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This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 (2024)
- indigodaddy 1y agoQuestion 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
- smithza 1y agoUSB ethernet tether might be the “how” here. Or some sort of VPN (tailscale) to the home LAN that the phone is hooked up to. Not quite “off-grid”.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoBlog was Posted on Aug 29, 2024 I don't think it would suddenly be hosted on something else in the very few days since. Edited to add: I don't think it's hosted via a phone with a SIM, it would appear that the device is connected to their home network. Also: Haha, ooops, 2024 (not 2025!)
- indigodaddy 1y agoRight, connected to the home lan would make sense, especially considering they detailed that it's fronted by nginx on another machine. curl -v does reveal nginx serving. I guess I was thinking maybe a phone wouldn't handle the HN load, but probably a mistaken assumption as it is after all a static site (believe it's Hugo generated html) and Pixel 5 likely has decent CPU and RAM (or at least plenty for static requests probably).
- indigodaddy 1y agoBlog author has confirmed that it's still running on the phone. Also it seems to have handled the HN traffic beautifully and without a hitch. Loading extremely fast (as I've been randomly sporadically checking it since it's been on the front page) the whole time. Don't believe there is any CDN involved as the domain resolves to a residential ISP range. Impressive!
- Aachen 1y agoHello, not OP but I can confirm after >10 years of doing it that hosting on reused portable hardware from a home connection is not just viable, it's cheap and stable. No issues with handling the HN frontpage here either
- indigodaddy 1y agoWhat portable hw are you using?
- Aachen 1y agoOld laptops mainly. At some point an Asus EEE PC. Currently it's a 2012 laptop that I used as daily driver for five years
- hamdingers 1y agoPedantry: 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!
- treve 1y agoRecycle is definitely grammatically correct. It's just a different word for re-use.
- Clamchop 1y agoIronically, this is semantics, not grammar.
- readthenotes1 1y agoHow is that ironic? Since the thread is about definitions, I am surprised that we are in a situation where grammar is expected and definitions not
- Infinity315 1y agoI thought recycle was the breaking down of the device into its constituents (mostly to recover precious metals or other base materials). In contrast, reuse is where the device is kept mostly intact and used for other purposes such as this. Just breaking things down requires considerable amounts of energy through the sheer logistics of it relative to just reusing it.
- account42 1y agoThere is quite a bit of room between reusing something for its intended purpose and recycling something at the material level. TFA is at neither extreme - the phone is kept intact but it's employed for a much more limited purpose that only really uses some of the phone's components.
- IshKebab 1y agoNo but it was reused as a whole. "Recycle" is completely correct. Pedantry failed. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/recycle#:~:text=To%20reuse%20as%20a%20whole. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/recycle#:~:text=To%20reuse%20...
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoI 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.
- varenc 1y ago> why not wifi? I'm not the author but can speculate. WiFi is higher latency and a bit probabilistic. Like the slowest 1% of requests to the server may take an additional 1000ms or so. And if I was running a blog from a phone I'd want it to be impressively fast. Also an old Android phone may not be able to use modern WiFi standards and it could struggle with the traffic from being on the HN homepage.
- Aachen 1y agoOld phone? It's a Pixel 5 from five years ago. My first Android ever in 2012 already supported 802.11ac with speeds faster than any internet connection I've ever had
- TheBicPen 1y agoAre you sure? Supporting 802.11ac in 2012 is pretty amazing considering that the standard was finalized in late 2013.
- daft_pink 1y agoI clicked just so I could experience this! This is awesome!
- watusername 1y agoTitle needs "(2024)". It's been over a year and whether the blog is still running on a recycled Pixel 5 is unclear.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 1y agoPretty 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
- kovac 1y agoImpressive. The page loaded very quickly for me here in Singapore. Is it still running on the Pixel?
- mcny 1y agoMy 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.
- chmod775 1y agohttps://www.instructables.com/Power-an-Android-Phone-Without-Battery/ https://www.instructables.com/Power-an-Android-Phone-Without... You can also buy dummy batteries for certain models online.
- rollcat 1y agoFor simple live streaming, the standard setup is a mid-range/DSLR camera, a dummy battery, and an HDMI capture card. (I have a Sony ZV-1 and Camlink 4K.)
- cinimodev 1y agoMy concern too. I go check on it about once a week. I definitely need to find something safer.
- joecool1029 1y agoDon't run it empty or get it super hot. Gas generation and cell degradation really seems to skyrocket if cells drop below 3V, so don't run them flat. Doesn't seem to ever happen on devices kept on around the clock and powered so long as they aren't in crazy hot conditions.
- mcny 1y agoI have tried this with devices that remained on all the time. The display or camera being on all the time also seems to cause spicy pillows?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoSpicy pillows are basically caused by 1 of 2 things: 1. Heat 2. Being fully charged all the time Recording video consumes a considerable amount of power, leading to heat. The display less so, unless you're operating at maximum brightness all the time. #2 is what killed my Pixel 3 after only about 2 years. Once I started working from home, I had a bad habit of letting my phone sit on the charger all day and after about 3 months of WFH the pillow got spicy. For a phone that's going to be repurposed as a server, I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to open the case and attach a heat sink to the battery.
- judge123 1y agoIs a phone plugged in 24/7 actually more power-efficient than a slice of a mega-optimized cloud server?
- chneu 1y agoIdk about power efficient but it's definitely more resource efficient. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Let's really stop fixating on the last one.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoIt is when it's plugged into a battery which is charged from a solar panel.
- bb88 1y agoWell, offhand, no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof. If you're buying ultra-power, you're forgoing power-efficiency.
- lmm 1y ago> no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof Low cost and power efficiency are pretty much the same thing for a datacenter though, since cooling is the most expensive part. Hence e.g. AWS pushing Graviton.
- bb88 1y agoI'm not saying you're wrong, but I would like to point out that a phone doesn't need active cooling. I just don't know if Graviton requires active cooling. And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
- sciencesama 1y agoCan you stresstest it ? How many simultaneous connections can it handle ?
- indigodaddy 1y agoI'd argue that's happening right now. But we don't know if it's still running on a phone as the post is from September 2024. *Edit, Blog author confirmed it's still running on the phone.
- chneu 1y agoI'd hope this is proxied thru cloudflare's CDN, lol.
- tiagod 1y agoIt's on a Comcast IP
- daemonologist 1y agoOne unexpected benefit of hosting your blog on a phone: an excellent defense the next time Comcast sends a nasty letter admonishing you for connecting a "server" to your residential internet.
- RealityVoid 1y agoWait, what? You can't host a server on your own internet connection with comcast?
- indigodaddy 1y agoWhy not?
- daemonologist 1y agoWell, it's a violation of the ToS. Presumably they want to upsell you on the business plan. Of course in practice, unless you're running a seed box or something, they're unlikely to find out/object. I've never heard of anyone getting dropped just for having a server on their home network, but I have heard of people being dropped for excessive upload.
- treesknees 1y agoI had a web server running on my jailbroken iPod touch back in 2009/2010. It’s neat but not entirely novel, or practical.
- mbasho 1y agoAlso impressive: two simultaneous front page posts on HN!
- indigodaddy 1y agoOh wow, that is indeed rare I think
- WithinReason 1y agoreduce, repost, recycle.
- chneu 1y agoAnyone 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.
- cinimodev 1y agoSo, 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.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoYou think like an engineer, so you're in good company here. I had a brief skim of the rest of your blog and there's definitely content that's interesting to me at least, and as I said in a comment above, the site design is beautifully easy to read and navigate. I plan on returning. Others seem to agree, given your "I want to be left alone" post also got some HN love.
- cinimodev 1y agoThanks!
- bantunes 1y agoThanks for the blog post, interesting read. Question: why run `hugo serve` instead of using it to build the files and then use nginx or some other webserver?
- indigodaddy 1y agoMy take is it's a lot easier to just use Hugo serve vs trying to get nginx/apache/Caddy et al working through Termux. And he is already using nginx as a reverse proxy from another machine on his lan in any case
- cinimodev 1y agoThis is it. It was just easier to get it up and running.
- busymom0 1y agoDoes anyone know if this is possible with an iPhone 6s?
- BallsInIt 1y agohttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id1623006812 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068...
- UlyssesZhan 1y agoTheoretically you can run Linux on iPhone according to this blog: https://konradybcio.pl/linuxona7/ https://konradybcio.pl/linuxona7/ But I don't know whether iPhone can be connected with ethernet.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoI like this. We are surrounded by old phones that are more powerful and energy efficient than a raspberry pi we should use them!
- UlyssesZhan 1y agoHow long can the power bank plus the phone's built-in battery last when the solar panel goes down?
- pbd 1y agoThe 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.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoFor a static site you can get a lot better by dumping it on S3 or Github Pages. Your site uses 0W while not being used since the server was already running, and it consumes no resource usage while not being requested. But yeah an x86 server at home for a static site is awfully inefficient.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>Your site uses 0W while not being used since the server was already running You are paying for it to be available (or in the case of GitHub Microsoft is as an incentive).
- SchemaLoad 1y agoIf you put it on AWS S3 (not subsidised), and your website is 1GB, which would be huge for a static blog, it'll cost you $0.27 per year to store / have available. The price is so incredibly small that numerous companies offer it as a completely free service.
- up2isomorphism 1y agoNot sure how reliable an old android phone is. You achieve the same thing with an old bad but much better reliability.
- fitsumbelay 1y agothere 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
- NoPicklez 1y agoThis 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
- gbbcf 1y agoI don't quite get how he's actually serving the page. Does `hugo` contain a webserver, I thought it's a static site generator
- dijital 1y agoIt's further down in the article but he's using `hugo serve` which renders the static site and serves it in one command. Not entirely sure how he's doing TLS from a quick skim of what he's shared though.
- indigodaddy 1y agoHe has nginx reverse proxy in front on another machine in his lan, so I suspect TLS is terminated there
- Quizzical4230 1y agoHere 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_Termux_and_Cloudflared.html https://mitanshu7.github.io/html/SSH_into_Android_with_Termu...
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoSomewhere 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.
- TheBicPen 1y agoHow does DNS work with a setup like this? I assume that ISPs generally don't want people hosting servers on residential connections.
- nick49488171 1y agoPlenty of dynamic DNS solutions. TP-link even has one you can set up from their app (not a endorsement, don't know if it is good or bad)
- disiplus 1y agoI have a fiber 2.5 gbit connection without static IP. But I run a script on the router that updates the DNS settings when the IP changes, you just have to have a DNS provider that allows you to do that and change ttl.
- rollcat 1y agoNAT is the hard problem. I'm tracking this one: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11563 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11563 You can also talk to your ISP (or their competition). My friend negotiated something like +5€/mo for a static IP. We can play Factorio together, yay!
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoDon't most ISPs hand out IPs that are only nominally dynamic? My IP is dynamic, but in practice only changes ~once/year. Even if I go to my router and release the WAN IP and reboot, when it comes back up, it'll have the same WAN IP. But then that once/year, my Internet randomly goes down and I have to reboot my router and I end up with a new WAN IP. When that happens, I just go and manually update the IP for a hostname I use. If I wanted to get fancy, I could automate all this, but meh. CBF to spend the time automating something that only takes me 30 seconds to do once/year. > I assume that ISPs generally don't want people hosting servers on residential connections. They likely don't care unless you're saturating your upload consistently. Also, some ISPs like Comcast/XFinity are known for having extremely asymmetrical connections. At least, they used to. I'm fairly certain I've heard of some people having 1 gbps down, but only like 16 mbps up.
- walthamstow 1y agoThis 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.
- JohnLocke4 1y agoThis post was made from a refurbished Pixel 5 I scored for ~$250. Just like you, this is easily the best phone I have ever had. I really like the 2020 design philosophy as is it doesn't include features meant to be technologically impressive rather than practical (eg. under-screen finger print reader). Here is to many more years of 2-3 days of use on a charge and good-but-not-great pictures
- indigodaddy 1y agoLooks like you can get a pixel 5 used for like $100-150 now? A quick look yields that most are in poor condition. Would be nice to find one barely used or even new/refurbished these days.. is it possible?
- walthamstow 1y agoFunnily enough I was just in the market for a sealed new Pixel 5 on Ebay UK last week. The going rate seems to be about £200 I'd probably buy at that price, but I'm not sure what the battery condition will be like after 5 years doing nothing.
- indigodaddy 1y agoPersonally, I cringe at paying more than 100-150 for a phone. Never spent more than that in my life! I've had a couple refurb iPhone 7's over the last 5-7 years, lol. My main phone currently is a 2024 Moto G Play, but it's a little lacking even for me (as I couldn't give two shits about even beginning to care about having a "nice" phone), so a decent shape Pixel 5 for cheap sounds kinda cool
- anthk 1y agoHeh, 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...
- aucisson_masque 1y agoTermux 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.
- Vinnl 1y agoRelated: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2024/11/28/the-fairphone-2-is-reborn-as-a-circular-microcomputer/ https://www.fairphone.com/en/2024/11/28/the-fairphone-2-is-r...
- tracker1 1y agoSeems 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.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- sct202 1y agoA 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.
- wltr 1y agoI 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.
- donkeybeer 1y agoNeat, 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoPixel 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
- mrheosuper 1y agoI swear that i remember pixel 5 support USB-Ethernet. In Fact, most of modern android support it. Since 2020 i've never encounter problem with usb-ethernet on android phone
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoWhy Android can't use CDC Ethernet (2023) (jordemort.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44219405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44219405
- radley 1y agoRepurposed, not recycled. (I did something similar for Android tablets, repurposing them into an automated, digital photo frame).
- mrheosuper 1y agoI 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.