4 ms·

It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!

by sandos 1y ago

swinglock 1y ago
It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment. Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
- clueless 1y ago
  this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper
  - alex-a-soto 1y ago
    It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoretic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  What about syntax highlighting?
  - 3abiton 1y ago
    That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
  - swinglock 1y ago
    I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
    - balou23 1y ago
      There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better. Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already. Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
      - swinglock 1y ago
        I like your idea better.
      - alex-a-soto 1y ago
        I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!
    - OJFord 1y ago
      I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on. Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.
  - camgunz 1y ago
    I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable. [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber https://github.com/camgunz/amber
    - porridgeraisin 1y ago
      > in the GUI version or in the TUI version, in a terminal like Kitty. I want to try some monochrome UI, but that amber is definitely not my taste. Let me see if there is a "paper-like" theme, or maybe I can make one myself.
      - camgunz 1y ago
        I (re)built it w/ a little script I call roygvim [0] -- here's the source [1] [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim [1]: https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC
        porridgeraisin 1y ago
        My attempt: https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png colorscheme paper highlight Normal guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Constant guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight String guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Character guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Number guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Boolean guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Float guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Identifier guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Function guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Statement guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Conditional guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Repeat guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Label guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Operator guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Keyword guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight PreProc guifg=#333333 highlight Include guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Define guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Macro guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight PreCondit guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Type guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight StorageClass guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Structure guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Typedef guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Special guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight SpecialChar guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Tag guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Delimiter guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Debug guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Underlined guifg=#000000 gui=underline highlight Error guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Todo guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
b112 1y ago
There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though. The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit? If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same. (One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
- swinglock 1y ago
  Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
- dspillett 1y ago
  Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).
  - DrJaws 1y ago
    they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".
- foolswisdom 1y ago
  Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
  - DrJaws 1y ago
    it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does. but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications. but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.
alex-a-soto 1y ago
Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU
- b112 1y ago
  I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis. An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on. So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on. I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment. Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
  - alex-a-soto 1y ago
    Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing this in X11 is definitely doable. I’ve seen others achieve similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage regions. I hadn’t considered using a custom backend video driver; that’s something I’ll be looking into. My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques at the hardware level, or making a camera rig. What excites me most is getting this into people’s hands, seeing what they create with it, and working together to improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I learned about recently: E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists use E Ink technology to explore its secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-mystery-of-cuttlefish-camouflage-scientists-use-e-ink-technology-to-explore-its-secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-my...

It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!

by sandos 1y ago

It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!

swinglock 1y ago

It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment. Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.

clueless 1y ago
this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoretic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...
porridgeraisin 1y ago
What about syntax highlighting?
- 3abiton 1y ago
  That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
- swinglock 1y ago
  I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
  - balou23 1y ago
    There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better. Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already. Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
    - swinglock 1y ago
      I like your idea better.
    - alex-a-soto 1y ago
      I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!
  - OJFord 1y ago
    I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on. Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
- dspillett 1y ago
  You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.
- camgunz 1y ago
  I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable. [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber https://github.com/camgunz/amber
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    > in the GUI version or in the TUI version, in a terminal like Kitty. I want to try some monochrome UI, but that amber is definitely not my taste. Let me see if there is a "paper-like" theme, or maybe I can make one myself.
    - camgunz 1y ago
      I (re)built it w/ a little script I call roygvim [0] -- here's the source [1] [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim [1]: https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC
      - porridgeraisin 1y ago
        My attempt: https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png colorscheme paper highlight Normal guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Constant guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight String guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Character guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Number guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Boolean guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Float guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Identifier guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Function guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Statement guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Conditional guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Repeat guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Label guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Operator guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight Keyword guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight PreProc guifg=#333333 highlight Include guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Define guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Macro guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight PreCondit guifg=#333333 gui=underline highlight Type guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight StorageClass guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Structure guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Typedef guifg=#000000 gui=bold highlight Special guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight SpecialChar guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Tag guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Delimiter guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic highlight Debug guifg=#333333 gui=italic highlight Underlined guifg=#000000 gui=underline highlight Error guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline highlight Todo guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE

b112 1y ago

There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though. The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit? If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same. (One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)

swinglock 1y ago
Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
dspillett 1y ago
Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).
- DrJaws 1y ago
  they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".
foolswisdom 1y ago
Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
- DrJaws 1y ago
  it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does. but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications. but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.

alex-a-soto 1y ago

Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU

b112 1y ago
I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis. An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on. So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on. I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment. Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing this in X11 is definitely doable. I’ve seen others achieve similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage regions. I hadn’t considered using a custom backend video driver; that’s something I’ll be looking into. My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques at the hardware level, or making a camera rig. What excites me most is getting this into people’s hands, seeing what they create with it, and working together to improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I learned about recently: E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists use E Ink technology to explore its secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-mystery-of-cuttlefish-camouflage-scientists-use-e-ink-technology-to-explore-its-secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-my...