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2093 points pabs3 | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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angrygoat ◴[] No.42135621[source]
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 and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.

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inanutshellus ◴[] No.42139034[source]
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: `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3600">`.
  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, go buy an e-ink display and point it to http://firstmachine:8000/, make it the default homepage.
Voila.

Any time you have anything to say, just edit the `index.html` file and the eink display will update.

No need for fancy subscription services or kickstarter projects or crowdfunding... just... batteries included python.

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trashcan ◴[] No.42141558[source]
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.
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1. Nition ◴[] No.42141824[source]
I tried to do pretty much this on a Kobo reader and discovered the Kobo browser doesn't support javascript. :|
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2. oarsinsync ◴[] No.42144446[source]
It sounds like there’s a lot more edge case complexity to this than the GP originally thought.

Like most DIY tinkerer solutions, unfortunately, which is why people like paying money for productised solutions - the time it takes to debug and troubleshoot home made solutions is often prohibitive for a lot of people who aren’t techheads.

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3. forgotacc240419 ◴[] No.42145231[source]
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
4. inanutshellus ◴[] No.42147911[source]
This is both fair and obvious... but at the same time, the nits folk are bringing up are not fleshed out.

  "I had to reboot my raspberry pi" 
and

  "whoops rando eInk display doesn't do javascript" 
are both super weird and frankly unfair to consider as criticisms of the original solution.

... In short - if our parish priest above sees the original post, I'd suggest he give it a go. It's an hour to set up and won't cost him or his parish anything (aside from buying the eink display ofc).

If it turns out that the DIY solution is insufficient, or his parish is wealthy enough to spend money on a thing like this, great, then upgrade to that.

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5. Nition ◴[] No.42153734{3}[source]
Kobo readers are fairly non-rando, they're the second most popular eInk readers after the Kindle I think. I agree that lack of Javascript support is not a blocking issue on the use case though (although it does make it a little more annoying).
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6. inanutshellus ◴[] No.42172872{4}[source]
Luckily the original solution doesn't involve javascript...