Weeklog #2036
Tech
I've started to work again on an old project of mine : the wall framed e-calendar. It's not framed yet, and certainly not on the wall, but I've started playing around with the ESP32 and the e-ink waveshare screen that I have sitting there for at least 2 years
Comics and Books
No comic book this time, but we've finished the reading of Charles 1943 with the kids. Aidan definitely didn't find it interesting whatsoever, he was mainly drawing on his desk or looking at another book while I was reading it to his elder brother, but Noah did enjoy the story.
We went to the public library on Saturday and we chose Coup de foudre by Nicolas Ancion. I've read one of his book when I was a teenager and his name caught my attention.
Interesting things online
- A quoi ça sert, un père?, Arte Twist (Archive)
- Miller, a command-line tool for querying, shaping, and reformatting data files in various formats including CSV, TSV, JSON, and JSON Lines.
Building myself a framed e-calendar
I am terrible at both planning and remembering stuff. It’s been a curse for the past 36 years and I can’t imagine it getting better over time.
I’ve tried a bunch of things over the years to overcome that, including writing a bullet journal – which I did for almost 3 years – but I was constantly frustrated by the fact that I never seem to have it on hand. The journal was living on my desk or in my bagpack, which was fine during working hours, but not outside of those hours.
A few months ago I started to look at TaskWarrior. I was instantly seduced by the tool – mainly because it lives in the CLI, of course – but it was definitely not a more portable option until I discovered WingTask, the mobile-first PWA companion to TaskWarrior.
Things went better, but not just yet. I soon realised that I was too often surprised by my schedule – that sneaky Slack notification that catch you off-guard : « <important meeting> starts in 1 min » was constantly taking me aback.
Not only am I terrible at planning and remembering – I already said that, didn’t I? – But I’m also terribly lazy. If the information doesn’t come to me, chances are that I’ll never even try to find it.
And then on a beautiful morning, I stumbled upon MagInkCal, a project built with Raspberry Pi, e-ink screen, and a wooden frame. This was it : I needed something to remind me of stuff right in front of me, and luckily, I have just the space in front of my eyes.
Now I am known to get really excited real quick, and I have a Raspeberry Pi Zero on hand, so I promptly order a 7.5inch E-Paper E-Ink Display and a battery, completely ignoring the fact that my very old Rpi Zero is not build with a Wi-Fi chipset.
Obviously I took way too long trying to make my Rpi Zero play nice with a USB Wi-Fi dongle – which is surprisingly frustrating – before I realise that the Wi-Fi dongle would require the use of an additional power supply. The idea being to have a low-consumption e-ink calendar, relying on a powered USB hub would make no sense.
What I didn’t know though, is that there is currently a global Raspberry Pi shortage, so buying a brand new Raspberry Pi Zero with built-in Wi-Fi was not an option. I was this close to let that project die in a corner of my head when I discovered the ESP32 – A tiny, low-consumption, Wi-Fi and bluetooth-ready microcontroller that is dirt-cheap.
But that’s a story for another day.
Tags: ESP32