64bit computing on a budget
virtuallyfun.com
virtuallyfun.com
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.
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.
Has anyone turned one of those into a home-server? If so, which steps have you followed?
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 It runs android, is several versions out of date, is connected to the Internet, yada yada.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…
This tool will allow a limit to be placed on the charging percentage; I have my phone set at 80%, so the battery never spends time at 100% charge which is the most damaging.
That should even be reasonably DIYable. 3.3V power supplies are readily available, and that voltage matches a (nearly empty) Li-ion battery. Make it beefy enough to handle peak currents at startup, add some minimum circuitry to satisfy the phone's charger and battery protection, and you should be able to run phones and tablets indefinitely.
Edit: some reports on stackexchange about people using this setup: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/309886/how-t...
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.
There were additional things that caused Windows Phone to fail, but I really feel Google Maps was the first nail in the coffin.
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.
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-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.)
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.
Maybe we need some more economic conflicts, for huawei and xiaomi to switch to their own "play services", and the developers will have to code apps that work on all android variants, not just google-based ones.
There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP, you can't really compare it to Ubuntu. It's not made for tinkering or user ownership.
Sure there are: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image/
The only project I know about doing that is Replicant and targets ancient phones. It's also a community run project, none of those phone came fully open from the factory either.
I think (guessing) the main thing an OSS advocate might take issue with is that decisions are made by corporate bodies that might not benefit end-users in every case. For example, the aforementioned Termux issue and how Google recently deprecated the open source Messages and Dialler apps on Android, with vendors like Samsung giving proprietary alternatives.
That seems to me to be an issue with some other open source projects too (people complain about GNOME for example not listening to its users) but it possibly happens there on a lower scale since Android's a bigger project (likely most people in the world have seen or held or used an Android phone once in their lives).
The kernel modifications are all GPL-licensed and the userland is Apache. Android is pure OSS, it's distributions are not.
I'm not sure how difficult it is to keep an OS going. What upgrades have I needed in the last 6 years? Security sure, but outside some phone system upgrades and messaging, I'm not sure what we even need to upgrade at this point.
Where is it resurging?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Nearly everything I’ve seen is either unobtainium, only supported by very specific kernel builds, expensive, or some combination thereof.
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.
Although Zero2Ws are a bit tricky to get hold of