Hosting a Website on a Disposable Vape
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A developer hosted a website on a disposable vape device, showcasing its potential as a miniature computer, while also highlighting the issue of e-waste generated by such devices.
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I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated.
(This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination)
https://www.amazon.com/Bag-Wind-Ted-Kooser/dp/0763630012#ave...
The bag laws have done nothing but increase the consumption of plastic, since stores still go through nearly as many, but they’re 5x thicker now.
I predict that if you spend 10 minutes observing the checkouts in your supermarket you'll see exactly what I see: At least 75% of people buying new plastic bags for the transaction, and zero people depositing bags into the special bag recycling bin at the store - which in the US is basically the only place this type of plastic is even accepted for recycling.
And again, these bags appear to be 3-5x as thick as the old bags, so the bag law is a huge win for Big Plastic who sells more plastic than they used to, and it mostly goes into the landfill.
The solutions:
• Admit this is a failed policy
• Everyone everywhere stops being imperfect, forgetful and lazy -- 100% of the time.
California is still hoping for the latter to pan out!
5x thicker is still a net win.
And it was less about reducing plastic consumption and more about reducing plastic pollution. 1000 tonnes of plastic in a landfill and incinerators (because the heavier bags are more likely to be reused even just as bin bags) is better than 200 tonnes blowing around and decaying into environmental microplastics.
In terms of total plastic consumption, 8 billion plastic bags (what the UK used before the charge) is maybe between 20000 and 40000 tonnes depending on thickness. Which is pretty minor on the scale of plastic usage considering how much plastic crap and packaging was and still is used.
But now every week we have more and more reusable bags that we can't find any use for, so we recycle a bunch each quarter. (And even that is questionable, when they are covered in impossible-to-remove stickers.)
One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.
One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.
I am constantly walking past disposable vapes in the street, with their LEDs still shining.
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
On the other hand at least in the US, a deposit of a buck or two wouldn’t do much. California has that for cans and bottles, yet only maybe 10% of people turn them in. Most end up in curbside recycling (which doesn’t refund) or the garbage, indicating people don’t care about getting their nickel or dime back.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
Good reusable systems have been around for 10 years now. Disposables sell well because people like to think that they can quit whenever they want without having to abandon an investment (never mind that the investment in a refillable system is literally cheaper than a single disposable vape in many cases).
ive even bought the brand of liquid owned by the disposable company with the same branding. it's just not quite there.
you also have to accept the market for them, according to what you have said above shouldnt exist, but it does
I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.
> A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.
> The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a “gateway” to nicotine cigarettes for children, undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/29/third-of-uk-...
Same thing happens to me (albeit far, far less frequently) when I'm out at the bars with my friends until 2am when I discover I'm out of juice. Since vape shops tend to keep normal retail hours, I'm limited on getting my fix from whatever the 7/11 is selling. If that's Marlboro reds, I'm probably going to smoke a cigarette or two.
Key difference between it being a "gateway drug" and not is the fact that I'll end up throwing away that pack the next day when I can refill my vape. Because smoking sucks in comparison. Not only on health grounds (not a huge concern for most nicotine addicts), but on basic grounds like "making you smell like shit", "hurting your throat", "tasting bad", and "not having the oppurtunity to be used nearly as frequently".
I vaped for around 8 years, about 4 years with typical flavorings and the last 4 years unflavored. IME unflavored vaping really isn't that bad, I accidentally switched to it because I ran out of flavoring one time and after a few days I didn't really miss them anymore so I just stopped using them.
I would compare it to people who drink soda all day, they can't fathom how people can drink "boring" plain water all day and they have a really hard time switching, but people who are used to drinking water find it as refreshing and satisfying as anything.
I think these flavorings cause more harm by luring young people to start vaping than they help smokers by luring them away from cigarettes. In an ideal world adults would be allowed to vape whatever they want, and teens wouldn't be able to get their hands on vapes in any capacity, but clearly that's not working so I think that flavor bans are a decent compromise.
I don't buy the argument that flavor bans will make teens go back to smoking. Cigarettes taste awful, they make you smell terrible, they irritate your lungs far more, they're far more expensive. If I was a teen I would still pick up unflavored vaping over cigarette smoking any time, but I'd be less likely to get into vaping without the flavorings.
As far as I can tell, banning flavored vapes has had a significant impact on reducing vaping/smoking new users, which is the ultimate goal. People who are currently addicted should primarily be motivated to quit, not find better tasting alternatives
Don't get me wrong: it's not good for you, but it's a lot less bad for you than cigarettes, and it's not some great mystery as to what's in it.
I had elevated white blood cells counts and I developed an autoimmune condition a few months after quitting vaping. I had good health record leading up to it and no family history of any autoimmune disorders. White blood cells eventually normalized but autoimmune is forever, although it's under control and I'm lucky that it was caught early.
In the final ~4 years of vaping I didn't use any flavorings either, just 70/30 mix of VG/PG and nicotine.
It's not terrible as far as vices go, much less harmful than the alternatives, but it's definitely not as harmless as I thought going in. I wish I hadn't started and went for the ADHD assessment right away instead of subconsciously self-medicating with nicotine.
No shit, I had no idea.
That explains a lot. I quit smoking (well, the first time I tried to quit) when I was 19 (2 years smoking). 3 months later I was in the hospital with sclerosing mesenteritis, a rare disorder for an older person but baffling and way out of left-field for a 19 year old with no prior history autoimmune issues. We only got a diagnosis after full exploratory surgery that earned me a six inch incision scar on my stomach.
Don't start smoking, kids.
The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
(and it was slooooow and ugly!)
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.
Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
With your example, why would the author care whether some random person buys the vape he mentioned in his article? I don't see the point
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
I appreciate that, thank you. And I can totally see how my comment above might read patronising to people dealing with shit that is functionally much, much worse than the situation I described, so I appreciated the opportunity to right that, also.
I might quit, I guess, when my fiancee has to for pregnancy, should it eventually stop being funny to tell her how wonderful each individual cigarette I smoke is. But I really, really love smoking - more than any of my other hobbies, wholesome or otherwise.
I'm sure that'll change, and I'll look that book up if and when it does. Thanks again.
It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027858461...
Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.
Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.
I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.
It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....
Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.
I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
All for a device to help you develop health problems.
It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
No just no.
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/qu...
I get that people want to scare kids, but that level of hyperbole is way overkill and has the opposite psychological effect on those who can think for themselves.
I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
whether it can be repurposed is worth little in being wasteful if >99% go to the landfill.
> I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
Monetarily? sure. Environmentally? unlikely
The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.
That's where the vapes started, and they still sell them.
I have a battery holder that's really just some control circuitry and a spot to shove an 18650. On that goes the tank which holds liquid and is refillable. Inside of that goes the "coil" which is the wick and heating element.
Daily I add a bit more fluid. Every 2-4 weeks I replace the coil. Every 1-2 years I replace the battery holder and tank. The 18650s I swap between to power it are 6-8 years old and still going.
(I'd replace the battery holder and tank less frequently, but I just can't find any that will last much longer than that banging around in my pocket and suffering the occasional drop or fall. All-in-all though, I've minimized the waste about as much as I reasonably can without quitting entirely.)
Somewhere in between and closer to what people are buying as "disposable" you can get refillable pods like my wife has. The "base" has a built-in battery and the circuitry. The tank and coil are a single unit. You add fluid and keep refilling until the wick/coil are gummed up, then toss the entire tank and coil... but keep the same battery/electronics.
Really, it's almost the exact same thing as these disposable units just with _very minimal_ changes to make them reusable.
Which is why I think these disposable units are extra heinous. There's just no reason for them to exist at all.
it's because politicians bend to pressure from lobbyists and outcry, such that the very idea that a resuable vape means that children can vape pina colada flavored liquids.
There was a federal push during Trump v1 to only allow iqos devices in any stores. The two vape brands (maybe 3) allowed in general in my state are manufactured by... if you guessed RJR and PMI, you are correct. The big tobacco farmers and cig manufacturers.
Reusable vapes with custom or pre-mixed flavors were attacked hard. I still have a couple liters of 100mg/ml nicotine in my freezer, for making custom flavors at home. I don't even know if you can still order nicotine in that ratio anymore in the US.
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components?
Sorry for being dumb here.
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Bioplastics are increasingly popular, research is making it better and easier to produce, etc.
I don’t fret over a plastic wrap. For one, if it’s bread in a supermarket, I want it wrapped, I don’t want someone’s sneeze on it.
Plastic for fruits and veggies that you rinse, that’s absurd.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
Some places do, some don't.
My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?
Insane.
At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
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