Considering the price of a Fairphone you have a right to be upset. I suppose the only thing going for your situation is maybe the parts are worth something since they can be used to easily fix other Fairphones.

The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.

But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:

phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…

Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).

I’m surprised to hear a phone for $100 referred to as cheap. But I suppose it is relative to some phones fetching 4 figures. Crazy! In the past I would go to the shop of a carrier and ask what they have in the backroom which is still new in box but not current enough to expose on the store shelves. I got new phones between $5 and $20 this way, which were only 1 or 2 Android versions behind.

That’s still not good. It’s frugal but it still feeds the 1st hand market when the 2nd hand market is absolutely flooded with phones no one wants. Going forward, every phone I buy will be 2nd hand.

The street markets are flooded with cameras (both digital and film). If you’re not fussy about pocket space that could be worth considering.

That’s interesting… I thought a Scandinavian country was known for banning ICE cars. Though apparently Ethiopia is getting credit for the first to enact the policy.

Though in principle it would make sense to have an exception so that someone in Ethiopia could to do ICE→EV conversions if they wanted.

I can’t see a wristwatch defying physics. It likely has to calculate your position fewer times per unit time, thus gets an updated fix less frequently than a phone. Which may be good enough when on foot. Otherwise it would suck the battery dry if it works too hard for a frequent high res fix. (edit: see item 4 on this page Looks like you get one calculation per second which is possibly a bit too infrequent for cycling unless the app is good at using other sensors to estimate intermediate positions)

When I said CPU load, I should have spoke more generically because indeed a dedicated chip is used. But that chip still needs energy. A dedicated GPS device would indeed help my situation, whether it’s a phone or otherwise. Getting an old dedicated satnav device isn’t a bad idea. The maps on those are far from useable but I recall some Garmins and Tomtoms had bluetooth and I think sending NMEA info is common. That might actually be a good way to repurpose an old obsolete dedicated satnav device – or phone that can be configured as such. There is an opentom project to put FOSS on a Tomtom.

what DO you want it to do?

Essential: navigation (and update maps over Tor), VOIP over VPN, render locally stored PDFs (pushed over adb).

Non-essential: XMPP (snikket), notes, calculator, take photos, scan QR codes, play from local music library

GPS navigation is heavy because calculating a fix from GPS satellites is always CPU intensive. This means (on old phones) the always-on screen coupled with CPU load while navigating drains the battery quick, which is a compounding problem because old devices are less efficient. On top of that, the CPU heat degrades the battery and charging performance when it is most needed. I would rather not strap a power bank to my arm. In principle I should navigate with two devices:

• a phone dedicated to receiving GPS, calculating the fix, and transmitting over bluetooth while screen is off (this could be stashed in a backpack)
• a phone with screen on and mapping software running, GPS disabled, bluetooth receiving the fix from the other phone

That would also mean when I stop for food or something I could charge both devices at the same time and they would each drain slower when used. Bluetooth uses much less energy than GPS. This approach is inspired by my PalmOS days, when a palm pilot had no GPS and there were dedicated separate tiny GPS→bluetooth devices. The tech exists but I think the GPS server app is either absent from f-droid or it requires a newer device (I forgot which).

I had some immediate objection to Organic Maps when I first heard of them. Was their website Cloudflared previously? ATM I don’t see what my issue with them was. Superficially they look like a decent 2nd option (which I say having not tried their software yet).

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing,

Web browsing is such a shit-show even with the latest Debian on a PC that I have almost entirely rejected the idea of browsing from a smartphone. I simply will not invest 1 penny of money or 1 minute of my time chasing garbage services with a garbage device. There have been rare moments where “Privacy Browser” on my old AOS5 phone manages to reach and render a webpage but I have mostly given up on that idea. Even captive portals are a shit-show so I usually cannot connect to public wifi. Fuck it… it wasn’t meant to be.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up,

I’m on the edge of scrapping Youtube altogether because of Google’s hostile treatment toward Tor users and simultaneous relentless attacks on Invideous nodes. But up until a couple months ago I could usually fetch a video via Invidious and store locally. My 2008 Thinkpad has been able to handle every video fine so far. I have the Newpipe app on the phone but I’m not really driven to use the phone for YT videos.

Looks like a quite useful service. Thanks for mentioning it. But $5/month is a bit much for that. I would love to SMS people from an XMPP app but it would have to be cheaper, or pay per msg.

Early flash memory had a severe bitwear/bitrot issue, but at some point (2015?) they made some strides on that. The best resilience is in the SSDs for some reason. I’m not sure how much SD cards improved, but I suppose a phone’s internal storage would be an embedded SD card.

It’s a good point, so it would be useful to know if there is a year where bitwear is less notable on phones.

It’s a shame Fairphone even has internal storage, which seems to go against their vision. But apparently Fairphone users can at least use the external storage as internal (if you neglect the apparent bug mentioned in that thread). I wonder if the internal storage is still needed for the boot loader in that case.

Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL.

I just bought an all-metal sewing machine from like the 1960s. Of course the warranty is toast (though it was generous… like 25yrs or something). I would not say it’s not BifL on the basis of warranty expiry. It will likely last the rest of my life which could amount to another 50 yrs.

Most of what I buy outlasts the warranty. Then I push it far beyond what’s expected. But indeed smartphones are such an obsolescence shit-show out of the gate they will be the hardest product to push the lifetime on.

I’m with you there. I have defunded phones for sure and minimized the role of phones. I don’t even use smartphones as phones (no SIM chip). I think the only absolutely essential use case for me is to run OSMand (navigation) because it’s far too impractical to get a paper map for every city I set foot in.

OSMand is a resource hog. Crashes chronically when overworked. So maintaining OSMand seems to require keeping pace to some extent. Certainly the FOSS platforms will at least enable a phone to stay in play as long as possible – or so I hope.

You can always make a bridge/hotspot that will do what you need. You are only limited if you are fussy about pocket/backpack space.

It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.

This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):

① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)

My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.

What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.

and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect 2 yrs ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE – which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak. Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.

(update) Nope… Just checked and it was this year that they pulled the plug on 3g… just last month for one carrier. So my mystery is still unsolved. Though I don’t suppose it matters… what good is a 3g modem now? I wonder if there are any hacks to get a 3g modem talking to a self-hosted fake tower.

For some strange reason Tor users are able to reach this otherwise paywalled article, so I will post the text below for all those who are unable to reach it. It’s long, so using a spoiler:

I don’t get how plastics can reach the food. Didn’t yours have a stainless steel innerpot with a metal cover on the food side?

Worked for no problem, over Tor in fact. Usually Tor gets the most hostile treatment.

I saw plenty of opportunities for enshitification and designed obsolescence.

There was an APP! So of course the natural order of things is to move more and more functionality from the physical control panel to the app. Then periodically let the app die by obsolescence. Force people to buy new phones to keep up, but then one day the new app no longer talks to old pressure cookers. Make the next version connect to the cloud for programs, and share with the IP maker everything you do. Sell that data to Amazon and Google who want to know what food you’re buying.

Then make the programs subscription based, so users have to pay a monthly fee to operate their cooker. Justify it by adding more and more programs. If someone does not pay their subscription, shut them down. Make the IP the biggest brick in the house.

I was actually disturbed that there was a Google Playstore app. Sure, it was optional, but I did not like the fact that my purchase in part financed the creation of an exclusive closed-source app exclusively available to Google and Apple patrons. It should have been an f-droid app.

The pics are a bit deceiving. They make it appear as if you get uniform thicknesses, but is that often the case? I doubt it. When a building is demolished, it’s disturbing how sloppy and chaotic they are. They just smash it to bits, producing all different sizes and shapes. I wish they would think about reuse. They could take a cutter and cut uniform blocks off the building which can then be used like building blocks. Instead you got a gnarly mess of blobs with rebar sticking out.

Anyway, I think it’s common to buy much less concrete than you need for a driveway, then mix urbanite with the wet mix so a large portion is reused. I’ve not done it myself but probably entails soaking the urbanite in polyvinylacetate (PVA aka wood glue). I once had to repair a broken concrete step as well as patch some existing stucco. If I had just put new concrete where needed, it would not stick to the old concrete well. So many bonding layers are needed. You water down PVA and paint that onto the old surface. Then when that’s ½ dry you do it again but with a little concrete in it. It’s like a sloppy slurry… gets everywhere. Then again with a thicker layer. Then you also add PVA in the new concrete mix. That’s how to make it bond. So it’d be the same idea with urbanite. It would only trust that for non-structural projects though. Probably wouldn’t want a foundation relying on it.

We are indeed.

Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.

But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.