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Make a “Literary Clock” from a Jailbroken Kindle
- vnglst 8y agoOh so cool this!!
- HippoBaro 8y agoThis is such a great, inventive idea. Would definitely like to have something akin to that as a screensaver, for example.
- techload 8y agoYou can show the page http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock as a screensaver. Search for "show web page as screensaver".
- johannes_ne 8y agoI actually adapted Jaaps work to a web version of the clock yesterday. http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock
- entropie 8y agoCool. I might use this for my smartwatch.
- johannes_ne 8y agoYou should. Some of the paragraphs are quite long for a watch, though ;)
- got2surf 8y agoLooks awesome! The difference between the "time" and "non-time" font styling is more subtle here - when I changed #main_text to have color: gray, it became a bit easier for me to see the time.
- johannes_ne 8y agoYou're right. It's better with a bit more contrast. I've lightend the main_text a bit.
- ada1981 8y agoDoes this work on iPhone? It only changed once for me. Would be cool to fade between times so I can use an old iPhone as a clock.
- johannes_ne 8y agoShould work fine on iPhone. Maybe you were unlucky to visit it at a point with no quote for the following minute or two, causing the same quote to be repeated.
- ada1981 8y agoAh, understood. How many minutes don't have a quote?
- johannes_ne 8y ago536, so a bit more than a third.
- ada1981 8y agoOh wow; that is significant.
- crossroads091 8y agoThis could also make for a really cool chrome extension.
- scottmcdot 8y agoVery cool! Are there more than 2 quotes for each time? E.g., will tomorrow's 10:17AM quote be different to this morning's 10:17AM quote?
- johannes_ne 8y agoSome times have a lot of quotes (e.g. midnight and noon). In these cases the quote is selected at random. About a third of the minutes have no quote. The author of the Kindle project (Jaap) has fixed some of these by using a close vague quote (like 'around noon' for 11.57). The remaining missing minutes just use the closest earlier quote.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoThat's great! As a web app, if you have a Kindle Fire you can do the following: 1. Go to the SETTINGS area 2. Click on DEVICE OPTIONS 3. Triple-tap the SERIAL NUMBER option, towards the bottom of the screen. 4. The DEVELOPER OPTIONS will now be accessible. 5. Find the option labeled STAY AWAKE. Click on it to ENABLE. The Kindle will now remain on while charging (a "clock" mode). Load the page in Silk - kindle browser and you're set.
- tzs 8y agoThis would probably be more work than it is worth, but it would be neat to have an option to take into account time differences between the location in the quoted story and the user's location. For example, this quote is used for 8:19: > I had arranged to meet the Occupational Health Officer at 10:30. I took the train from Watford Junction at 8.19 and arrived at London Euston seven minutes late, at 8.49.|The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|Jonathan Coe If the location aware option were enabled, it would give that to me at 1:19, not 8:19, because I'm in PDT (UTC-0700). (Well, 1:19 if London is not also on daylight savings time. If they are, then I'd get it at 0:19. This is one of the reasons it is probably more work than it is worth. You'd not only have to have the location information for the quotes, you'd also have to deal with the rules for daylight savings time in multiple locations. This would be a pain in the ass).
- pxndx 8y agoWhy would you do that? you want to see the quote for 8:19 at your 8:19 local time, otherwise it's not a very good clock.
- tzs 8y agoI think it is meant to be an interesting clock, not a good clock in the timekeeping sense. There are many times that do not have an associated quote, so the time it shows if often off by several minutes. If you just need a good clock, https://time.is/ https://time.is/ is hard to beat. I think it would be interesting to, say, look at the clock just before 5 PM, as I'm getting ready to knock off work and find something fun to do, to be told that it is five minutes to midnight at Hogwarts and Dumbledore is advising Hermione that three turns should do it.
- gpvos 8y agoI think it still wants to be a useful clock, i.e., you want to be able to see at a glance how late it is where you are now. That's actually why the current time is highlighted. Although your idea also has some merit.
- CPLX 8y agoThis is awesome. For those of you that hobby with this stuff, what would be the most stone cold simple cheap way to get a machine that would output this page into a monitor continuously? Like if I had an extra display lying around and wanted to make a little wall installation, what’s the most direct path, something like a raspberry pi?
- ada1981 8y agoYou could send it the page via Chromecast.
- jimbauwens 8y agoThanks, used the JSON files to quickly script a console version. Now I have a kitty giving me a nice quote with the time every time I open a new terminal :)
- therealdrag0 8y agoCare to share?
- jimbauwens 8y agoSorry, missed your reply. Here you go: https://github.com/jimbauwens/literature-clock-console https://github.com/jimbauwens/literature-clock-console . It's a very simple node.js application. If you don't like node.js the logic can be easily ported to any other language. I just didn't feel like parsing the data files with a shell script.
- ada1981 8y agoIt might be fun to make a Twitter version of this. Ie, select a random tweet that references the time (vs. a book quote).
- roryisok 8y agoLiterally just saw this on the verge, nice project. Sadly I don't have an old kindle. I do have an old nook but I don't know if its possible to do the same with that
- Animats 8y agoE-readers are so cheap now that makes sense. Years ago I built a little clock that displays "It's a little after 2". Ardunio-class CPU with a 2x24 character display. Looks dated now. I'd like to build an e-ink unit that will run for a year on a battery.
- userbinator 8y agoKindle-sized e-ink displays themselves are quite cheap and can be driven from a microcontroller: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar ...to do things that the huge expensive modules with builtin controllers can't, like more intensity levels: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar/log/72153-can-you-get-32-level-grayscale-out-of-an-e-ink-display https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar/...
- mantenpanther 8y agoI cant‘t open this page in a sane way, because I‘m from the EU.
- entropie 8y agoHuh? Worked for me. "All no".
- KineticLensman 8y agoReading it now, from the EU. I had to scroll to the bottom of an opt-out pop-up and click okay, which wasn't too onerous.
- gpvos 8y agoI'm in and from the EU, and had zero problems.
- chx 8y agoI wonder whether someone made a boarding pass display out of these. Zoom will be tricky, I guess.
- chedabob 8y agoI've been building something similar with a Nook Simple Touch. They run Android 2.1, and you jailbreak them in a similar way.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y agoNice keep us updated, I've got one with a dodgy battery which is dying to be used for a project like this.
- moonka 8y agoThat's awesome! Up until now the only reason I have jailbroken every kindle I've owned is to have the screensaver be the book I'm reading rather than the dull preset ones. Finally I've found reason 2!
- WalterBright 8y agoI'd like to be the current page of the book I'm reading!
- moonka 8y agoThe screensaver hack allows you to do that.
- pcmaffey 8y agoInstructions? Was looking a few months ago to no avail
- anowlcalledjosh 8y agoIf you have a firmware 5 kindle (Touch, Paperwhite, Voyage, Oasis), see the screensavers hack thread on Mobileread: > Dou you prefer to just show the last thing that was on screen, with an overlay indicating when the device's alseep? Just drop a blank file named last in the linkss folder. Restart your Kindle ([HOME] -> [MENU] > Settings -> [MENU] > Restart; or simply use the Screen Savers > Restart framework now button in KUAL), and you're done from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=195474 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=195474 Obviously make sure you read everything (really, everything, including all the tiny text, even if it doesn't seem relevant) before you start.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI.e. an option to disable the screensaver? :).
- pard68 8y ago
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoThis is brilliant. If you panckaged this up as a product you could sell a tonne of pre orders on Kickstarter
- WalterBright 8y agoA friend of mine in college decided to make an LED clock for an EE project. Everyone else who decides to make an LED clock strives for accurate time. My friend decided that nobody needs time closer than quarter hour intervals. So that's all it displayed - it was highly accurate to within 15 minutes.
- tejasmanohar 8y agoA colleague of mine made a photo frame out of his Kindle, https://twitter.com/f2prateek/status/1003019245125451776 https://twitter.com/f2prateek/status/1003019245125451776
- got2surf 8y agoThis is awesome. It would be cool to adapt the same idea to images which contain numbers (house numbers, highway exit signs, etc) like "1245" to represent 12:45. Since you've identified the number in the image, you could even blur the background slightly and add contrast between the image portion and background (since the numbers may only be a small part of the image). Not very efficient, but a cool way of combining screensavers and clocks. Not sure how many "aesthetic" screensaver-quality images contain numbers though
- sytelus 8y agoThis is so cool! Just one ask: If you have gone through all these trouble, just make a GitHub repo to store your files so people can fork, contribute etc.
- disposedtrolley 8y agoThis is awesome! I dug up my old 2nd gen Kindle in the hopes of following along, and sadly the battery is busted :( Instead, I'm currently in the process of making a macOS screen saver to replicate this! I'm blogging my updates at http://jamesliu.io/posts/macos-screensaver/ http://jamesliu.io/posts/macos-screensaver/ GitHub repo: https://github.com/disposedtrolley/literary-screensaver https://github.com/disposedtrolley/literary-screensaver
- marnett 8y agoYES! insta-star from me!
- disposedtrolley 8y agoThanks!
- iforgotpassword 8y agoIf you're lucky it will still run with USB power attached. Depending on where/how you want to set it up that should be an option. I did the same with mine. When I found it again it was dead, but I left it laying on my desk with the USB cord attached (accidentally). When I dug it up again a couple days later it was up and running. It will shut down almost immediately when I unplug it. It's displaying a rotation of various webcomics now.
- disposedtrolley 8y agoHmm I might have to give that a shot. Thanks!
- ginnungagap 8y agoIs there a way to do something similar for a phone's lock screen background? Or maybe even for a laptop
- beardyw 8y ago"The Clock" is a 24 hour hour long movie made by Christian Marclay which contains thousands of film clips each with a clock somewhere in them, so that the whole thing keeps the right time. Whilst scanning for the time in text may be tricky, the work involved in finding those clips is unimaginable. Sadly copies are only held by few museums.
- kuroguro 8y agoI heard there were attempts to stitch together a remake with all the same scenes by some torrent site users. Not sure how far they got or if they ever finished.
- yoz-y 8y agoAt some point, in order to finish the movie you can just release a few films just so you have a clock scene in them.
- slededit 8y agoThe amazing progress of image recognition over the last few years would vastly reduce the amount of work required. You would need to chain together a more generic object recognition network, and feed the results into another trained network to detect numerals. Analogue clocks might work better with more traditional geometric detection.
- Roritharr 8y agoThat's cool! I was looking into doing a project that turned old Kindles into Meeting Room Booking Signage. Did anyone stumble upon previous work in that direction?
- hmottestad 8y agoI made this: http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/ http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/ It's not a kindle, but a Sony PRS-T1. What I did was simple: Jailbreak it so I could get to the Android dev menu and disable sleep. Make a webpage with javascript that pulls in an image from yr.no (for weather) and gets xml from ruter.no (for subway times). Then just use the built in web browser and put it all in a frame to cover all the ugly parts and also covers the android status bar up top. PS: If you just want a working meeting room booking system. We have these on the wall by every meeting room at work: https://www.evoko.se/products/evoko-room-manager/ https://www.evoko.se/products/evoko-room-manager/
- Roritharr 8y agoCool, I will look into this. The pre-built systems all cater to larger orgs that have no qualms at spending thousands on this nice to have feature. If I can't hack it for fun in a day on spare hw it's not worth it to me.
- joosters 8y agoSlightly related: A twitter bot telling the time using photos of Flavor Flav - https://twitter.com/flavorflavtime https://twitter.com/flavorflavtime
- Quequau 8y agoI was expecting something more closely resembling a clock. I suppose these days a clock doesn't necessarily resemble a grandfather clock and I get that most clock don't have arms any more but still...
- raister 8y agoIt is amazing that you throw away working and functional Kindles around when other parts of the world having one of those is extremelly expensive. Kudos for "America", where everything (I mean everything) is disposable.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoThis is so cool! Thanks for sharing.
- haberdasher 8y agoVery cool. Don't have a broken Kindle, so I decided to make a Chrome new tab extension to display these! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/literary-clock/dkakoclgfplinfknmloejhabadnchdem https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/literary-clock/dka...