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How you learned the jail breaking and figure out all this? How much time it took to create? Can you please tell me i am interested. Thanks
I've build a similar thing for my kindle.
https://github.com/makepanic/eink-weather
It is a simple website, which a headless chrome screenshots to use with the online screensaver app.
A browser might be overkill but I wanted to avoid manual layouting.
I'd love to use this on my working Kindle. Is that possible? Basically, replace the "screensaver" program with this dashboard?
There are some minor downsides though. If you keep the built-in Kindle UI running it will draw a menubar on the screen when the Wi-Fi connection status changes and power consumption will be a bit higher with this setup. All in all still a good tradeoff if you want to keep using the Kindle for it's original purpose too.
Edit: someone else posted a link to this tool which does exactly this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104
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An issue with mobile UX is that it's tricky to maintain 'ambient awareness'. How do you 'keep an eye' on Slack? You have to foreground it & disable screen locking, or get push notifications.
On desktop you can just alt+tab to it every so often, plus the taskbar icon lights up.
I sometimes use Chrome on desktop to address a similar requirement (they have a feature to 'pin' a tab, so you can have GMail plus stuff like WhatsApp pinned.)
Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc
Just thinking about this ambient computing thing reminds me of the ‘Chumby’, a cute smart alarm clock from the early 2000s.
Apparently the Amazon Echo Show is a bit of a successor. And I came across a wall-mounted calendar display called ‘Dakboard’ (it’s like $400 though.)
I have a use case that sounds ridiculously lazy, but I guess has been a problem for me for most of this decade: I need to know the time in various cities without doing any work besides a glance
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Addendum: over the last couple days I've been looking into stuff like Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc but re-using a Kindle is cool if you don't want to do a whole electronics project
If you don't have a spare Kindle lying around, smallish e-paper modules are nowadays quite cheap, and can be driven easily from a Raspberry Pi (Zero W upwards). That's what we did on our boat: https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard
Otherwise I currently do desktop notifications/speech text.
I have a basic Kindle too (paper?) And it's amazing the battery life.
I tried to jail break my kindle a while back. But Amazon auto pushed a new firmware and prevented it minutes before I could reboot with the crack. So now my device is up to date and catching dust again. Thanks Amazon.
I love these “under engineered” solutions. I’d be tempted to do everything in the Kindle itself, but he achieved what he needed with much less effort and higher flexibility.
Very cool! I've been thinking about this.. let me just paste my tweets thread from a few weeks ago: -- An issue with mobile UX is that it's tricky to maintain 'ambient awareness'. How do you 'keep an eye' on Slack? You have to foreground it & disable screen locking, or get push notifications. On desktop you can just alt+tab to it every so often, plus the taskbar icon lights up. I sometimes use Chrome on desktop to ad…
So you could theoretically bind Slack status to a key (say your F1) key and have it turn red when there was an unread message.
I think that was/is a great solution to ambient awareness
I love this idea - roughly how long do you think the battery would last if you had a dashboard that updated every hour?
I'm only letting it update during office hours, so I reckon I should get around a month of battery life with this usage.