[GTALUG] War story: Hardware bloat

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi all.

Slightly related to Linux because this ... or rather was ... about an
Android tablet.

Not a knockoff Alibaba tablet with no vowels in the brand name, an Acer
Iconia One bought from Amazon in 2015. It served me well for quite a few
years but, as always happens, support for updates ran out and it was
replaced for daily use by an Amazon Fire 10 for which I paid almost the
same amount (on Prime Day) as for the Acer a decade ago.

This raised the issue of what to do with the old tablet, that was not only
out of updates but also running much slower than the new stuff. I
investigated the many "what can you do with an old tablet" articles and
settled into turning the Iconia into a weather station that one could check
at any time to see what was coming for the next six hours.

It had been doing that task for about two years now, and was stationary and
always plugged in.

I was looking at it the other day, almost by accident, and noticed the back
was much thicker than I recall. Everything was functional, and the tablet
had barely been touched since given this role. I suspected something to do
with the Lithium battery and immediately became wary. Was this going to be
one of those times when the device caught fire or exploded? Some checking
online led me to immediately turn off and unplug the device, and put it in
the garage.

Today I took it to the hazardous waste disposal depot on Ingram Drive
(Lawrence/Keele area). Things were deteriorating fast. It had swollen so
much that the screen had cracked. I drove to the dump gingerly as if I had
a bomb in the car. After informing the depot staff of the nature of the
tablet's battery, they were unfazed and had me just put it in the
designated "electronic waste" portable dumpster, into which people had
tossed their old printers, screens, faxes and a few desktop CPUs. At least
it's a thick metal dumpster and any ... incident ... would certainly be
well contained. Still, the disinterested response was a little surprising.
I've also disconnected my Google account from the tablet, in case anyone
has the bright idea to try restarting it.

Lessons learned?

   1. Routinely inspect any devices you have that contain lithium
   batteries, even if they're off.
   2. Be especially careful with devices that are rarely unplugged such as
   old devices being repurposed as photo frames, clocks or weather stations.
   Overcharging is a common cause of such battery failure.
   3. This doesn't just happen to Chinese mystery brands, it can happen to
   household names too.
   4. Don't scavenge from electronic waste bins, you never know what's
   there. Hacklab swap events (the next one is sept 22
   <https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day-5/>) are much more
   useful for this kind of thing.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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