My dad didn't like poetry clock, but he does like image gen. So we got a (color) Inky Impression 7.3 and hooked it up to an RPi.
I made a basic telegram bot that you could send a verbal prompt to ("snowy day"). It would then ask which of your favorite artist styles it should create an image in. I found that presenting a list of two styles combined had cooler results. The prompt would be used to fetch a random quote on the topic, and quote and style would then be feed to stable diffusion, and maybe 30 seconds later you have fresh art and a quote on the display.
My dad then asked if we just could forward images directly there. He prefers, each day, to post an image of whatever the day is (November 13 is "World Kindness Day") and occasionally share a family photo. My mom looks forward to seeing what day he picks every day.
> There’s one other problem, though. It’s well known that AI language models like ChatGPT have a tendency to make up data (sometimes known as “hallucinations”), and it turns out that’s true even if you’re just telling the time. Roughly once every 15 minutes, says Webb, the clock will simply lie about the time just to make a certain rhyme work. “The fibbing is hilarious. Sometimes you can’t tell — it might say ‘one past two’ when it’s actually ‘two past one,’” he says. He says this will be fixable but, for now, is a fun quirk of the system. “Clockwork means you get precision drift; AI-work means you get hallucination drift.”
What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.
This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.
You may be interested in https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal, it looks like it's out of stock at the moment but they have pre-made devices or you can make your own with a list of parts.
Nothing spectacular, I just want to have a display by the door that shows various things I'd like to check on before leaving, like: which windows are open, outside temperatures, etc.
I don't want a battery because:
- although every X months is quite ok, I don't want the hassle of remembering to charge it (first world problems, I know)
- but I also have a fear of leaving devices with a battery plugged in for a long time / having to monitor for battery swelling or other abnormalities
I already have a classic battery-powered display which shows temperature info from some sensors and it's really convenient, but annoying when the battery is dead right when you need the info. Even if that only happens every X months.
My fridge isn't magnetic. A lot of modern fridges aren't.
Might be a neat idea to offer a magnetic mount for it, like a flexible flat magnetic board shaped to fit the TRMNL with a sticky backing so you can attach it somewhere and then use that to attach the TRMNL (your site doesn't seem to say anything about being magnetic so I'm guessing you have to attach magnets to the TRMNL too though?).
For that matter, the site doesn't offer any information about mounting it at all. Looking at the disassembly animation I see what looks like a hole to hang it on a nail, but it might be nice to put this info at least in the FAQ section if nowhere else (that does say it can be "hung on a wall" but no details).
thanks for the feedback, will add more detail to our website specs + docs.
we included magnets for VIP backers on our crowdfunding campaign and may start selling them again. device has a mounting hole on the back for nails / hooks, we’ll probably release mechanical specs so people can 3D print or otherwise fabricate their own mounts. for example some people want to mash up an array of them. but until then, adhesive magnets work great for the fridge use case.
You can buy sheets of rubbery material with sticky backing and metal powder embedded in the rubber. One supplier is WarMag - people use them as a surface for putting magnetic-based figures on.
I came into possession of several sheafs of the A4-sized ones, which now serve as "generic surprisingly heavy objects".
ah really?? feel free to email us (team@usetrmnl.com). we've been granted a bunch of EC licenses lately but maybe missed a few country check boxes on our store.
Not super relevant but your site is super janky for me (chrome, ubuntu). I get a scrollbar for the second part of your site, which then captures scrolling so if my cursor is in the middle of the page and I go down then up I am stuck.
For anyone else that followed the "buy a device" link on the docs page, and found yourself on the (ended) Kickstarter page, editing the URL to https://usetrmnl.com/ works :)
(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)
> Most IoT products support SSH-ing directly into peripheral devices. We've heard too many horror stories about how this can go wrong, and decided to invert the paradigm.
> Your TRMNL device pings our server, never the other way around.
> Each request made to our /api/display endpoint includes only the minimum details needed to support customers -- an API key, device mac address, firmware version, battery voltage, and wifi signal strength.
Super hackable but it pings their hosted server and nothing else?! Is there a way to run your own server?
They seem to have the api base url hardcoded in their firmware[1]. The repo seems to have pretty clear instructions for compiling and flashing modified firmware. From there, it's just a matter of writing a decent server to implement the calls documented in BYOD/S[2] and Private API.[3]
we're adding more docs on running your own server soon, which will include 1-click deploy starter projects that Just Work.
if you think about it, we are incentivized to do this. no subscription fees means the more you ping our server, the lower our margin. but for now we're wrapping up fulfilling all pre-orders, scaling, etc typical new product issues.
even without BYOS (bring your own server) docs however, it's already possible to point TRMNL to your own stack if you 1) fork our OSS firmware + b) have some experience with e-ink.
Can you clarify what the difference between the Developer Edition and normal edition are? It's not clear from the checkout flow if this is required in order to create plugins, and is not mentioned anywhere in the docs.
Seems very nice buuuut why did they put the USB-C on the back if it is supposed to be wall mounted and needs to be charged every couple of months? Why not on one side??
If you're comfortable with microcontrollers (esp32/arduino), I can definitely recommend Inkplate. I found them when I was making a similar setup for my parents, and they have various sizes up to 10" and up to 6 colors they can display.
You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites.
Seconded. I matted and framed one InkPlate 10 and hung it on our wall, then wrote a simple "show the next three days from everyone in the family's Google Calendars" image creation script and it's been wonderful.
The principal of my son’s former school was a Sister of St Joseph, and a huge HN fan.
More amazing was how creative the sisters were in managing themselves with technology. Many decisions are made by votes, done in real time globally! Religious people get short shrift.
If you have a hacker’s soul, an old Kindle, a jailbreak, and a Python installation, anything becomes possible. I’m working on something like that (though I hadn’t thought about markdown!). The Kindle is a particularly fun device once it’s hacked!
I looked into this a while back, but can you post some notes on jailbreak kindles? Aren't there certain models of Kindle that can be had very cheaply. That are possibly locked or have some dead component, but the screen can be used with a jailbreak? They were like only ~$10 on ebay.
assuming your eink display would be on the same LAN as some always-on PC...
1. install python
2. make a file named `index.html` somewhere.
2a. put this in the "head" tag, so it'll refresh hourly: `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3600">`.
3. run `python -m http.server` from the same folder
This will start a single-threaded web server on 8000
4. On another machine on your network verify you can pull up http://firstmachine:8000/.
5. having proven it works, go buy an e-ink display and point it to http://firstmachine:8000/, make it the default homepage.
Voila.
Any time you have anything to say, just edit the `index.html` file and the eink display will update.
No need for fancy subscription services or kickstarter projects or crowdfunding... just... batteries included python.
Having done this, you will also most likely want to setup a javascript timer that also triggers a refresh in case the meta refresh fails. And a weekly reboot of the machine in case there is a memory leak or some other issue.
It sounds like there’s a lot more edge case complexity to this than the GP originally thought.
Like most DIY tinkerer solutions, unfortunately, which is why people like paying money for productised solutions - the time it takes to debug and troubleshoot home made solutions is often prohibitive for a lot of people who aren’t techheads.
This is both fair and obvious... but at the same time, the nits folk are bringing up are not fleshed out.
"I had to reboot my raspberry pi"
and
"whoops rando eInk display doesn't do javascript"
are both super weird and frankly unfair to consider as criticisms of the original solution.
... In short - if our parish priest above sees the original post, I'd suggest he give it a go. It's an hour to set up and won't cost him or his parish anything (aside from buying the eink display ofc).
If it turns out that the DIY solution is insufficient, or his parish is wealthy enough to spend money on a thing like this, great, then upgrade to that.
Kobo readers are fairly non-rando, they're the second most popular eInk readers after the Kindle I think. I agree that lack of Javascript support is not a blocking issue on the use case though (although it does make it a little more annoying).
Would an old rooted Nook Simple Touch suffice for your use case? They're very cheap these days and you've direct access to some early version of Android on them
That sounds like defensive programming; what makes you think meta refresh will not trigger always? If you can demonstrate it, it'd be worth filing a bug report with the respective browser(s). Same with the reboot, although the user does not control every software in the e-reader. That said, e-readers and tablets are designed to be always-on, so memory leaks should be rare nowadays.
There's nothing wrong with defensive programming, especially if it is supposed to run on a device where you don't have easy and/or immidiate access in case something stops working.
I have setup a raspberry PI dashboard before and run into these exact issues. They are not defensive or pre-emptive. An e-reader will probably not have the same issues, just sharing my experience.
* Browser runs out of memory or has other issue and stops refreshing.
* Wifi connection drops and browser displays an error page and stops executing your refreshes. The power-saving options on the RPIs wifi caused me quite a bit of grief before I disabled them.
* Raspberry Pi crashes with kernel errors due to cheap SD card, underpowered USB power supply, or something else.
I ran into these issues one by one over a few months and fixed each one as I ran into it. What I ended up with was:
* Browser set to run at OS startup displaying my page.
* That page having a meta refresh tag, and javascript code to reload the page periodically.
* A browser extension to automatically reload the page as well if both of those failed.
* A watchdog daemon that detects when the RPI has frozen and reboots it.
* A cron job that reboots periodically.
With all of those my dashboard would run for months without any issues or interruptions. Just sharing so others can be aware of potential issues.
We had to configure a daily reboot for a raspberry PI that just displayed a web page with the current status of emergency calls for local first responders on a mounted TV screen.
Purpose: if you come into the building to fetch the car with the medical equipment, you could see at a glance how many people acknowledged the alert and would arrive shortly etc. Sadly, the system tended to loose its WIFI connection and then the reloaded web page would display a network error. And since the web page was a 3rd party product, we could not hack the Javascript.
The primary issue I would imagine, would be not that a meta refresh fails to happen, rather, that any type of full refresh is attempted during a momentary 'blip' of the local network, leaving it showing a "cannot find server" type of error. To achieve the safest persistence of the refresh loop, it would probably make more sense to have the refresh function via
1. AJAX request for itself, with a timed retry in the case of any failure (optional: During this time, add a visible indicator that you're having connectivity issue)
2. Extract the contents of the <body> tag of the fetched HTML
3. Set the innerHTML of the <body> tag of the DOM to the fetched body.
To avoid memory leaks I'd still be tempted to also try to implement a "safe-ish refresh" that checks for a successful response and quickly fires off a location.reload() on like a daily basis.
I'm developing something so that everyone can do this easily[0]. It's a plugin based presentation software. Real time connection through websocket.
So all you need to do is create a project and use a plugin(existing or your own) to generate your view. The plugin is flexible, so it could be a custom UI or uploading a HTML file for example.
Then, you can open a link on any machine like the e-ink display.
Open-source and self-hostable. But you can also use the online version I'm hosting.
It's still very new so things will break but I'm already using it in church and other meetings.
I've seen these in a few restaurants as menus listing the special of the day. They were mounted elegantly in some stone mounting so didn't give the ipad mcdonalds touchscreen feel. They just looked printed but on closer inspection were e-ink
This is such a wonderful story, and I'm so happy that the author found something which worked well for their mom.
> Despite her amnesia, my mom came to remember that this display exits and what it’s for. She looks forward to seeing updates from her children on it.
This is the most interesting part for me here. Brains are such wondrous things. Would be cool to know if this is a special quirk of her mom or this is something which can help others like her too.
Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears.
For example, I am already in the habit of logging every phone call to any doctor's offices or important contacts as they're happening. Being able to refer back to all the notes has helped me manage a number of complex errors. I know the name of the person I spoke to, the date, and what we discussed. Any time I need to make a call about a topic or to a company, I have an easy way to pull up all the past notes.
I'd like to think if I ever got amnesia, already having this system in place would serve me really well if I couldn't learn new things. I have the old things, and the habit of referring to and adding new things to the list.
But I wonder what else would or wouldn't be useful to try to practice now?
If I'm right that this condition is like that of Henry Molaison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison - then the real difficulty is that you don't remember that you have amnesia.
Well yes, but my current "write down the details of my calls and refer back to them every time" wouldn't require me to remember I had amnesia, right? For now, I do remember those past conversations, but if I stopped remembering them, having them up on my screen in the side panel of my note-taking app would still make them available to me if I didn't.
Sign language and brail come to mind as useful in this regard (if not for you, then for a loved one).
As for amnesia, it seems like a habit of making notes and seeking out to read your own notes would be useful. However, the trend in technology to constantly change behaviour, appearance, and functionality makes anything digital a barrier. Manual notes are also susceptible to being impossible for ageing people to make. So it's really hard to think of something.
I have visited the thought of what it’d be like to have amnesia like this many times throughout my entire life. I am sure reality is nothing like my thoughts, but in fantasy land it’s just interesting to imagine picking up a note in my own hand writing saying “you have amnesia, everything is okay, everyone is well and happy, some bathroom humor, go watch YouTube and chill”
Does any commercial version of this exist? Using an existing tablet makes the DIY aspect a little less but then you have to roll your own site as well.
Well, for the Dutch market there's Luna: https://www.nedap-luna.com/. This has the advantage of being integrated fully into a formal care structure and of several years of research in how to best present information specifically for patients with cognitive issues.
Really nice project. One idea for “if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.” Put a start and end date/time on messages and implement in the board. That way you can pre schedule them and have them fall off automatically.
It might be nice to add default messages that can auto-populate the date so she won't notice if network goes down for awhile or someone forgets to post a message.
It (hopefully, theoretically) shouldn't make that assumption. It only relies on her apparent natural tendency to call her kids when/as she believes she hasn't heard from them in some time.
When I watched the film Memento, I found myself thinking 'holy shit, I'm not quite far away enough from this...'. No tattoos yet, but one could write a book on the stcky pads I've laying around.
As a bit of a luddite, e-ink is one of the few modern wizbangs I'm enamored with. It's so damn nice I take it as an inside woosh joke that it isn't everywhere and available without pawning my organs.
This is one of the few HN articles that have profoundly moved me. Such a beautiful and simple use of technology to make a clear and big improvement in someone's life.
As a side note on his mother remembering that the tablet exists, it sounds like she has amnesia quite like Henry Molaison, a famous case study in neuropathology. He had very specific brain damage that seemingly stopped him forming new memories in the same way as OP's mother, but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. So for example he would have warm feelings towards people who'd been caring for him despite not remembering them, and would also pick up card games more and more quickly as he played them repeatedly despite saying he didn't remember the game. OP's mother remembering the tablet sounds very similar, particularly when paired with the feeling of being remembered and loved by her children.
> but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously.
This reminds me of muscle memory. I can play pieces on the piano even though I don't actively remember the sheet music of them. My hands just "know" what to do. Funnily enough the moment I start actively thinking about certain passages that ability worsens by a lot.
In psychology memory is divided up into various groupings depending on what people are interested in, e.g. explicit (remembering that Paris is the capital of France) and implicit (remembering how to ride a bike). You can further subdivide explicit into semantic (Paris is the capital of France) and episodic (events that you have experienced), and implicit into procedural (how to ride a bike) and emotional conditioning (memories of feelings). Those categories aren't related to neurophysiology though, which is where I think it gets really interesting because I doubt matches those rather Platonic categories.
Yes same for me on guitar. If I try to play something too slowly or if I really start thinking about what I'm doing it all falls apart.
I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.
I ran into this when teaching my son to tie his shoes. He now ties his shoes “upside down” from me, because I tied it from my perspective. It’s surprisingly hard to tie shoes in slow motion, it took some practice by paying attention to myself tying shoes quickly.
Now I’m wondering if you can tell a kid is from an “even” or “odd” generation by which way they tie shoes…
This Ian guy's shoe-tying tip you've linked is one of the most universally useful life-improving pieces of knowledge I have, which I try to evangelize to anyone I know who will listen. The only facts whose impact comes close are mostly household tips:
- cheap liquid dishwasher detergent including in the prewash cup instead of costly pods that deprive the prewash cycle of soap
- Put bleach in the washer's bleach dispenser and use hot water for any light sheets, no, it doesn't hurt prints or fade light colors
- cook anything you can fit in the air fryer to decrease total time ~70% vs an oven
Yes. This is the big reason why muscle memory is the worst possible memory for music. The slightest glitch leaves you completely lost if you don't have conscious knowledge of where to go next.
Further than just muscle memory, every cell in our bodies actually has "memories". That's why heart transplant patients can experience personality changes from the donor:
Excuse my ignorance in asking, but is this trustworthy? I'm a layperson regarding biology and I was always assumed that organs outside of the brain don't contribute to memory. At the end of the article is the statement "Data not available / No data was used for the research described in the article." Is it possible to see the data?
We know there are lots of biological mechanisms that retain state at the cellular level to put it in CS-ish terms. A fraction of these mechanisms could plausibly be transmitted outside the cell (e.g., miRNA).
These mechanisms may or may not encode memories as we typically understand them, i.e., the ability to remember an event or fact, but could very plausibly shift personality, preferences, etc.
Not to mention that most neurotransmitters are produced / collected from the gut. Many seem to be produced / used as signalling molecules by gut microbiota.
>> can experience personality changes from the donor
> organs outside of the brain don't contribute to memory
Interesting question. To start, personality typically refers to the totality of a person's behaviors, not the memories they may be able to bring forth. Behavior, esp automatic, is informed by cognitive states informed by the body.
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. . . . The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. [0]
Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside you called interoception. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system.
...[M]oment-to-moment interoception infuses us with affect, which we then use as evidence about the world. People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing.
0. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (p. 72). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
I remember seeing a docmentary about this. There was a man who received a transplant arm from someone who died and started to exhibit the donor's manners and ended up planning an elaborate scheme to get revenge on the donor's twin brother.
Yes it is strange to practice a song one day and then come back to it again the next day. It's like meeting a new person who plays better than I did yesterday, and practice involves finding out more about this new person.
My choir director does this with new rehearsal pieces on purpose. We go through them once at the beginning and then let them "percolate" while we practice some other songs. Then we go back to them in "stabilization" before the end of the same rehearsal and they suddenly feel familiar, so we can pay better attention to things like dynamics. It's wild.
I remember a lecturer in undergrad psychology talking about this in the context of walking, and my walking felt really messy for a week, like when you start to become conscious of your breathing.
At the start it's all about carrying around notes full of picking the relevant condition depending on the current permutation/state of the cube then following the step by step algorithms on which sequence of steps to perform for that condition.
Then you'll naturally realise that certain conditions happen a lot more than others and you'll start to remember the sequence of letters for each series of steps to perform.
Over time you'll forget the letters and your fingers will just know the sequence to perform when you perceive that condition, kind of like typing a password without thinking about it.
Eventually you'll be able to fit each condition and algorithm into your muscle memory and completely forget the series of letters that you used to memorise.
Now I can barely explain how to solve a rubik's cube in-person. I just do it.
You'll also notice this if you try to significantly slow down performing an algorithm, or try to solve a digital Rubik's cube where you have to click and drag to rotate sides.
Perhaps if we approach technology more from the perspective of elders, and those in need, we are going to produce much better technology application for everyone else.
There was a study that suggested that the motor cortex can remember even if short term memory conversion was destroyed.
If nothing else, myelinization counts as a form of memory. Strengthened by reuse.
I would love to know if those warm feelings are stronger with individuals who remind you of someone you used to know. “This nurse reminds me of Aunt Sarah, who was nice to me when my dog died.” And so forth.
That study is an interesting suggestion that there might be a physiological basis for the explicit / implicit distinction in terms of memory. Makes sense in many ways that some kind of memory might be embedded in the motor cortex. I wonder if the same is true for emotional memories and midbrain structures, as hinted at in your last paragraph.
I always find those non-obvious connections fascinating, like the disorders where e.g. someone can't say the word "fork" when they're looking at one despite being to describe what you use it for etc, but can immediately name it when they touch it.
I have this weird issue where about a third of people I meet for the first time swear they know me from somewhere, and it's somewhere specific that I know I've never been. My dad and brother have the same issue, and we strongly resemble each other, so I think I just have a congenitally familiar face.
I have no idea if feelings would automatically transfer to me from people with amnesia, but they certainly do for people without it, even though I don't remind them of anyone they know well enough to name.
> but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously
I expect it is very hard to overestimate how incorrect our mental model memory and learning is. If literally everything was forgotten, then you could set up a reverse groundhog day or groundhog hour for someone, just optimize for them having a wonderful day every day. (Would still be horrible for the loved ones to be effectively disconnected from their still-living relative.) Probably there have been movies made about this.
I have no experience with this but I am sure it is nothing, nothing, nothing like that. The article says you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
> Because she cannot remember things, she goes through each day in a state of low-grade anxiety about where her grown children are and whether they are all right. She feels she hasn’t heard from any of us in a long time.
To me this is not a description of someone frozen in time. To me this is a description of some horrific combination of some amount of learning or "remembering" happening, some sense of passage of time, and no episodic memories to draw on to explain any of it.
> If literally everything was forgotten, then you could set up a reverse groundhog day or groundhog hour for someone, just optimize for them having a wonderful day every day. (Would still be horrible for the loved ones to be effectively disconnected from their still-living relative.) Probably there have been movies made about this.
There is a Drew Barrymore movie Fifty first dates. And yes, it is horrible for the relatives.
(not the original poster), a reminder that changing the law is important in many situations and can change real-life impact of people (for example with this tablet, or with blood oxygen feature of Apple) ?
If we had truly enforced software patents we wouldn't see widespread LLMs.
> One small challenge was maximizing the size of the message text. Sometimes a message is just a word or two; other times it might be several sentences. A single font size can’t accommodate such a wide range of text content. I couldn’t find a pure CSS way to automatically maximize font size so that a text element with word wrapping would display without clipping.
> I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.
Wow -- not just for accessibility but this seems like a very useful feature to have in native CSS.
Nice find.
Overall such a heartwarming use of technology. Love.
I've been watching the evolution of the web since 1995, and I remember when css got popular in the late 90s thinking that it didn't match real-world use cases. Somehow design-by-committee took us from drawing our sites with tables in the browser's WYSIWYG editor, to not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have.
Css jumped the shark and today I'd vote to scrap it entirely, which I know is a strong and controversial statement. But I grew up with Microsoft Word and Aldus PageMaker, and desktop publishing was arguably better in the 1980s than it is today. Because everyone could use it to get real work done at their family-owned small businesses, long before we had the web or tech support. Why are we writing today's interfaces in what amounts to assembly language?
Anyway, I just discovered how float is really supposed to work with shape-outside. Here's an example that can be seen by clicking the Run code snippet button:
Notice how this tiny bit of markup flows like a magazine article. Browsers should have been able to do this from day one. But they were written by unix and PC people, not human interface experts like, say, Bill Atkinson. Just look at how many years it took outline fonts to work using strokes and shadows, so early websites couldn't even place text over images without looking like Myspace.
I think that css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements, sort of like with calc() and @media queries (although @media arguably shouldn't exist, because mobile shouldn't be its own thing either). And we should have more powerful typesetting metaphors than justify. Edit: that would adjust font size automatically to fit within a container element.
IMHO the original sin of css was that it tried to give everyone a cookie cutter media-agnostic layout tool, when we'd probably be better off with the more intuitive auto flow of Qt, dropping down to a constraint matrix like Apple's Auto Layout when needed.
Disclaimer: I'm a backend developer, and watching how much frontend effort is required to accomplish so little boggles my mind.
Your comment is some interesting food for thought, but I wanted to respond to a couple statements you made:
> not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have
Not being able to center things is a bit of a meme, but flexbox was introduced back in 2009 and has been supported by major browsers for quite a long time. Centering text and elements is now extremely easy.
> css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements
You're in luck! Container queries were added to CSS fairly recently:
As someone who has struggled with getting CSS to do normal layout stuff that had clear precise semantics but required weird CSS trickery, it's actually more scary than lucky that stuff like container queries have arrived 30 years after CSS was introduced.
container queries have a very obvious chicken and egg problem if used a certain way: If this container is less than 30px wide, make its content 60px wide. Otherwise make it 20px wide. Now that container exists in a quantum state of being both 30 and 60px wide. I actually haven't looked into container queries to see how they ended up dealing with this yet.
Obviously this is a very contrived example but it can also express itself in subtler ways.
> so early websites couldn't even place text over images
I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.
CSS was doomed from the start, IMO. It was a poorly-targeted solution to a the wrong problem that could never have worked. But you don't have to use it. You can keep using tables for layout, all browsers render them well (generally faster than CSS, and with better progressive rendering too), real-world screenreaders and the like have had great support for them since before CSS emerged, there's no actual downside.
I made a handful of corporate sites, e-commerce, CMS and even flash lol, just out of college with boring defense contractor job. I didn't have time to be picky because I had a full time job so I always worked with whatever they had and a lot of stuff was made in Dreamweaver, and even a corporate site exported from Word. The code was awful but worked everywhere. And you always had to get into code anyway, so there was no time to even think about which of the tools was best. Something was always missing in some integration so you gotta code/script. I think a lot of people made money in the last cycle tech cycles and had nothing to do but create or fund a bunch of stuff to confuse the marketplace.
That's also been one of my biggest CSS wishlist items for years.
I've had dozens of clients complain about headings wrapping onto the next line when they add one too many letters, and ask if we can make the font size smaller without affecting the others. There are several ways to accomplish that, but they're all annoying compared to a theoretical one-line CSS solution like:
font-size: 12-18px 400px;
Or something of that nature that could hopefully do it automatically.
Would combine quite well with `text-wrap` actually! [0] That way, the renderer knows the area it needs to fill (the implicit `max-content`, defined width/height, or flex/grid size of the container) and it knows how to best split up the text amongst the lines. Feels like the renderer would be capable of finding the optimal font size to satisfy those two constraints.
a commercial product along the same lines is KOMP https://komp.family/en/. We had it to communicate with our elderly grandparents until they died. Its a bit like a senior accessible social network feed for the family, including its dynamics, because the app shows what is being shown to everybody else of the family. In that regard it's a disadvantage you have some of the same dynamics going on. You dont only communicate to the grandparents, but also to the (extended) family.
I don't know if it's because we are conditioned by our interaction with TV and mobiles, but active LCD screens feel like they are screaming for our attention and an always on display will mostly be a distraction.
E-ink displays don't have this, they just blend in.
Glad I went on HN today. My grandma has dementia and I've been leaving paper reminders around the house. Maybe I should try something like this. Wishing you and your family the best.
Does anyone know if "Start its web browser and have that browser display a designated start page." is specific thing for this tablet or if that is "normal" in android?
I want to do something similar for anki cards I'm struggling with, and I dunno if I'm in for a world of pain. I was considering https://shop.boox.com/products/go6 for my needs as it's a bit cheaper.
I don't know the specific mechanism used in the OP, but android has several mechanisms that can be used to start an app on reboot. Take a look around a Google search, I'm sure you'll find what you need
A little off topic, but on the subject of E-Ink, here is an analysis of a Kindle display with optical coherence tomography images: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05174
Pimeroni has a selection of eink displays up to 7.3" including some with various buttons and LEDs to make whatever you'd like. https://shop.pimoroni.com/search?q=inky
All boox tablet/e-readers just run Android. They can do literally anything Android can for folks asking about the loading and displaying of the web page. There are several "kiosk" apps and browsers with kiosk modes. Also fairly expensive Android automation tools.
> It takes approximately 40 seconds to refresh this display
I think that would rule it out for the purpose of this project - the demo in their introduction video[0] shows that it flashes multiple colors for ages during this long refresh. I imagine that could be very confusing for someone whose short-term memory might not last that long.
Yeah, a black and white version would probably have been fine. Somewhat frustratingly they don't seem to have a 7 inch greyscale one though, only colour versions! Maybe they used to but stopped selling them?
EDIT: posted this before I noticed harpastrum's comment
If you're comfortable with microcontrollers (esp32/arduino), I can definitely recommend Inkplate. I found them when I was making a similar setup for my parents, and they have various sizes up to 10" and up to 6 colors they can display.
You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites.
With an ESP32 or comparable (RPi Pico W, for example) you get MicroPython or CircuitPython support! That means a Python interpreter, drivers for popular peripherals and usually a network stack. Performance doesn’t beat a native SDK but Python is Python.
My wife acquired anterograde amnesia after a car accident. This device may or may not have worked for her: she would probably have discovered the device anew every time (as in, every 10 minutes or so), although she would probably be pleased each time.
Thankfully she fully recovered after a few weeks. It takes a lot of patience to deal with someone like that, and you could tell it frequently caused a lot of frustration on her part. Every 10 minutes or so in fact.
That illustrates the difference between anterograde amnesia and dementia. Dementia is a general degradation of the brain that includes memory but you can have amnesia with an otherwise perfectly functional brain. A patient with dementia would never text her kids as in OP's case.
My grandpa had dementia. Last time me and my mom flew over to visit he didn't recognize either of us the first day. He didn't even remember having a daughter. Second day he vaguely recognized my mom but not me.
Third and last day of our stay, as soon as I entered the living room he lit up and exclaimed my name. We sat and talked for hours, reminiscing past events with great details, until we had to leave for the plane home.
There's no single cause. Forming memories requires many parts of the brain. Injury to or illness in any one of them can cause anteretrograde amnesia.
It's like asking "what makes a person unable to walk?" Arthritis, paralysis, muscle wasting, MS, Parkinson's, a broken bone, an amputated foot... some are temporary, some are permanent.
Walking is hard, even though most of us can do it. Forming memories is similarly hard.
Interesting. Waveshare makes this recommendation across their product line, and from what I can glean from google, their displays really do develop permanent artifacts if they're not refreshed. I've never seen another epaper company say this, and anecdotally I've seen ereaders that held the same image for months or years work perfectly fine, even with no power for refreshes. I don't know why there would be a difference.
This is awesome and I am happy to read that she was able to remember the device and asks if things have been added to it. My parents have just retired and I wonder if something like this would be advantageous to introduce prior to signs of memory loss. My grandmother had Alzheimers and while it is different than the amnesia that OP references, her memories were lost in reverse chronological order (can't remember where her keys are, but could remember where her last job was, later could not remember that last job, but could remember her first job, etc). So introducing this prior to those recent memory lapses could help solidify that device in my parents head so that they could benefit from it even if they do start to exhibit that behavior.
My sister has a disability making independent living a challenge. Although I have 0 technical background, I need to start thinking and brainstorming in this manner.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadMy dad didn't like poetry clock, but he does like image gen. So we got a (color) Inky Impression 7.3 and hooked it up to an RPi.
I made a basic telegram bot that you could send a verbal prompt to ("snowy day"). It would then ask which of your favorite artist styles it should create an image in. I found that presenting a list of two styles combined had cooler results. The prompt would be used to fetch a random quote on the topic, and quote and style would then be feed to stable diffusion, and maybe 30 seconds later you have fresh art and a quote on the display.
My dad then asked if we just could forward images directly there. He prefers, each day, to post an image of whatever the day is (November 13 is "World Kindness Day") and occasionally share a family photo. My mom looks forward to seeing what day he picks every day.
That's fun. Although, from the article:
> There’s one other problem, though. It’s well known that AI language models like ChatGPT have a tendency to make up data (sometimes known as “hallucinations”), and it turns out that’s true even if you’re just telling the time. Roughly once every 15 minutes, says Webb, the clock will simply lie about the time just to make a certain rhyme work. “The fibbing is hilarious. Sometimes you can’t tell — it might say ‘one past two’ when it’s actually ‘two past one,’” he says. He says this will be fixable but, for now, is a fun quirk of the system. “Clockwork means you get precision drift; AI-work means you get hallucination drift.”
;)
This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.
(disclaimer, i'm the founder)
Also, what country are the orders shipped from? US?
It's shipped from USA.
I don't want a battery because:
- although every X months is quite ok, I don't want the hassle of remembering to charge it (first world problems, I know)
- but I also have a fear of leaving devices with a battery plugged in for a long time / having to monitor for battery swelling or other abnormalities
I already have a classic battery-powered display which shows temperature info from some sensors and it's really convenient, but annoying when the battery is dead right when you need the info. Even if that only happens every X months.
https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal
https://usetrmnl.com/assets/section2-3-d6887b41db12ad0659992...
as the first character, タ (ta), is missing from the display, making it read "(a)minaru".
Might be a neat idea to offer a magnetic mount for it, like a flexible flat magnetic board shaped to fit the TRMNL with a sticky backing so you can attach it somewhere and then use that to attach the TRMNL (your site doesn't seem to say anything about being magnetic so I'm guessing you have to attach magnets to the TRMNL too though?).
For that matter, the site doesn't offer any information about mounting it at all. Looking at the disassembly animation I see what looks like a hole to hang it on a nail, but it might be nice to put this info at least in the FAQ section if nowhere else (that does say it can be "hung on a wall" but no details).
we included magnets for VIP backers on our crowdfunding campaign and may start selling them again. device has a mounting hole on the back for nails / hooks, we’ll probably release mechanical specs so people can 3D print or otherwise fabricate their own mounts. for example some people want to mash up an array of them. but until then, adhesive magnets work great for the fridge use case.
I came into possession of several sheafs of the A4-sized ones, which now serve as "generic surprisingly heavy objects".
Just one comment:
> Developer Edition > Ability to build custom plugins for yourself and others. Unlocks our API. > $20
Isn't it in your interest that developers unlock the potential of your hardware in some new ways? Charging for it seems... weird.
I mean the price is not that high, it just doesn't feel right to pay for access to API. My 2 cents.
[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SystemSix
If eInk wasn't a monopoly this would be 100% a project I'd love to do
https://streamable.com/sm0oek
I wanted the same kind of general eink device, but this is also supposedly super hackable!
no longer a Kickstarter btw, shipping same-day now (see homepage)
(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)
> Your TRMNL device pings our server, never the other way around.
> Each request made to our /api/display endpoint includes only the minimum details needed to support customers -- an API key, device mac address, firmware version, battery voltage, and wifi signal strength.
Super hackable but it pings their hosted server and nothing else?! Is there a way to run your own server?
> Purchase a TRMNL from our home page: https://usetrmnl.com
> Then follow the instructions on BYOD/S > Server.
> More TBD.
[1]: https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/e3db8c37990c2333ec...
[2]: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod-s
[3]: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/private-api/introduction
if you think about it, we are incentivized to do this. no subscription fees means the more you ping our server, the lower our margin. but for now we're wrapping up fulfilling all pre-orders, scaling, etc typical new product issues.
even without BYOS (bring your own server) docs however, it's already possible to point TRMNL to your own stack if you 1) fork our OSS firmware + b) have some experience with e-ink.
brief post here outlining more of the benefits: https://usetrmnl.com/blog/developer-edition
need to update docs too, thanks for the call out. we were writing docs before this piece was ironed out.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/invisible-computers/e-p...
I've backed the new, bigger display, which should be shipping soon.
You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites.
https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/
More amazing was how creative the sisters were in managing themselves with technology. Many decisions are made by votes, done in real time globally! Religious people get short shrift.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
TLDR: 20 years as SWE, then used his skills for his calling.
Any time you have anything to say, just edit the `index.html` file and the eink display will update.
No need for fancy subscription services or kickstarter projects or crowdfunding... just... batteries included python.
Like most DIY tinkerer solutions, unfortunately, which is why people like paying money for productised solutions - the time it takes to debug and troubleshoot home made solutions is often prohibitive for a lot of people who aren’t techheads.
... In short - if our parish priest above sees the original post, I'd suggest he give it a go. It's an hour to set up and won't cost him or his parish anything (aside from buying the eink display ofc).
If it turns out that the DIY solution is insufficient, or his parish is wealthy enough to spend money on a thing like this, great, then upgrade to that.
* Browser runs out of memory or has other issue and stops refreshing.
* Wifi connection drops and browser displays an error page and stops executing your refreshes. The power-saving options on the RPIs wifi caused me quite a bit of grief before I disabled them.
* Raspberry Pi crashes with kernel errors due to cheap SD card, underpowered USB power supply, or something else.
I ran into these issues one by one over a few months and fixed each one as I ran into it. What I ended up with was:
* Browser set to run at OS startup displaying my page.
* That page having a meta refresh tag, and javascript code to reload the page periodically.
* A browser extension to automatically reload the page as well if both of those failed.
* A watchdog daemon that detects when the RPI has frozen and reboots it.
* A cron job that reboots periodically.
With all of those my dashboard would run for months without any issues or interruptions. Just sharing so others can be aware of potential issues.
Purpose: if you come into the building to fetch the car with the medical equipment, you could see at a glance how many people acknowledged the alert and would arrive shortly etc. Sadly, the system tended to loose its WIFI connection and then the reloaded web page would display a network error. And since the web page was a 3rd party product, we could not hack the Javascript.
1. AJAX request for itself, with a timed retry in the case of any failure (optional: During this time, add a visible indicator that you're having connectivity issue) 2. Extract the contents of the <body> tag of the fetched HTML 3. Set the innerHTML of the <body> tag of the DOM to the fetched body.
To avoid memory leaks I'd still be tempted to also try to implement a "safe-ish refresh" that checks for a successful response and quickly fires off a location.reload() on like a daily basis.
Additionally for a raspberry pi, you can use a watchdog timer service that checks to see if the rpi has frozen, and reboots it.
https://github.com/TrisSherliker/FridgeChalkboard/tree/main
So all you need to do is create a project and use a plugin(existing or your own) to generate your view. The plugin is flexible, so it could be a custom UI or uploading a HTML file for example.
Then, you can open a link on any machine like the e-ink display.
Open-source and self-hostable. But you can also use the online version I'm hosting.
It's still very new so things will break but I'm already using it in church and other meetings.
[0] https://theopenpresenter.com
> Despite her amnesia, my mom came to remember that this display exits and what it’s for. She looks forward to seeing updates from her children on it.
This is the most interesting part for me here. Brains are such wondrous things. Would be cool to know if this is a special quirk of her mom or this is something which can help others like her too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming
For example, I am already in the habit of logging every phone call to any doctor's offices or important contacts as they're happening. Being able to refer back to all the notes has helped me manage a number of complex errors. I know the name of the person I spoke to, the date, and what we discussed. Any time I need to make a call about a topic or to a company, I have an easy way to pull up all the past notes.
I'd like to think if I ever got amnesia, already having this system in place would serve me really well if I couldn't learn new things. I have the old things, and the habit of referring to and adding new things to the list.
But I wonder what else would or wouldn't be useful to try to practice now?
That's the kind of idea I'm looking for.
As for amnesia, it seems like a habit of making notes and seeking out to read your own notes would be useful. However, the trend in technology to constantly change behaviour, appearance, and functionality makes anything digital a barrier. Manual notes are also susceptible to being impossible for ageing people to make. So it's really hard to think of something.
The creator is on HN too.
Disclosure: I'm from the TRMNL team.
[1] - https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins
As a bit of a luddite, e-ink is one of the few modern wizbangs I'm enamored with. It's so damn nice I take it as an inside woosh joke that it isn't everywhere and available without pawning my organs.
As a side note on his mother remembering that the tablet exists, it sounds like she has amnesia quite like Henry Molaison, a famous case study in neuropathology. He had very specific brain damage that seemingly stopped him forming new memories in the same way as OP's mother, but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. So for example he would have warm feelings towards people who'd been caring for him despite not remembering them, and would also pick up card games more and more quickly as he played them repeatedly despite saying he didn't remember the game. OP's mother remembering the tablet sounds very similar, particularly when paired with the feeling of being remembered and loved by her children.
This reminds me of muscle memory. I can play pieces on the piano even though I don't actively remember the sheet music of them. My hands just "know" what to do. Funnily enough the moment I start actively thinking about certain passages that ability worsens by a lot.
I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.
Now I’m wondering if you can tell a kid is from an “even” or “odd” generation by which way they tie shoes…
I wonder if what you describe is kind of the reason for this.
- cheap liquid dishwasher detergent including in the prewash cup instead of costly pods that deprive the prewash cycle of soap
- Put bleach in the washer's bleach dispenser and use hot water for any light sheets, no, it doesn't hurt prints or fade light colors
- cook anything you can fit in the air fryer to decrease total time ~70% vs an oven
Why would I want to cook my milkshake?
However my wife, who’s 3 weeks younger than me, ties her shoes in a completely different way to me, which I believe is a “bunny ears” method.
Give the large variety of ways to tie shoes, there’s no way you could infer anything other than the way they are doing it now.
Even with the bunny ear method right bunny ear over left is wrong, it comes undone much easier than left bunny ear over right.
If you're like me there's a Google rabbit hole to disappear into for 1/2 hour, completely forget about, and carry on doing it completely wrong.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...
Reddit is telling me to not accept it at face value - https://old.reddit.com/r/research/comments/1bh2jmv/this_is_h...
These mechanisms may or may not encode memories as we typically understand them, i.e., the ability to remember an event or fact, but could very plausibly shift personality, preferences, etc.
> organs outside of the brain don't contribute to memory
Interesting question. To start, personality typically refers to the totality of a person's behaviors, not the memories they may be able to bring forth. Behavior, esp automatic, is informed by cognitive states informed by the body.
Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. . . . The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. [0]
Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside you called interoception. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system.
...[M]oment-to-moment interoception infuses us with affect, which we then use as evidence about the world. People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing.
0. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (p. 72). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
1. ibid (p. 56).
2. ibid (pp. 76-77)
At least playing is mostly an entertainment. Passwords is where the shit happens. I recently lost a 20y old account thanks to this.
At the start it's all about carrying around notes full of picking the relevant condition depending on the current permutation/state of the cube then following the step by step algorithms on which sequence of steps to perform for that condition.
Then you'll naturally realise that certain conditions happen a lot more than others and you'll start to remember the sequence of letters for each series of steps to perform.
Over time you'll forget the letters and your fingers will just know the sequence to perform when you perceive that condition, kind of like typing a password without thinking about it.
Eventually you'll be able to fit each condition and algorithm into your muscle memory and completely forget the series of letters that you used to memorise.
Now I can barely explain how to solve a rubik's cube in-person. I just do it.
If nothing else, myelinization counts as a form of memory. Strengthened by reuse.
I would love to know if those warm feelings are stronger with individuals who remind you of someone you used to know. “This nurse reminds me of Aunt Sarah, who was nice to me when my dog died.” And so forth.
I always find those non-obvious connections fascinating, like the disorders where e.g. someone can't say the word "fork" when they're looking at one despite being to describe what you use it for etc, but can immediately name it when they touch it.
Edit: got a link? I'd be interested to read that.
I have a relative with anterograde amnesia from a stroke, so that story got passed on to my father when it happened. 8 years ago perhaps?
I have no idea if feelings would automatically transfer to me from people with amnesia, but they certainly do for people without it, even though I don't remind them of anyone they know well enough to name.
I expect it is very hard to overestimate how incorrect our mental model memory and learning is. If literally everything was forgotten, then you could set up a reverse groundhog day or groundhog hour for someone, just optimize for them having a wonderful day every day. (Would still be horrible for the loved ones to be effectively disconnected from their still-living relative.) Probably there have been movies made about this.
I have no experience with this but I am sure it is nothing, nothing, nothing like that. The article says you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
> Because she cannot remember things, she goes through each day in a state of low-grade anxiety about where her grown children are and whether they are all right. She feels she hasn’t heard from any of us in a long time.
To me this is not a description of someone frozen in time. To me this is a description of some horrific combination of some amount of learning or "remembering" happening, some sense of passage of time, and no episodic memories to draw on to explain any of it.
There is a Drew Barrymore movie Fifty first dates. And yes, it is horrible for the relatives.
It's even aesthetically pleasing! What mom wouldn't find this charming?
If we had truly enforced software patents we wouldn't see widespread LLMs.
> I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.
Wow -- not just for accessibility but this seems like a very useful feature to have in native CSS.
Nice find.
Overall such a heartwarming use of technology. Love.
Css jumped the shark and today I'd vote to scrap it entirely, which I know is a strong and controversial statement. But I grew up with Microsoft Word and Aldus PageMaker, and desktop publishing was arguably better in the 1980s than it is today. Because everyone could use it to get real work done at their family-owned small businesses, long before we had the web or tech support. Why are we writing today's interfaces in what amounts to assembly language?
Anyway, I just discovered how float is really supposed to work with shape-outside. Here's an example that can be seen by clicking the Run code snippet button:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/33953666
Notice how this tiny bit of markup flows like a magazine article. Browsers should have been able to do this from day one. But they were written by unix and PC people, not human interface experts like, say, Bill Atkinson. Just look at how many years it took outline fonts to work using strokes and shadows, so early websites couldn't even place text over images without looking like Myspace.
I think that css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements, sort of like with calc() and @media queries (although @media arguably shouldn't exist, because mobile shouldn't be its own thing either). And we should have more powerful typesetting metaphors than justify. Edit: that would adjust font size automatically to fit within a container element.
IMHO the original sin of css was that it tried to give everyone a cookie cutter media-agnostic layout tool, when we'd probably be better off with the more intuitive auto flow of Qt, dropping down to a constraint matrix like Apple's Auto Layout when needed.
Disclaimer: I'm a backend developer, and watching how much frontend effort is required to accomplish so little boggles my mind.
> not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have
Not being able to center things is a bit of a meme, but flexbox was introduced back in 2009 and has been supported by major browsers for quite a long time. Centering text and elements is now extremely easy.
> css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements
You're in luck! Container queries were added to CSS fairly recently:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_contain...
I agree with GP that CSS should be scrapped.
Obviously this is a very contrived example but it can also express itself in subtler ways.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/container-queries-introducti...
I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.
I've had dozens of clients complain about headings wrapping onto the next line when they add one too many letters, and ask if we can make the font size smaller without affecting the others. There are several ways to accomplish that, but they're all annoying compared to a theoretical one-line CSS solution like:
font-size: 12-18px 400px;
Or something of that nature that could hopefully do it automatically.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-wrap
anyone with influence on the CSSWG?
E-ink displays don't have this, they just blend in.
I want to do something similar for anki cards I'm struggling with, and I dunno if I'm in for a world of pain. I was considering https://shop.boox.com/products/go6 for my needs as it's a bit cheaper.
Could tweak the UI to add an expiration date on the initial input screen, with a sensible default (maybe 2 weeks?)
All boox tablet/e-readers just run Android. They can do literally anything Android can for folks asking about the loading and displaying of the web page. There are several "kiosk" apps and browsers with kiosk modes. Also fairly expensive Android automation tools.
> It takes approximately 40 seconds to refresh this display
I think that would rule it out for the purpose of this project - the demo in their introduction video[0] shows that it flashes multiple colors for ages during this long refresh. I imagine that could be very confusing for someone whose short-term memory might not last that long.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluopgSoSWY&t=500s
EDIT: posted this before I noticed harpastrum's comment
You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites.
https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/
It solved a personal problem.
Amazing mission behind the tech.
Could solve a myriad of issues for other families. This part is unproven, but that's why it would be cool to see the author release it as a product!
Could start by simply putting up a payment page and making them bespoke as orders start coming in.
Thankfully she fully recovered after a few weeks. It takes a lot of patience to deal with someone like that, and you could tell it frequently caused a lot of frustration on her part. Every 10 minutes or so in fact.
Glad that your wife got over it.
Third and last day of our stay, as soon as I entered the living room he lit up and exclaimed my name. We sat and talked for hours, reminiscing past events with great details, until we had to leave for the plane home.
It's like asking "what makes a person unable to walk?" Arthritis, paralysis, muscle wasting, MS, Parkinson's, a broken bone, an amputated foot... some are temporary, some are permanent.
Walking is hard, even though most of us can do it. Forming memories is similarly hard.
Happily, e-ink displays don't suffer from burn-in.
Can't say if it is due to burn-in but some manufacturers do recommend refreshing the display image periodically like every 24 hours [1].
See precautions #4
https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/4.2inch_e-Paper_Module_(B)_Ma...
My sister has a disability making independent living a challenge. Although I have 0 technical background, I need to start thinking and brainstorming in this manner.
Meeting for dinner tonight? Set the message to expire after today.