Wonders of Technology: This Website Runs on Disposable Vape

We're used to seeing DOOM running on whatever unconventional system players can come up with, but have you ever seen a website hosted on a disposable vape?

If not, visit ewaste.fka.wtf, although chances are you'll be stuck with a 503 or 504 error, since the news of the unusual setup has spread far already.

The site was made by Bogdan Ionescu using a microcontroller from a disposable vape (thanks, PC Gamer). He says that disposable vapes have gotten more advanced lately, and one day, he saw a PUYA chip inside one of the devices and, long story short, decided to host a server on a vape using SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol).

At first, the site worked pretty slowly: "Pings took ~1.5s with 50% packet loss and a simple page took over 20s to load. That’s so bad, it’s actually funny, and I kind of wanted to leave it there."

But the problem hid in the fact that the first implementation read and wrote a single character at a time. Bogdan then added a ring buffer to cache reads from the host and feed them into the SLIP poll function and "split writes in batches to allow for escaping."

This gave the site an impressive boost, with pings now taking 20ms, no packet loss, and full page loads at 160ms. This is truly a crazy feat.

If you want to learn more about the technicalities, read Bogdan's blog post and keep trying to access the vape-made site.

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