Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

> Undoubtedly at least one of the readers of this story will raise alarms at the prospect of keeping a lithium battery on full charge all of the time. It's a fire hazard! It can explode!

> I have a fair bit of experience with charging batteries of many types, and with confidence I can say that these concerns are largely overblown. Any appropriately designed battery charging system will stop charging the battery once it's fully charged.

Tell that to the multitude of laptops I've owned and/or repaired because the battery swells up and pushes the keyboard and trackpad out of the chassis.

It's a cute dream to have - running some kind of webserver/API/IoT service off an old phone, but in my experience it's not as easy as it sounds.

I had a little fleet of phones doing some IoT-like operation but they eventually all went offline, restarted, or just developed wonky issues.

Cell phones simply do not like being powered on 24/7 and actively doing things - they are used to being used for a bit, then off. It gets worse as the battery ages, of course - and maybe that's the main reason for the failures.

> There's also some suggestions out there that leaving a lithium ion battery fully charged will degrade its max capacity over time; I haven't seen any evidence of that in practice,

I did. Several old devices of mine died like that.

At higher voltages the passivation layer at the cathode, necessary for the battery to function, becomes unstable and decomposes.

"then later dropped in a toilet before sitting for over a year in a bag of rice"

Oh my god please tell me someone remembered to throw the toilet-water-rice out and not accidentally use it for cooking X-(

I’ve been dreaming of this (generally speaking) for years. Just occurred to me I could easily do it myself now too with modern tools…

If only we had truly unlimited data plans to go with it

Google had a lovely related article recently of data centers built around many old stripped down phones. The main focus seems to be a university experiment,

> Researchers at the University of California San Diego are planning a 2,000-phone computing cluster to support computer science classes such as Parallel Computation and Systems Programming. Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend. A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once.

https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515336

I do think there is huge potential here for things like running lots of semi persistent agent harnesses. The work time is currently massively dominated by the remote LLMs, so running on old phones would be cheap and because of Amdahl's Law it wouldnt really be much slower.

This is awesome! The page looks good, and is nicely optimized. Is the phone serving the whole site? I noticed that the backgound image fades in, is it serving that too?

This is a advertisement for a service called qik "Next step is to pick a Qik Node to run your web services, and host your apps. There are official Qik Nodes "

several pages on the site direct you to this service which seems to be a web server smashed together with some buzzwords and crypto services.