this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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What's the best way to make use of an old laptop? (hexbear.net)
submitted 4 months ago by MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My aunt's got an old slightly broken laptop. She's got a new one. No one has any need for this old one anymore. It has no selling value. Etc etc etc.

I know I can put an SSD in it and run it on Linux to make it run smoothly as a laptop for emails and word processing etc, but I already have a crap old laptop for exactly that.

What sort of fun things can you do with an old laptop? I'm talking like, using it as a whole new device. Maybe using it as a 'TV Box' of sorts - getting some radio apps, and hacked streaming apps... Or loading up a bunch of PS2 games on it... or having it as the jankiest personal assistant, with timers, and calendars, and all that.

You know what I mean.

I love pointless gadgetry.

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[–] znonymous@hexbear.net 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I turn all my old laptops into servers. Most often, I use them to experiment with various self-hosted services.

Most laptops these days can be put into clamshell mode, especially if they have an HDMI out. Just get a headless dummy plug -- they run about $6.

Plug one of those in, close the display, and you have a small, book-sized server with a built-in continuous power supply backup battery.

Of course eventually, the power consumption of all these devices can add up. Older devices are often less efficient. Sometimes, just retiring and getting a device "recycled" (to the extent possible) is best.

[–] MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

What sort of self hosted services do you mean?

[–] copyleft@hexbear.net 11 points 4 months ago

I do the same thing they do. Currently running Jellyfin and Nextcloud off a 2011 macbook.

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago

I run a few:

  • AudioBookShelf for podcasts
  • Calibre-Web for ebooks which syncs with my Kobo Sage
  • Shiori for making bookmarks and archives of articles
  • Miniflux, an RSS reader.
[–] Gorb@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

3 spare laptops i have one runs as a home server (i would recommend removing the battery if you do that, the constant charging and discharging makes them a fire hazard) which i use for jellyfin, smb shares (nextcloud is better than smb but i use smb for hosting my ps2 ISO for use with OPL), pihole, unbound, joplin, tandoor, discord bots, game servers on lan like my azerothcore server and probably some other shit I'm forgetting. Another laptop i use as a smart TV style thing for streaming from jellyfin using kodi, also runs a bunch of emulators for couch gaming and i use it to stream my desktop with moonlight. Other old laptop that can run XP i use for XP shit old nostalgia game stuff things I can't easily get running on a modern machine that's so niche nobody has any fixes for it. Another old laptop i turned into a hackintosh for funsies not useful but interesting to do

[–] xj9@hexbear.net 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Depending on the laptop, you can configure the charge controller to properly cycle the battery so it can function as a UPS. https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/battery.html

Good call to be careful about it though, because you definitely should make sure its configured correctly if you're going to leave the battery in.

[–] Gorb@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

Even properly cycling it which I did for a bit using tlp i wouldn't trust. I've had too many devices go spicy pillow on me i just assume every lithium ion battery will inevitably end up exploding and take precautions. This especially so for an old laptop with an already degraded battery.

Daily scheduled data backups and just letting the server go offline for me are safer especially considering my server doesn't actually run anything critical that i can't just reprovision if it does corrupt itself since i have scripts that recreate it all from scratch.

[–] MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Is this all on Linux? What distro are you using?

Very interesting.

[–] Gorb@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah for my server I use ubuntu LTS cos its well supported and documented. For my TV one I use fedora cos fedora is neato as well as my other machines. Debian is another good choice for a server OS. I tend to run all my services in docker with docker compose as its simple to use with a few native services and some of my own built services as well all routed through nginx proxy to give them convenient domain names using pihole as the DNS.

Another tip i don't port foward and expose any of my server stuff to the public internet the risk of opening up my shodily made home server for everything to see is too high. For hosting things on the interwebs i spin up ephemeral vps machines for each thing only for as long as i need it

[–] MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

Amazing, thanks

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago

it would be cool to have a dedicated emulator maybe, like to build a cool little cabinet with a monitor and it just plays SNES, Sega, or whatever level of arcade it can handle.

I've also always been absolutely enchanted by those like flatscreen-behind-a-mirror setups that people put in the wall so it's like a mirror with a little HUD in the corner with weather, time date, etc info.

I would love to have a big dedicated display that only ever showed some national weather service radar feed that was pegged to my lat-lon and only zoomed in/out within some specified range and looped the last hour with timestamps.

[–] buh@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago

Home server for things like shared storage or self hosted cloud services

Could also just stick it somewhere you might sometimes want to use a computer but wouldn’t want to bring a nicer laptop due to risk of damage (for example, a kitchen or garage workshop)

[–] someone@hexbear.net 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Libreelec. It's a super easy to install Linux distro that turns a machine into a Kodi box. Add one of those cheapie little USB-rechargable keyboards like this and you have a nice media centre.

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

whoa. this looks tight. also, any recs for a good brand of keyboard for this?

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 6 points 4 months ago

You can get one of these things for like $15 or less on any number of websites; I feel like this is one of those edge cases where you want something pretty cheap, I don't want to spend so much on accessories that I could have just bought better gear instead of trying to make what I had lying around work.

[–] someone@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago

Not really any specific keyboard recommendations. That basic design of keyboard is sold by dozens of companies. I'd bet on them all coming from the same factory.

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've tried 2 different ones so far. Pepper Jobs remote control and the Logi keyboard with built in track pad.

The remote is really cool and amazing features for cheap, but the gyro mouse is tedious at best, and the media controls are hit or miss.

The Logi is perfect for full service couch surfing, but it's big and cumbersome.

Given a choice, I'd take the Logi for an htpc.

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks!! I think that's what I am looking for.

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 1 points 4 months ago

Hope it works well for you! I want to try one of those game pad keyboards, they look interesting.

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Expanding upon other users' suggestions of running self-hosted services...

If you have multiple unused devices laying around, I'd suggest making a Kubernetes cluster out of them. (The easiest way to bootstrap a cluster would probably be using k3s.)

The main benefits of doing this are:

  • Your self-hosted services can scale to meet demand by running them on multiple nodes or more powerful nodes, letting you make the most of multiple crappy machines instead of being limited to its specs.
  • You can combine storage devices from across all your machines and create distributed volumes or large shared volumes.
  • If a machine goes down, your workloads can switch to another node to run on, preventing downtime.
  • You can add new machines as nodes and they'll be available to run your services without much additional effort.

It's a fair amount of effort to setup, but the benefits are worth it IMO.

[–] xj9@hexbear.net 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I wish this kind of cluster thing was a lot more approachable in general. I'm also just stubborn and I'm having a hard time accepting that kubernetes is actually the way to go for general purpose home cluster computing.

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

Kubernetes is a huge time sink if you don't use a k8s distribution. But I set mine up long ago, so I have had the leg work done for awhile now. Mostly just reaping the benefits now.

[–] machinya@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

kubernetes is the way to go for home cluster computing

i will challenge this idea every time I see it. The benefits that you get with it are good but usually quite overkill for the needs of a home cluster. Services that balances across nodes, no downtime, software defined storage; all of those stuff is nice and fun but most of the home clusters don't really need them.

kubernetes is quite complex and it's very hard to handle when you don't have all the necesary knowledge and experience to do so. it's very easy to misconfigure things and errors are often very hard to find when you don't know where to look. there are other projects that try to have a simpler version of the "cluster orchestration" (nomad, swarm, portainer and others. haven't tried all of them so I might be wrong) but they are also complex on it's own way and have their own share of problems.

my recomendation is that, unles you are planning to work on it and want to get more experience, you should start with smaller things (podman + systemd, regular docker, maybe start managing systems with ansible) and slowly build new things over what you already have. this has the benefit of letting you learn the basics slowly so that if you ever jump to the kubernetes bandwagon you will have more knowledge that will help the experience to be better

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Depending on the setup you can run a media server on it

Some chipsets are better than others for this, intel chips with integrated graphics are particularly good, but probably anything would work just suboptimally