenge I wonder when arm64 hackintosh will appear.

lockhouse 3y ago
I’m not sure that’s going to be viable. From my understanding there are some unique features of the M1/M2 architecture that aren’t commonplace. The unified memory, certain specifics of the system on chips, and a couple of extra instructions that Apple added to facilitate Rosetta 2 support. Intel Macs were largely generic PCs with a different firmware and a few custom chips thrown in here and there. Apple Silicon Macs were a big departure from this.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

I feel these used/screen-broken phones are an under-used ressource that have usually a much better specs/prize ratio, but are held back by the lack of documentation (and lack of support from distros? Raspberry Pi OS is quite solid). Has anyone turned one of those into a home-server? If so, which steps have you followed?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I think the problem is more there matter of booting a replacement OS on them, and getting drivers on a supported (read: gets security fixes) kernel.
- mcny 3y ago
  Personally, my biggest qualm is the spicy pillow syndrome. Spicy pillow means the battery swells up so it is no longer safe to connect to power unattended (to say the least). I tried using nexus 4, then nexus 5 phone as a ip webcam, always connected to power. Result spicy pillow. Tried using an iPhone 6 as a two step Authenticator so I could see the two step code at a glance from my computer by keeping the screen always on, connected to power. Result: spicy pillow. Tried a ZTE phone as another webcam again, same result. Ah but wait, the battery in the zte is user removable so can I use this phone which gets USB-C power without a battery? Yes, with an asterisk. I still need to connect the spicy pillow on boot and once booted, it will happily run from the 65W laptop charger with USB-C. Seems like certain things like flash photography will be too much for my charger to handle but for an ordinary IP webcam, it works just fine. It runs android, is several versions out of date, is connected to the Internet, yada yada. What I personally want when/if this EU directive that requires manufacturers to use user replaceable batteries takes effect is the next step that requires devices to be able to boot and operate (at least actions that are physically/electronically possible) without a battery as long as the device is connected to power. Something like how laptops used to be? They still ran just fine without a battery. The OS and firmware make no assumption that a battery exists to boot. This possibly requires the use of a super capacitor, something like the dash am in my car? I don’t know enough about electronics…
  - 3y ago

Tepix 3y ago

You don't need Windows for "computing"… seems like overly complicating things.

cpach 3y ago
We all know that, don’t we? They probably just thought it was a fun project. To each their own.
chuckSu 3y ago
[dead]
hospitalJail 3y ago
With the ads/news showing up on my computer, I can't imagine any reason you'd want Windows (11) outside some crappy software that is windows only. Apple was a 'never buy'. Google has turned into an 'avoid if possible' Microsoft is now a 'avoid'. Maybe I need to try harder with Linux and degoogled Android, I have worked hard enough on making Windows tolerable. I can't imagine Linux could possibly be worse(although I still have my USB/wireless mouse disconnect randomly on rpi4 and haven't been able to fix it)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Having followed this blog for a long time, I can assure you very little on it is about the easiest way to compute.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  thanks? lol
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    We're on hacker news; it's an unambiguous positive:)

kazinator 3y ago

In 2023, you can get 64 bit PC's in the back alley dumpster.

windowsrookie 3y ago
Exactly. Brand new Intel N100 (Four 12th gen efficiency cores) desktops are selling for ~$120. Intel 6th gen desktops can be purchased for the ~$30 he spent on the phone and don't require the many hours he spent trying to boot an OS on it. 64-bit Core 2 Duo machines are still perfectly usable and people will pay you to take them.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  Instead, I got one with a different CPU architecture, at a comparable price which was my goal. The unlock took the most amount of time. The larger point is a comparison of AXP64, and ARM64. AMD64 hardware is pretty much easy to find, and not all that interesting. Not to mention it takes up no space.

lockhouse 3y ago

Are there any decent ARM64 computers with good mainline kernel support that are easy to purchase for less than $50? Nearly everything I’ve seen is either unobtainium, only supported by very specific kernel builds, expensive, or some combination thereof.

scruffyherder 3y ago
Indeed. I thought it was a fun distraction, as it's not often you get to recycle some old junk, and mix it with new software. This thing with a cracked screen had zero viable future.
speed_spread 3y ago
If ARM wanted to make themselves relevant in the face of RISC-V and Apple M1 in-house supercores, they could come up with a reference ARM PC platform accompanied by a hardware certification program. It could look a lot like the Windows ARM devkit.

ComputerGuru 3y ago

> Turns out that the phone was still locked, the seller had neglected to logout from his Xiaomi account. Even worse though he had forgotten his login and password. I thought this bit was phrased a little too kindly. While it's unclear whether it was the case here or not [0], usually when you buy a locked phone off eBay and the seller has "forgotten" to log out of their cloud account and has "forgotten" their password (and login too, to boot!) it's because the phone was stolen. [0]: OP claims "seller went above and beyond" to get the phone unlocked, which I initially interpreted as "figured out the locked account info" but then continued to read and learned that the use of an unlock tool was involved.. making me once again doubt the veracity of the "forgetful seller" story.

randkyp 3y ago
The unlock tool would only work if it successfully authenticates with Xiaomi's server with matching Mi Cloud ID as the one previously registered to the device. So I very much doubt that it is stolen.
scruffyherder 3y ago
I was worried it was stolen, but it was not. I reached out to him, and he did contact Xiaomi, but that went nowhere. So he gave me a password to try and it worked, so I could log him out after giving him the account number, and he could then retrieve all his lost data, so it was a win/win. He had migrated all his google data but didn't realize there was more to it than that. It was innocent enough, not every used phone is stolen. But it's something to be mindful of, that a 'working phone' may in fact be locked.