frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

https://www.offthebricks.com/articles/smashed-toilet-phone-web-server
24•mircerlancerous•3d ago

Comments

nubinetwork•3d ago
> 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.

rcxdude•3d ago
Yeah, it's not a matter of stopping charging, that is a necessary but not sufficient condition to stop the battery from exploding. It's generally keeping the battery fully charged and hot inside a device that's always plugged in and always on that does them in like this over time.
subscribed•1d ago
Ah, yeah, like MSI does - the only way to set a charging limit is to install windows and their malw....ummm, bloatware, to switch one thing in EC (yeah, out of curiosity I checked various Linux-based attempts but it looks like they're not baked at all or sometimes messing up the bios settings)
mircerlancerous•17h ago
Author here. All good points from this point and its replies, which to me says best to me that not all products and experiences are equal, so proceed based on your comfort level.

Note that the app is capable of monitoring both battery charge percentage and temperature. If one was inclined a USB to serial adapter with some simple circuitry could be used to monitor and control the state of charge. Good idea for a follow-up project and article!

rob74•26m ago
Also:

> so there's little (not nothing, but little) to go wrong.

Yes, but if "going wrong" means your house burning down (because the phone overheated while you were away), most people will try to avoid even the slightest possibility of that happening, because people are generally pretty attached to their house/flat/whatever and its content.

Schlagbohrer•3d ago
"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-(

mircerlancerous•17h ago
Author here. What boiling water doesn't take care of all that ;)
DemiKone2•3d ago
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.

mircerlancerous•17h ago
Author here. Qik is the name I've given to the project. It's pretty clear on all the pages that it will always be free, and that there's no reference anywhere to any crypto services. Give specifics if you think otherwise; there's lots of noise these days, so I'm not offended you figured this was another one.
thejazzman•2d ago
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

mircerlancerous•17h ago
Author here. I'll admit that I have made limited use of AI for helping in areas that I'm less familiar with (like FTP protocols), but I haven't paid a dime; all free plan. I'll use AI to help make the project possible, but it's not trustworthy enough to make things readable and maintainable.

If you want help getting this setup for yourself, let me know; happy to help.

jantuss•1h ago
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?
sgt•12m ago
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.

Midjourney Medical

https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
887•ricochet11•10h ago•611 comments

Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at 90% lower cost

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/hospitals-and-universities-repurposing-drugs-at-90-lower-cost
46•giuliomagnifico•1h ago•12 comments

DeepSeek Introduces Vision

https://chat.deepseek.com/
199•RIshabh235•5h ago•87 comments

Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

https://blog.alexellis.io/local-ai-is-not-opus/
266•alphabettsy•9h ago•131 comments

Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability

https://lore.org/
1163•regnerba•21h ago•620 comments

I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle

https://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?p=1725
61•ingve•3h ago•48 comments

I hate compilers

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/anubis-wasm-vendor-binary/
94•xena•6h ago•72 comments

AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-silently-removes-memory-encryption-from-consu...
181•lompad•4h ago•94 comments

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-holds-off-blacklisting-chinas-deepseek-more-than-100-firms...
474•giuliomagnifico•1d ago•521 comments

Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache

https://vinyl-cache.org/organization/on_vinyl_cache_and_varnish_cache.html#org-vinyl-varnish
14•embedding-shape•3d ago•1 comments

Sogen – High-performance Windows and Linux userspace emulator

https://sogen.dev/
41•fratellobigio•3d ago•10 comments

The 2-Year Apartment Rule

https://tadaima.bearblog.dev/the-2-year-apartment-rule/
44•surprisetalk•2d ago•98 comments

Challenging the Narrative of European Decline

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/challenging-the-narrative-of-european-478
11•vrganj•33m ago•0 comments

How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

https://browser-use.com/posts/firecracker-browser-infra
289•gregpr07•1d ago•194 comments

Clojure Hosted on Go

https://github.com/glojurelang/glojure
155•dnlo•12h ago•17 comments

How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply/
164•trymas•16h ago•106 comments

Storied Colors – A catalogue of named colors

https://storiedcolors.com/
183•susiecambria•14h ago•41 comments

Taxonomy of the Occlupanida (parasitoids on bread bag tags)

https://www.horg.com/horg/?page_id=921
156•beatthatflight•12h ago•39 comments

Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

https://www.offthebricks.com/articles/smashed-toilet-phone-web-server
24•mircerlancerous•3d ago•13 comments

About ASCII art and Jgs font (2023)

https://velvetyne.fr/news/about-ascii-art-and-jgs-font/
14•Luc•2d ago•1 comments

Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction

https://loreline.app/en/
182•smartmic•15h ago•30 comments

Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD

https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM
191•zachdive•19h ago•88 comments

RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10008/
384•schappim•1d ago•159 comments

Nim Conf 2026 (Online, Sat June 20)

https://conf.nim-lang.org/
56•pietroppeter•8h ago•11 comments

The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion

https://www.acma.gov.au/sms-sender-id-register
114•anitil•5h ago•63 comments

Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/seven-perfect-shuffles-randomize-a-deck-of-cards-but-how-many-slop...
5•layer8•2h ago•2 comments

Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

https://www.thesignalist.io/s/the-dialogue-dividend/
284•kodesko•23h ago•124 comments

Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students

https://github.com/c0rRupT9/STEPLA-1
85•CorRupT9•2d ago•21 comments

AI Compute Extensions (ACE) Specification

https://x86ecosystem.org/resource/ai-compute-extensions-ace-specification/
46•matt_d•9h ago•18 comments

Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35949-volkswagen-app?page=3
712•microtonal•21h ago•424 comments