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MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

jan.miksovsky.com

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Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#31

Post by mathieuh »

ghosty141 wrote: post #22
frereubu wrote: post #12

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 sa…

> 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.

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.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#32

Post by cynicalpeace »

I feel this could be a product that would see some success in the retail market.

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.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#33

Post by vanderZwan »

tekchip wrote: post #28

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 automat…

That's cool, but:

> 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

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#34

Post by djbusby »

grahameb wrote: post #3

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…

There has been a number of these on HN. Other features too. The first one I remember seeing was MagicMirror (not e-ink) ages ago.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#35

Post by zackmorris »

albert_e wrote: post #19

> 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 ma…

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:

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.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#37

Post by steezeburger »

grahameb wrote: post #3

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…

I'm a backer, but this would probably fit your bill https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/usetrmnl/trmnl-the-e-in...

I wanted the same kind of general eink device, but this is also supposedly super hackable!

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#38

Post by zrail »

shireboy wrote: post #10

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.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#39

Post by speleding »

lbotos wrote: post #25

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.

When starting Chromium you can pass a `--kiosk` option with one (or more ) URLs of the pages you want to display

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#40

Post by rvnx »

fortran77 wrote: post #24
devwastaken wrote: post #16

[flagged]

You come into every thread just to say how we need to get rid of property laws. What does that accomplish?

(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.

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