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Never Missing the Train Again

lilymara.xyz

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Re: Never Missing the Train Again

#42
post #34
post #7

R.I.P. Pebble: https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/community/a... """ Caltrain is a Pebble app that displays upcoming trains at a station, and where those trains will stop along the remainder of each of their routes. Finally, it uses PebbleKit JS to retrieve your location on launch. If it gets a response before you manually choose a station, it will automatically show the station closest to you. """ ...y…

We've really taken steps backwards since pebble. We used to be able to respond to messages by talking into our wrists, for ~$100. I switched to Garmin after using rebble for a bit, and that's the feature I miss most.

I'm the reverse, I never wanted to "input" to the wrist, but really appreciated the notifications, Bluetooth disconnect warnings, "the timeline" interface, and the necessarily limiting interface of 4 buttons (specifically: music control while in the shower... play/pause, next track, pick a station from a list, etc).

Totally understand how some loved the ability to compose/respond to messages, but that never made sense to me.

Garmin, Amazfit, and BangleJS comes close, but #buttons, #battery, and #b&w (well, always on, transflective, sunlight readable)

Re: Never Missing the Train Again

#44
I love how they blamed the flake on node and Javascript, then switched to Rust and also changed the whole approach, which had a hundred times more effect than changing the language did.

Re: Never Missing the Train Again

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes they are: https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm?___SI... A 4.37inch E-Paper in 3 colors is $24, problem is need you to program yourself (they have code sample in python, for raspberry pi), and you need a raspberry pi, case, cables, etc. Also, these cheap epaper displays are, of course, of lower quality (slower, lower resolution) than an kindle display.

They jump up in price pretty quickly as size goes up. The cheapest 5+ inch display I found at your link was over $40, and it's about 100PPI. It's certainly not prohibitive, but certainly priced high compared to "just jailbreak a kindle" for any remotely kindle-comparable display, right? (remotely comparable in size and resolution)

I imagine the Kindle is sold as a loss leader, plus whatever economies of scale/negotiating Amazon does pushes the price down heavily vs buying a single unit from an electronics retailer

Re: Never Missing the Train Again

#46
post #44

I love how they blamed the flake on node and Javascript, then switched to Rust and also changed the whole approach, which had a hundred times more effect than changing the language did.

I don't blame Node/JS for the reliability issues of the first version at all, they're simply not the tools that I prefer to work in.

> Each of the seven sections on the image represents a browser tab that Puppeteer needs to keep open in order to fetch screenshots. Remember that the Node.js server was running on a Raspberry Pi, it didn’t have an excess of memory to operate in and Chrome is not known for its svelte-ness.

> I picked Node.js for the first server because I was using Puppeteer. I don’t particularly like Javascript, so given the ability to start from scratch I happily pivoted to Rust.

> Next, since we’re not relying on a browser engine to render the display, we will be using a 2D graphics library to render a PNG directly. This should have a much lower resource cost than using an entire browser engine, at the cost of some decreased flexibility.

Re: Never Missing the Train Again

#47
post #44

I love how they blamed the flake on node and Javascript, then switched to Rust and also changed the whole approach, which had a hundred times more effect than changing the language did.

I don't think they really blamed node and js? They seemed pretty aware that it was the overall arch of the thing that made it non-viable.

> Each of the seven sections on the image represents a browser tab that Puppeteer needs to keep open in order to fetch screenshots. Remember that the Node.js server was running on a Raspberry Pi, it didn’t have an excess of memory to operate in and Chrome is not known for its svelte-ness.

So then figuring they had to effectively redo it from scratch with a new solution, they then switched over to a language and stack they enjoyed, which seems completely reasonable.

> I picked Node.js for the first server because I was using Puppeteer. I don’t particularly like Javascript, so given the ability to start from scratch I happily pivoted to Rust.

edit: Just beaten and directly from the author it seems. :)

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