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Never Missing the Train Again
101–110 of 147 posts
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#102Yeah, i wish more programs worked like this.
I wrote something similar on a smaller scale for the keihin-kyuukou line in japan: https://rail.esrh.me. Now I live in tokyo and there's several transit options closeby so I would love to have some always on display like this in my room.
Unfortunately, while public transit in the US and Europe seem to be tracked by services with developer friendly APIs, this is not the case in Japan as far as i know -- not that much of a problem back then, i just needed to do some light web scraping.
I wrote all of the scraping/data and processing/frontend code in clojure and clojurescript, and wrote a small blog post about it here: https://esrh.me/posts/2023-03-23-clojure
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#103I'm kind of surprised that no one in here seems to have mentioned https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html so far. It does exactly what seems to be wanted here.
Wow, I had no idea something like that would work out in the deep forests of north sweden, With live updating times! Thankyou!
So much better than the official app, it directly shows exactly what is most needed, closest bus-stop with live times for next busses.
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe I'm not understanding the use case. I don't want to "take the train". The use case is routine. A lot of people, most of the time, do indeed want to "take the train". Heroic feats of real-time planning have their place, and it's great to have tools that help you with that, but routine can be covered with much simpler tools just as well. Even in the Tokyo scenario you gave (which is fascinating -- thank you!) G…
never met that person. as someone that has long lived in cities with amazing transportation (sf is not one of those with good transportation) there are too many options and people always want whatever is best now, not routine. you're out drinking - which mode is last. you're on the east side of X, which route is closest. you're tired, does any route guauntee a seat. etc.... Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Ky…
> never met that person.
Hello! Now you have.
In many cities certain parts of the transit network follow a star / hub-and-spoke layout. The station nearest to my house is on a spoke, and has trains going south and those going north. So for me, an in-home train display only really needs to show the next train in each direction.
And a lot of transit decisions are conditional on things the planning app doesn't know. Am I comfortable riding a hire bike, appropriately dressed, and carrying a helmet? Do I already have a return ticket for the light rail making it the obvious choice? Am I the kind of person who enjoys a brisk 20 minute walk?
Combine that with the fact that the multimodal transit apps don't understand fares, and I find it's simpler to just start the taxi app if you need a taxi.
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#105If you're in the UK you can buy a depature board that mimics a station departure board: https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/store/product/desktop-depart...
There's also https://departureboards.mobi/departures/BTH which mimics the departure boards used in some stations.
Is there a bus version? This is excellent.
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be even cooler if Amazon also encouraged and built a "Kiosk mode" browser view of the kindle for this sort of display hacking.
They really ought to, it's a fantastic reuse mechanism. Like I totally understand why they wouldn't for new Kindles, since I assume part of their ebook sales help subsidize the hardware, but if they enabled it once a device hit 5 years old or something, I don't see what they'd have to lose.
> I don't see what they'd have to lose.
If there is a cost or liability, then most businesses will avoid doing it.
There usually has to be a clear financial benefit: businesses should make profits - they are not social services or hobbies.
Fortunately businesses contain people and people often do altruistic things for non-financial reasons.
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#107n.b. I'm the executive director of the non-profit behind OneBusAway, which is an open source project used by millions of people every day to find out where their buses, trains, trams, and funiculars are, and when they'll be arriving. If you live in a city that already has a OneBusAway server[1], you can use one of our brand new SDKs to build your own custom app experience: https://github.com/onebusAway/?q=sdk&type=al…
As an aside, being opensource is there a reason you only publish in Play store and not F-Droid?
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#108I'm kind of surprised that no one in here seems to have mentioned https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html so far. It does exactly what seems to be wanted here.
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Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#109n.b. I'm the executive director of the non-profit behind OneBusAway, which is an open source project used by millions of people every day to find out where their buses, trains, trams, and funiculars are, and when they'll be arriving. If you live in a city that already has a OneBusAway server[1], you can use one of our brand new SDKs to build your own custom app experience: https://github.com/onebusAway/?q=sdk&type=al…
Currently there's only 9 cities supported worldwide, and of those 2 are in beta. If this software had broader reach, it may be easier to get open source support.
Having said that, I'd add my city if it were straightforward. It looks like you've spent a lot of engineering time in library and SDK support lately - I suggest investing in the DX happy path to encourage new folks to invest their time.
For example, this document is rather complicated https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway/wiki/Multi-Region
Re: Never Missing the Train Again
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, ~ds was disabled by a firmware update a few years ago.
Ugh, that sucks. Any idea how to determine which ones are affected? I.e. what firmware version, or which models it started affecting? Older models still support ~disableScreensaver -- at some point Amazon just stopped issuing firmware updates for them, I have to assume.
I don’t follow the space closely, but if you find a Kindle Keyboard (third generation of the product) or earlier, they stopped getting updates ages ago and in fact can no longer use the store (though USB sideloading still works fine). They are all jailbreakable.
As a kiosk-like display, though, they do have that keyboard taking up space.
I only use my Kindle to read outside (at the beach or pool); in the house, my iPad is faster and has a bigger screen. But in the sun, it’s useless. eInk is far superior for that. For the week or two a year that I need one, my 15-ish-year-old Kindle is fine. I travel with a laptop and tons of cables anyway; sideloading just means a few minutes of work after dinner to make sure there’s enough on there to read tomorrow and isn’t much slower than using the internal interface to get books was.
I do miss the free 3G. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/548/