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MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

jan.miksovsky.com

181–190 of 259 posts

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

#181
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!

There is also this bigger display:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/invisible-computers/e-p...

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

#182
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would also be good to display the current date alongside the messages' date

It looks like it's at the top of the screen

The current date - yes, but messages don't have a date assigned to them

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ` `. 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,…

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.

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.

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

#184
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried to do pretty much this on a Kobo reader and discovered the Kobo browser doesn't support javascript. :|

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

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the monks in the third season of Babylon 5. Who says you can't both be an IT person and a cleric?

Given their history as archivers it seems like a natural complement, really

And scientists. Gregor Mendel comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel

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

#186
post #45

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 frustratio…

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.

Glad that your wife got over it.

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

#187
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'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

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Passwords also work this way.

Yep. I couldn’t write down my work one without a keyboard.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: ` `. 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,…

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.

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.

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