Reminds me of the Ex Machina end credits [1] (and the Android live wallpaper I made as a homage to it [2].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRJ-fPAO3Go [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.figmentano...

Alternatively it has been suggested that harnessing fire to cook our food was the breakthrough that allowed that cerebral expansion. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cooking-up-bigger...

I have my old Galaxy S1 sitting in my cellar listening to the beeps from my washing machine. It sends me an email when the wash finishes. (I can't hear the beeps from upstairs.)

My Samsung Galaxy S turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks, I am still using it as my day-to-day smartphone for these reasons:

* These things are seemingly indestructible. In 10 years, the only problems I had was a deteriorating battery (which I replaced once) and a broken back cover (which I replaced by a 2,99 EUR one from eBay). The screen is still unbroken, fully working, and without scratches

* They are small, handy, and slim (thinner than many modern smartphones)

* Browsing is so slow that I cannot do anything except checking Hackernews and reading the local news. So it is definitely not a procrastination tool for me

* The camera still works great, and makes good pictures

* I don't care about security holes. I have no important passwords stored on the phone, I don't use it to check my mail (for the reason above). The only password stored is the ical service password on my private server which is used to update the calendar app. I couldn't care less if anyone had this password, my calendar is really not interesting.

* Osmand (for OpenStreetMap) and the national route planning app for public transit still work

So basically, I have an extremely reliable pocket machine which can be used as a telephone, to send SMS, to do route planning, to check the news, to check my calendar, to provide a Wifi access point for my laptop and which is also a world wide map. I don't need anything else, so why replace it? During these 10 years, I saw my then-girlfriend and now-wife go through 5 new smartphones, which regularly broke. I used it to make pictures of all our vacations, our engagement, our wedding and our child as a new-born. It has accumulated an amount of experience-patina which is very rare for physical things these days, so I also cling to it out of sheer nostalgia.

> turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks

Anecdote:

6 months ago I got a OnePlus 7 Pro and installed LineageOS (continuation of CyanogenMod) on it. The 7 Pro has very small screen borders and no notch (iPhone) / punch hole (Samsung); instead a motor makes the selfie camera pop up & retract from the top of the phone. I also never updated LineageOS because it went from an unofficial build to officially supported so updating would require a complete reset.

About two months ago I noticed that the camera would pop up every once in a while for seemingly no reason.

I could only conclude that it was hacked; worse, I would have never noticed on a 'normal' phone without a pop-up camera. Was my phone also recording me the entire time?

I don't know what the vulnerability was - it could have been a remote exploit in Android itself that's also exploitable on your phone, or it could have been from an app that I had installed (the only apps I had with network usage + camera permissions were Firefox, and the latest version of WhatsApp from when I bought the phone (no updates since I don't have Google software on it, I just downloaded the WhatsApp APK when I set it up)).

You've said that you don't have any sensitive data on your phone, but still be careful.

I updated LineageOS and since then the issue has disappeared. I update the OS about every week now to hopefully prevent this from happening again.

>I could only conclude that it was hacked

That seems like a bit of a leap. Isn't it more likely to have been a software glitch of some sort?

Camera activated for a split second every once in a while, with no apparent relation to what I was using the phone for at that moment.

And it hasn't happened again since I reinstalled the OS two months ago (though admittedly it took ~4 months to start happening the first time).

Doesn't seem like a very big leap to me.

I could imagine some app (background service? Unsure) iterating through available devices and the OS or system services being a bit too eager to initialize devices upon iteration.

(Not saying that's what happened, but I can easily hypothesize a scenario where this only happens after a while, after some specific app is installed or configured.)

Hah! I did the same with an iPad. It loops me singing “the wash is done” instead of an email.

That's a cute hack!

I tried several approaches to this problem, with an ESP8266 and a water-flow measurement on the intake, via a microphone/vibration sensor catching the spin-cycle, and finally via measuring electrical consumption (again on the spin-cycle).

Sadly I had to remove the setup, but it was a fun project that took a few months of iteration to get working.

What software do you use?

I hacked together an Android app specifically for the purpose, so it doesn't really answer the original question about generally available projects. (I haven't got round to releasing the code as it's rather bespoke, but could do if you're interested.)

I'd be interested in the general technique, "teach a man to listen for beeps..."

I FFT incoming sound buffers, and if the 2KHz band is the highest for a suitable number of consecutive frames, then I send the email and stop listening for a few minutes to avoid double notifications.

2KHz is the frequency of my machine's beep. Just triggering on overall noise level alone would notify me each time the machine goes into spin, but using the FFT allows it to be more discerning.

(I'll try to publish the code soon.)

I'd appreciate seeing your code for this - I've intended to write a similar app for listening to an old alarm system I have.

I've now put it on GitHub: https://github.com/martin-stone/AndroidAudioNotifier

Thank you!

Thanks for sharing the code.

Perhaps someone (with more patience than I for Android/Kotlin development) can tweak it so that is can listen for knocking on a door to trigger some sort of alert (email/txt/broadcast an intent).

Triggering an intent would be very helpful as then it could then be acted upon by Tasker or Automagic4Android.

this would be very interesting!

Code is now on GitHub here: https://github.com/martin-stone/AndroidAudioNotifier

If you're looking for an off the shelf solution, I turned an old Android phone into a baby monitor for keeping track of crying when I'm on the other side of the house. There's plenty of baby monitoring apps that do anomalous noise detection and raises an alert.

That’s so simple and brilliant; if I kept any old phones I’d love to build a little device like that. I’ve thought about similar stuff with raspberry pis or the other tiny hacker platform (can’t remember the name right now!) but these things cost more to figure out than its worth to me right now.

I'm also a convert to this. It's even more efficient if combined with Ukranian Lacing: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ukrainianlacing.htm

Wow I hadn't seen that. I will learn it, thanks!