What I Did in April

This month lined up with the end of my university term, so I mostly got up to two things: A) two assignments, and B) procrastinating those two assignments! :p

Nonetheless, I got two little projects done - check them out!

Kindle

I got a second-hand little 2011 Kindle 4, and jailbroke it! I love e-paper technology, it looks so dang cool, even in this, what, 15 year old iteration. I'm so deeply in love with the silver casing and chunky buttons - it doesn't even have a touch screen!

The lock screen is (sometimes called) Rosa Celeste, by Gustave Doré, an illustration from Dante's Paradiso. I'm in a 5-year-so-far D&D campaign named for Paradiso, so this illustration has some familiarity and meaning to me!

Aside: I think there's something really satisfyingly thematic about the way that LCD screens work so poorly in direct sunlight. Like, in order to look at your phone you have to hunt for a wretched cave to squirm into, out of the sun's ireful glare. By contrast, check out how good the e-paper screen looks in direct sunlight!

I'd like to get a bit more into reading, and a bit less into the infinite scroll. For now, I've just been building the habit with very easily digestible stuff, cozy, familiar webfiction, trying to recapture the feeling of when I was a kid and would read for hours at a time. We'll see how that goes!

Weather Machine

One of my friends sent me an Instagram reel, wherein someone'd set up a receipt printer to give them a printout of the weather forecast each morning! I love this idea, but am not in love with the host of impracticalities that come with sourcing, interfacing with, feeding and hosting a receipt printer in my bedroom. So I recreated it as a Discord bot instead!

Each morning, I (and a couple of my friends) receive a little Discord DM like this:

I promise this image is actually greyscale, but against the pink background on my website it looks blue!

The data is from the old BOM site, and it's rendered in Python with Pillow, which is new to me - I usually use OpenCV on account of my prior experience with it, so I was pleased to find that Pillow was quite easy to use.

I admit the digitisation of the physical printout premise robs it of much of its material charm, but I think it has charm to spare, and I do what I can to try and evoke that materiality. Let's talk about how receipt printers (or "thermal printers") work, real quick!

Receipt paper has a coating on it that blackens when exposed to heat. The thermal printer head has a one-dimensional array of tiny elements that can be electrically controlled to quickly change temperature, essentially burning an image onto the receipt paper as it gets pulled through. This is quite a bit like CRT screens, in that, in the final two dimensional result, we sort of have one discrete dimension, and one continuous dimension.

A closeup of a thermal printhead from Wikimedia - you can see the line of heating elements!

To evoke this, I use a pixel font, slightly blur it in the vertical direction, and then dither the result, to break up horizontal lines a bit, while keeping the vertical lines clean. I think the result carries the vibe I'm after!

I also add some "garbage data" along the edges of the image - I'm not sure quite where I've seen this before (maybe the audio component of film strips), but I think it channels a bit of the energy of information-dense protocols, where you can see there's information there that's not for you.

I'm super pleased that myself and a couple of my friends get this each morning! It's small, but I really like creating a little positive thing for the people around me.

And That's It!

I'm heading into holidays now, so i have basically nothing going on for the next 5 weeks. Maybe this means I'll do lots of cool things, or maybe I'll just nap in the sun.

Chat to you at the end of May!