“The Street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturers never imagined.”

– William Gibson

There’s a techie online who goes by “Bogdan the Geek,” a name I swear I’ve read before but can’t remember where. Maybe a passing reference on the socials. Anyway, he is, broadly speaking, a maker and tinkerer:

“The truth is that being able to make anything tickles the dopamine receptors in my brain in just the right way.”

– Bogdan the Geek, while writing about one of his many hobbies

In pursuit of said tinkering, he collects junk for parts, including disposable vape pens. At first he was just interested in the batteries, but while taking one apart, he found, instead of the probably-useless control circuitry he expected, an honest-to-god computer processor:

• 24MHz Coretex M0+
• 24KiB of Flash Storage
• 3KiB of Static RAM
• a few peripherals, none of which we will use.

You may look at those specs and think that it’s not much to work with. I don’t blame you, a 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower…

I’m not as shocked, but that’s because I’m old enough to remember my parents toying with a Timex Sinclair (which I was considered too young to be allowed to touch).

…I on the other hand see a blazingly fast web server.

…and he did it. It works, serving up a copy of his blog post. It did hatch a bit midway through loading the page, but that’s a common experience on the Net these days. (…though usually it’s because the page wants to load multiple megabytes of ads and trackers…)

The Street finds its own uses for things, indeed.

…but it might be best not to dwell too much on the mindset that led to putting a general-purpose computer processor in a disposable vape pen. To do what, exactly? Track the battery level?

Via another techie on Mastodon.