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Hosting a website on a disposable vape
- HardwareLust 1y agoYour GitHub link in the doc gives me a 404. Otherwise, good stuff!
- BogdanTheGeek 1y agoThank you, it's fixed now.
- BruceEel 1y agoThis is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?
- BogdanTheGeek 1y agoMaybe, I'm not sure how you would connect a debugger to qemu, and you would have to emulate the ram and flash, but other than that is pretty standard arm cortex m0. The code is pretty generic too.
- BruceEel 1y agoMakes sense, thank you. Congrats on the extremely cool project.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jrmg 1y agoI wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
- bombcar 1y agoJust like how places with bag bans often just end up with thicker plastic bags that can be sold for ten cents and claimed as “reusable.
- orev 1y agoThey are reusable, which many people take advantage of. And it has dramatically reduced the number of tumbleweed bags clogging up nature.
- privatelypublic 1y agoReasonable people already reused single-use bags. Trashcan liners, dog walk bags, cat scoop bags, etc. Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
- orev 1y agoI’m not sure what your point is: because one type of litter is reduced, it doesn’t matter because people still litter in other ways? In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
- ewoodrich 1y agoYep, every so often I remember staring out the window on the highway in the car as a kid and seeing single use bags snagged on fences or trees pretty much anywhere inaccessible or not routinely cleaned. I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated. (This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination) https://www.amazon.com/Bag-Wind-Ted-Kooser/dp/0763630012#averageCustomerReviewsAnchor https://www.amazon.com/Bag-Wind-Ted-Kooser/dp/0763630012#ave...
- jsheard 1y agoYou think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.
- malfist 1y agoWhat's insane is how cheap all those components are. A quadcore processor with ram and memory, WiFi and Bluetooth for pennies at wholesale. The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
- ants_everywhere 1y agoImagine a beowulf cluster of... wait probably not
- balder1991 1y agoI guess at this point it’s safe to assume humanity won’t regress to a time before computers anymore.
- ta12653421 1y agoyeah, in 1992 we ran Doom on a 386DX 20Mhz and 320x200 VGA mode :-D (and it was slooooow and ugly!)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- marstall 1y agohow long til they have GPT-5 level LLMs?
- vpShane 1y agoThat's actually really cool, and gives me a peak in to microcontrollers. Wasn't aware of YUBA, but using such little RAM, loading an ipstack on it is impressive enough. Never would have thought about turning a vape in to an IoT device
- dudeWithAMood 1y agoWhat were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.
- rovr138 1y agoOpen a port or if their router supports it, assign their device to a DMZ. Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it. Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
- happyhardcore 1y agoVPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.
- sunsetonsaturn 1y agoCould you elaborate more on the "a small VPS is free"? Except Oracle's free tier offer, I am not aware of others; I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.
- ruperthair 1y agoI'm not sure where to go for the free VPS, other than Oracle Cloud, as you mention, but a Cloudflare tunnel will get traffic into your LAN even behind CGNAT or other nonsense.
- happyhardcore 1y agoFor this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?
- 1y ago
- analog31 1y agoSo the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.
- allenrb 1y agoOr would it be the other way around?
- BogdanTheGeek 1y agoso I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.
- temp0826 1y agoThe HN way is to colocate a cluster of these and put them behind a F5
- Dilettante_ 1y agoI respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.
- efilife 1y agoI am probably stupid so bear with me. I don't get the part about not naming brands if you are certain they won't ever sponsor you. I feel like it just hurts the value of the article with nothing gained
- Dilettante_ 1y agoIt's not about sponsorships and integrity, it's about preventing the pipeline "Person reads article -> Sees this brand of vape has micocontrollers -> Buys this brand of vape". (If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
- efilife 1y agoOk, but what's bad about this?
- Dilettante_ 1y agoContributing to people buying stuff that's bad for them, and giving money to an industry that profits off it, presumably? Again, I'm just assuming the author's position(which, for the record I do not share) here.
- efilife 1y agomay I ask what's your personal stance on this?
- Dilettante_ 1y agoMy position is "give people all the info you have, do not make the 'right' decision for them."
- gabriel666smith 1y agoThis is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS. Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
- panarchy 1y agoHaving an addiction doesn't make anyone "a pathetic excuse for a human being"
- gabriel666smith 1y agoI agree wholeheartedly. I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin. I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me. Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength. That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
- panarchy 1y agoGood. Just wanted to make sure you weren't being too hard on yourself.
- gabriel666smith 1y agoNo - that's what the drugs are for. Only joking (for real). I appreciate that, thank you. And I can totally see how my comment above might read patronising to people dealing with shit that is functionally much, much worse than the situation I described, so I appreciated the opportunity to right that, also.
- metal696heart 1y agoIt would be nice to pool ideeas for what they could be recycled into. Imagine the amount of automatic cat feeders the world could build with these.
- madcow2011 1y agoI've actually been trying to look into something similar? I have a pile of old vapes from friends/family I want to re-purpose, but don't really know where to start.
- panarchy 1y agoNow make a cluster of them running on load balancer
- rpcope1 1y agoSo a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.
- dev0p 1y agoI am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist. My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE? Insane. At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
- markstos 1y agoI found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.
- ivape 1y agoI wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things. It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
- jdoliner 1y agoHey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.
- RedShift1 1y ago> It’s really hard to quite vaping btw. They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoThe Addictive Stuff™ is literally the core feature of the item. Your comment makes it sound like the producers are nefariously and covertly adding nicotine to a product which normally would not have any? It's like saying "These scoundrel breweries! They're making beer that gets you drunk!"
- zetanor 1y agoAdd a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.
- Rebelgecko 1y agoI know you're joking, but it seems like a great option for IEDs. Cheap, hard to trade (might even come with a patsy's DNA preinstalled)
- ch4s3 1y agoWhy wait until they're empty, let he fish vape I say!
- RedShift1 1y agoWe need to reduce microplastics. Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes. I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThe micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic. I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway. In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there. It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
- citizenpaul 1y agoThe mfg/mining process for the chips is probably equally bad. All for a device to help you develop health problems.
- cluckindan 1y agoYou could say that for a lot of devices. It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
- citizenpaul 1y ago>healthier choice No just no. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/quit-smoking-tobacco/is-vaping-safer-than-smoking https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/qu...
- konfusinomicon 1y agoliving that cloud life
- x187463 1y agoRe-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this. I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
- Mistletoe 1y agoWill the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?
- ffsm8 1y ago[flagged]
- zknow 1y agoReally? I thought that it was kind of a ecumenist religion that included themes from many religions.
- overfeed 1y agoI hope gp goes on a tear about the Orange Catholic Bible next, and how outrageous its non-subtle references are.
- NemoNobody 1y agoIt is.
- ffsm8 1y agonot really, pretty old overview on it - but kept up to date it seems (current references to interviews) https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-in-frank-herberts-dune.html https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-... its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however. It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess
- droobles 1y agoLong live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!
- NoiseBert69 1y agoI bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.
- grues-dinner 1y agoApparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jerf 1y agoThe mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.
- justincormack 1y agoIts only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.
- briansm 1y agoThe old 1980s computers also had no equivalent of flash storage though, the RAM had to store the program being run as well as act as scratch-space.
- Narishma 1y agoIt's got only 3KB of RAM, less than even the VIC-20.
- masfuerte 1y agoThe CPU isn't that fantastical for the 1980s. The Archimedes had an 8MHz ARM in 1987. It was expensive though and came with at least 512KB RAM. P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
- broabprobe 1y agovery impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (https://collapseos.org/ https://collapseos.org/)
- peteforde 1y agoI see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it. Yet?
- jsheard 1y ago3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.
- xigoi 1y agoSo you’d just need about 100 vapes. If you have a friend who uses them, should not take long to collect.
- gaudystead 1y agoA Beowulf cluster of vapes...
- reaperducer 1y ago3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom You can play Doom on an Atari 2600: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demake/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demak... Just need to outboard a little extra RAM.
- reaperducer 1y agoI see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoI was just thinking about that slashdot meme the other day. Like Beowulf clusters were the dream! Imagine one! I wanted one! Everybody did! And now you can spin that shit up for pennies an hour and then throw it all away when you are done. Who would have seen that coming back in, what, 1998…
- nusl 1y agoDisposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.
- mcdonje 1y agoSociety tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- toast0 1y agoDo vapes have ad budgets? All I see are anti-vape ads?
- mcdonje 1y agoYes, like all tobacco products. These days a lot of marketing is targeted and subtle, especially for an industry used to dealing with advertising restrictions. https://tobaccoatlas.org/challenges/marketing/ https://tobaccoatlas.org/challenges/marketing/
- isoprophlex 1y agoThey represent the most viable pathway for big tobacco to exit regular cigarettes, which are in decline or at least struggling. AND vapes have huge traction with younger people. It's basically The Thing that big tobacco needs to go all in on if they want to keep selling carcinogenic air to people for the next 50 years
- nusl 1y agoAd budgets and convenience/"cool factor." Similar to cigarettes, people think they look cool when doing it and/or do so to fit in with groups that do.
- NoSalt 1y agoNot to mention the EXTREME damage it can do to a person's lungs, and do this damage very quickly.
- shadowgovt 1y agoThat's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan! I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.
- distances 1y agoBy law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices? Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
- avian 1y agoThe vape comes with a miniature laser-engraved WEEE crossed-out trash can symbol so everything is fine.
- NoSalt 1y agoThe current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.
- zero_k 1y agoI am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong. This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
- cluckindan 1y agoThere are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police). Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
- dpc050505 1y agoMy reusable vape cost like 15$. It's basically the same components as a disposable vape, except I can refill a pod and switch the pod if I burn the wick.
- cluckindan 1y agoWell, lucky you, I guess? Here they are considered tobacco products and taxed as heavily as cigarettes. I think the cheapest models are around $50. That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven. The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy. Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
- SXX 1y agoTalking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_(generic-zhihe) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_... https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.
- happyhardcore 1y agoI've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere. [1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/ https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/
- motorest 1y agoWhat an interesting gadget! It looks like it has most of the features of an Orange Pi Zero, but at around 1/5th of the price.
- sitzkrieg 1y agoit's almost like everything matching the pi footprint is severely overpriced!
- motorest 1y agoThere's a silver lining in raspberry pi and it's clones being so relatively expensive: they create a market and demand for hackable devices. In an age with so much pressure to plug every single digital hole, these devices bring some much needed market pressure to the opposite direction.
- kpil 1y agoThis is like a really really fast VIC 20!
- daft_pink 1y agoI’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.
- accrual 1y agoThis is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)
- 867-5309 1y ago504 timeout -- fug of breath
- isoprophlex 1y agoCould one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?
- rozumbrada 1y agoThis is why I go to hackernews every day <3
- 6r17 1y agoHei ; Preact would be deff appropriate in that scenario ; it's a clone of react that is meant to be small ! Very inspiring work btw !
- jhoechtl 1y agoTime for the disposable vape web farm
- prism56 1y agoAnyone got an RSS for this blog?
- happyhardcore 1y agohttps://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/index.xml https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/index.xml
- prism56 1y agoThank you! Struggled to find it.
- r0bbbo 1y agoHas anyone done the joke about "next big cloud platform" yet?
- t_mann 1y agoReality catching up with satire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s
- gbacon 1y agoThis was my first time working with perl and I have to say, it’s quite well suited to this kind of task. Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan! https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/uip/makefsdata https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...
- jumploops 1y agoMeta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251) Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!
- busymom0 1y agoRegarding the meta comment, it's due to comments being moved from a 4 hour older post into this brand new post by the mods (a bit strange). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249287#45252845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249287#45252845
- jumploops 1y agoAh, that makes more sense, thanks!
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- dirtyoldmick 1y agoIt's down. =(
- afspear 1y agoTo be fair, it's a disposable vape.
- koliber 1y agoHow does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?
- fragmede 1y agoRunning at 24 Mhz, the vape is umpteen times faster but interestingly enough the AGC had 36 KiB of ROM while the vape only has 24 KiB. Umpteen is a technical term denoting that a straight comparison isn't possible, as the Cortex M0 does more in a single clock cycle than the AGC does but they're also different architectures and the programs running are different.
- oltmang 1y agoTrue vaperware
- curvaturearth 1y agoI used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.
- zsimjee 1y agoCan someone please make a zyn tin container for these?
- zeppelin101 1y agoThis is why I come to HackerNews. This made my day.
- braunshizzle 1y agoVaPS
- theyknowitsxmas 1y agoThe vape is 503
- mdavid626 1y agoAny lucky ones? I got only 504-s.
- tgtweak 1y agoMissed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwaway3b03 1y agoWow, it even survived the HN hug of death.
- ljsprague 1y agoNo mas.
- BogdanTheGeek 1y agoIt's on life support, only about 5% of the request get though, most html only. I've been babying it all day :)
- raxxorraxor 1y agoJust smoke a bit more and build a vape load balancer that just randomly forwards to a small vape cluster. Seriously nice project! These chips are more powerful than some µC I used for medical applications just a few years ago...
- rusabd 1y agoVery appropriate to host “Suck it, Jin-Yang!”
- spacebacon 1y ago** yeah
- notorandit 1y agoNice. But ... > Later modems used PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) PPP a (c)slip are not used by modems but by the computers whose serials are up and running. Even without modems.
- arcabus 1y agobut will it run Doom? :)
- CyberDildonics 1y agoI don't understand the hardware setup. There is a usb-c port and they talk about usb serial devices which could be a usb to serial port, but what is after that? There are no pictures of it connected.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoMy best guess is that only the power pins of that usb port is connected. So they're going over a debug port for io.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoSomeone in a different forum said it was a usb to serial port then on a pc a network port was forwarded to the serial port, but it is very unclear in the article.
- coffeecantcode 1y agoAppcolypse plan: Ammo? Canned food? Fresh water? No. 1,200 geek bars in a faraday cage.
- duncangh 1y agoGetting a 503 error now upon request to the vape hosted blog. Safe to say that it got smoked by the hacker news traffic volume!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 1y agoWe are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.
- s-mon 1y agoAnd its faster than Vercel!
- SandmanDP 1y ago> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP. Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.
- faangguyindia 1y agobut why? i upload my website to cloudflare pages.
- ChaoPrayaWave 1y agoI never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.
- Daisywh 1y agoThis reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.
- kencut801 1y ago[flagged]
- williambrabyn 1y ago[dead]
- oldherl 1y agoBut the essential resources for website hosting are public IP address and link bandwidth. Not a tiny computer.
- unglaublich 1y agoA good demo for a computer would be something that needs computing, like running DOOM.
- Tepix 1y agoLuckily, IP addresses (in particular for websites) and bandwidth can be shared with many devices.
- bvvgpc 1y ago"pacifiers for adults" is probably the best description for a vape that I have ever read.
- Lprince 1y agoTook a few attempts (over a few hours) to get the vape hosted version to load... but it just worked and I felt soooo happy! I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?
- SamBuildpcb 1y agointeresting
- noreplydev 1y agothis is fun af
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sentinelsignal 1y agoAt this point, is there any device left we could not make a web server yet?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoAs of this moment, this article has 420 comments which seems fitting. I guess until now, mine may be the 421st.
- PrinST 1y agoWant to fit a web server into a speck of dust? Check out smews ( https://github.com/2xs/smews https://github.com/2xs/smews ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST) The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)
- _1tem 1y agoIt's all fun and games to host a blog, but Ukrainian home garage drone manufacturers actually defend territory with these kinds of projects.
- ge96 1y agoMakes me start thinking of cool use cases like dropping pineapples all over the place or those GeoCaching things