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60,000 divided by 60 is 1000, not 10,000. So only about a month, still a lot of time!

The phone has 4,000mAh, too.


I used an old Motorola phone for this, and yes, if it dies it won’t turn back on again until the power button is pressed. I Googled around and there’s a way to disable this behavior though, through an ADB command. The bad part is that it supposedly might get stuck in a boot loop – it tries to boot but there’s not enough battery yet, so it dies and keeps trying to boot. Over and over.

I made a second Tasker automation, so it shuts down with less than 15 percent battery. It might still get stuck in a boot loop, but eventually the solar panel will quickly charge it above 15% so that it won’t be for very long.


You can virtually power down a phone in Tasker without turning it off by shutting down all antennas and downclocking the CPU and GPU, disabling background tasks etc.

Most android phones have a feature that lets you set a time at which the phone should turn itself on at a certain time. I used this as a last resort in a project with similar requirements, but I don't remember if we ever ended up testing if it worked after fully draining the battery.

Interesting. The "power on when charging" thing appears to be a flag you can set, but not all brands support it.

I think I fixed this! nice catch

I just tried on my macbook (was on ipad before) and I'm still getting the translation popup :(

As far as I can tell, by boosting each recording and listening to the purported song in full, I can eventually hear just a snippet of that song. Shazam's algorithm is extremely good.

I've listened to a bunch of the snippets and you can usually just barely hear the sound in the background. Which makes me think Shazam is very accurate. I really should read more about how Shazam's algorithm works, because it feels like magic.

The phone records 10 minute chunks of audio at a time, in airplane mode. Every 10 minutes, airplane mode is turned off and the audio is uploaded to a server. The server then splits the audio into 15 second overlapping chunks, and each is passed to Shazam's API (no official API, but someone reverse engineered it and made a great Python package). This setup is super power efficient! The phone dips down to a minimum 70% percent battery by the early morning.


> I really should read more about how Shazam's algorithm works, because it feels like magic.

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf


Also, if you’re more visual, algorithm inventor Avery Wang delivered an accessible and detailed lecture at DAFx several years back:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YVTnj3OIhwI

I found it especially insightful because he started from the beginning and traced the thought process as the algorithm developed and became more sophisticated.


Holy cow.

Just clicked around and you're right: the Sep 29 5:19pm snippet detected "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang, and there's almost nothing there. But it's in there.

Had I not known what I was listening for, and been intentionally listening, there's zero chance I'd have picked up on it.

It does feel like magic.


The battery will live much longer if you run it from 80% down to 50%. There are some clever plugs you can get off the shelf if your phone doesn’t support setting this in software.

I doubt the "design brief" for this involves ensuring it's got thousands or days worth of expected battery charging lifetime.

There's already people here discussing the best way to locate it. Sooner or later someone's gonna find a "free phone" and trade it for a point of meth somewhere just off 16th and Mission...


will be interesting to see how it fares in the winter!

A San Francisco winter? The mean daily minimum is something like 45F, it's more likely to have trouble overheating during the summer.

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." -- Mark Twain

I suspect moisture damage from Karl The Fog rolling in every afternoon is more likely to kill it.


Less daily solar radiation to power/recharge the phone.

It's back up now.


Haha thanks :)


I just ran this though and "I fucking hate this thing" has a -7 score, and "I fucking love this thing" is -1. "Fucking" and "hate" is negative, but "love" is positive and adds to the score. It would be improved if it could tell the difference, "fuck" itself definitely sounds negative but "fucking" can almost mean anything


Haha, thanks for sounding nice :)

I added that because some comments had really long URLs, so I had to enable breaks so the page wouldn't be really wide, more so on phones. Didn't realize that it added hyphens to words, thanks for pointing that out, it's fixed now


The negativeness is a percent (number of negative comments divided by number of total comments). I don't think the data is too significant though, because they are all + or - 5 percent of each other


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