This is a very nice packaging of a kindle hack I've seen several years ago [1]. Previous discussion: [2]
You can point your kindle web browser at this website: [3]
It is based upon a Kindle project [1] and initially I just used the quote library from that project (which is based on a crowd-sourced collection of quotes by The Guardian [2]).
Later, a lot of quotes have been added by kind strangers through GitHub issues and pull-requests [3].
"Author Clock has built-in Wi-Fi, so all software and content updates happen automatically." i.e. At some point in the future, an advertisement will be the first thing you see when you open your eyes in the morning.
my mom had an alexa gizmo beside her chair, that was cycling through 4 kinds of ads followed by a random pic of one of her grandkids. Literally 80% ads. And she placed it beside the chair where she spends so many hours.
I said "but didn't we get you a digital picture frame?" and she said "this one can play music. sometimes I use that feature."
Really felt dystopian. She didn't mind at all. Although she appreciated when I spent 15 minutes digging in the settings and turning off every category of slideshow _except_ for pictures from her albums.
She turned back—-for a brief, brief moment—-and it felt like all the mad activity of the world stood paralyzed, save for a soft flutter from a single wisp of her hair.
“Target closes in 45 minutes and they still have that great sale on TVs.”
I think this is too cynical. Not every business owner is out to get you. Not every company suffers under never-ending, always-increasing shareholder pressure.
Unless you know something about the people behind this that you’re not sharing, your comment is just informationless nihilism.
What will come first ? Ads, or the company discontinuing the service and bricking all equipment they sold, inviting user to restore the device to factory default and disposing of it safely (aka : throw it in a landfill)
It might be nice to update the quote database, or the timezone database, and wifi is handy for setting the time.
I built a wifi alarm clock with OTA updates [1], which is handy when I find yet another bug in processing iCal or assumption I've made about what data will actually be in the iCal files. :/ Although, at this point, I've figured out what kinds of things don't actually work and avoid them instead of fixing the bugs, because there's two of these in the wild and I think the person I sent the second one to gave up on it.
I kickstarted this long ago and when I got it a few months ago gave it to my wife as a gift, who is an author. She immediately rejected it because she found the eink transitions where it flashes a dark color briefly very distracting.
I made a small digital clock program that I put on a small display.
It sat next to me while I worked, and I found the transitions from one time to another (like 1:01 -> 1:02) to be distracting. So I changed the transition to be a gradual fade and it helped.
Now that I think about it, I remember getting distracted years ago at a home with a grandfather clock. A quiet room except for the ticking. Definitely accentuated boredom (which with smartphones, we never have anymore)
Do you all not think that companies should charge prices that maximize their profits (in the long run)? Typically, companies are trying to predict the price elasticity curve that yields the most profit via # units sold * price. That said, if you overcharge, that could be bad for the brand, turning off users in the short and longer term.
Another product like this for me is the Manta Sleep Pro Mask. It’s $80, but the best I’ve found, so I buy it anyways. I’m mildly annoyed and also feel like they’re taking advantage of me on price and will switch as soon as there’s an alternative at least as good for less…but when that happens, they’ll probably lower their price, which is what typically happens as sectors and products mature due to competition.
Profit maximization curves are interesting, and I think explain things like how convenience stores exist with much lower volume compared to grocery stores. Eg XYZ food costs 90 cents and the grocery store sells it for $1, yielding profit of 10% whereas a convenience store sells it for $1.50, just a 50% increase in price for the consumer (for the convenience), but the profit is 6x that for the grocery store, so they only need to sell approx 1/6 to make the same profit.
In the case of the author clock. If COGS is $50, profit is $150ish. If they sold for $100, they’d have to sell 3x as many to make the same profit. Given that it’s a niche product for readers (smaller population and typically more educated and wealthier), I think they care less about the price. Doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.
It’s interesting; we’ve lived within capitalism so long, it sounds reasonable for you to (archly) ask “do you not think all companies… should maximise their profits?” - as it that’s a given, and anyone even treading around questioning this fundamental is by default wrong, or forgetful, or crazy. It’s almost as if had moved from being a choice, to an immutable natural law.
But I’m coming to the conclusion —more powerfully in the recent few years— that not only is this an issue that should be debated, but the pursuit of profit above all else is responsible to a greater or lesser degree for many of the ills that we see and suffer in our societies. And from my European perspective, I believe that it is responsible for America (its culture, way of life, the ‘American way’) fracturing and falling apart.
I think it was in the 80's, I got a little pine tree from McDonald's. Must have been a promotion or part of a Happy Meal, I honestly don't recall. I planted it in my parents yard, where it is still growing today (and its huge).
We had a live Christmas tree another year that is still growing in the yard too.
Save your money from over-priced clocks, plant a tree yourself and enjoy it for a long time.
Funny how products made as if there's no such thing as an externality or grotesque wealth inequality are always so much cheaper than they really ought to be.
ps. i am not suggesting that the author clock is externality-free. it probably is not. nor am i forgetting that it will be purchased mostly by people on the upside of that inequality.
It's buyer manipulation. "Here's this ridiculously priced item; but it's okay you can feel good about throwing this much money away, because we're planting a tree."
Instead of segmenting/targeting the high-income market by product quality, they target by emotional manipulation claiming good causes. (i.e. higher-priced product that does not have to be higher quality).
You're suggesting that it's somehow made in a way that's more conscious of externalities or wealth inequalities than cheaper competitors, a suggestion that I think is unwarranted.
They don't plant a tree for every Author Clock sold.
They plant a seedling.
This means (a) it may not survive to be a tree, but that's not the mental image they want you to have and (b) it might be in a tree farm, which means it's not a ecosystem-tree but a product to be harvested and processed (with fossile fuels). So, you know, it's more likely about giving you the warm-fuzzies than any particular concern for the environment.
That said, kudos to them for making the device easy to disassemble and repair. That in itself is a laudable thing.
This device does not need a WiFi for any reason. A microsd with the entire database of messages (encrypted) would have made the device cheaper, safer, consuming less energy (not an expert, but I guess that those solar cells you see in calculators could power 1 e-ink transition/minute forever), still upgradeable and a better product overall.
> An ever-expanding library
> What a vision that is. We are continuously adding new quotes to Author Clock. Once it's connected to your WiFi they'll simply begin to... apparate.
I wonder if someone has managed to extract the quote database yet for DIYers.
The device's firmware is easily available via their website - the Mac Installer contains a pair of 9MB binaries (in addition to 200MB of Electron), which seems to just be an unencrypted ESP32 blob. Running `strings` on the blob gives plenty of human-readable stuff (including entire html pages), but nothing resembling quotes. Maybe they are compressed in some way?
Assuming 140 characters per quote, the entire 13000-entry quote database should fit uncompressed in about 2MB, so who knows.
13,000 seems surprisingly small, all things considered. Seems like the sort of task where you could automate it with a small LLM instance and process millions of books easily. Then extract all of the key strings and have a set of tens of thousands of ways to describe time which can be searched for as fixed-string matches, and might be of interest in its own right. (How do mentioned times change over history? Do they get more precise? Do books take place at wider ranges of the day?)
Reproducing a quotation from a book is likely always fair use in the US. A database of quotes is also probably not copyrightable in the first place though of course the software is.
A Kindle is ~$80, and the Paperwhite without ads is $180.
A cheap Android tablet is ~$70 without an eInk display.
Just a 4 or 5 inch eInk display would cost me ~$70 or so.
This is a finished product, in a gorgeous timber case (if you like that sort of thing) with a beautiful knurled knob. And a bunch of custom written software and a collected database of quotes.
I reckon it'd sell - at least to the right crowd - at 4-5 times that price.
Those of use who are capable of making their own probably wouldn't buy one anyway - but as a high end gift or executive toy, I could see them selling these at $700 or $800.
(And yeah, I'm considering grabbing a 2nd hand Kindle and firing up my CNC mill or laser cutter to make a case for it, but people like me are very much in the 0.1% or 0.01% of all the people who'd like to own one of these.)
I have no doubt it is also pretty expensive to make. Eink screens of that size have certain price. Other parts likely are not cheapest possible options either. Volume is likely also pretty low, so tooling etc. isn't shared over that many units.
Not that it isn't expensive for what it does. Just that it probably isn't cheap to make.
> If the "Captive" setup page is not working, try going to "192.168.4.1" instead of the captive website.
I’m at a loss as to why they’d hard-code an IP address instead of pulling a DHCP lease. I suppose they chose that subnet with the thought that it isn’t in use for most people, but it would in fact collide with a VLAN on my network.
I reckon it's a combination of simplifying it and assuming that anyone capable of setting up a VLAN knows enough to sort this one out. That might not hold for more exotic networks (businesses, schools...)
Readit News
[1] https://techni.gallery/literaire-klok-trekt-internationaal-a... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17688324 [3] https://literature-clock.jenevoldsen.com/
It is based upon a Kindle project [1] and initially I just used the quote library from that project (which is based on a crowd-sourced collection of quotes by The Guardian [2]).
Later, a lot of quotes have been added by kind strangers through GitHub issues and pull-requests [3].
[1] https://www.instructables.com/Literary-Clock-Made-From-E-rea...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/26/lite...
[3] https://github.com/JohannesNE/literature-clock/blob/master/l...
I said "but didn't we get you a digital picture frame?" and she said "this one can play music. sometimes I use that feature."
Really felt dystopian. She didn't mind at all. Although she appreciated when I spent 15 minutes digging in the settings and turning off every category of slideshow _except_ for pictures from her albums.
“Target closes in 45 minutes and they still have that great sale on TVs.”
Unless you know something about the people behind this that you’re not sharing, your comment is just informationless nihilism.
I think the right level of cynicism would be:
They will be bought by a shareholder-beholden-competitor and shut down.
Or, this is their v1 product. Their v2 product will aggressively market a subscription service at you.
At any moment no but over time statistically likelihood is high.
So yeah...that will probably happen.
I built a wifi alarm clock with OTA updates [1], which is handy when I find yet another bug in processing iCal or assumption I've made about what data will actually be in the iCal files. :/ Although, at this point, I've figured out what kinds of things don't actually work and avoid them instead of fixing the bugs, because there's two of these in the wild and I think the person I sent the second one to gave up on it.
[1] https://github.com/russor/ClockThing
I come to Hacker News for interesting, curiosity-satisfying content. Not meaningless drivel like this that belongs on Reddit.
If you point this out , you may be thought of naive or out of touch.
They add 0 quality to the discussion but are easy to upvote.
It sat next to me while I worked, and I found the transitions from one time to another (like 1:01 -> 1:02) to be distracting. So I changed the transition to be a gradual fade and it helped.
Now that I think about it, I remember getting distracted years ago at a home with a grandfather clock. A quiet room except for the ticking. Definitely accentuated boredom (which with smartphones, we never have anymore)
This product, from the ad copy, is targeted at fans of writing. People sitting on the bleachers, not the ones on the court.
So from the right angle, the gift reads as saying "I don't take you seriously - you're a wannabe".
> Shop: $199.00 USD
Funny how products that claim a cause on the side are always 5 times the price they should be.
Another product like this for me is the Manta Sleep Pro Mask. It’s $80, but the best I’ve found, so I buy it anyways. I’m mildly annoyed and also feel like they’re taking advantage of me on price and will switch as soon as there’s an alternative at least as good for less…but when that happens, they’ll probably lower their price, which is what typically happens as sectors and products mature due to competition.
Profit maximization curves are interesting, and I think explain things like how convenience stores exist with much lower volume compared to grocery stores. Eg XYZ food costs 90 cents and the grocery store sells it for $1, yielding profit of 10% whereas a convenience store sells it for $1.50, just a 50% increase in price for the consumer (for the convenience), but the profit is 6x that for the grocery store, so they only need to sell approx 1/6 to make the same profit.
In the case of the author clock. If COGS is $50, profit is $150ish. If they sold for $100, they’d have to sell 3x as many to make the same profit. Given that it’s a niche product for readers (smaller population and typically more educated and wealthier), I think they care less about the price. Doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.
But I’m coming to the conclusion —more powerfully in the recent few years— that not only is this an issue that should be debated, but the pursuit of profit above all else is responsible to a greater or lesser degree for many of the ills that we see and suffer in our societies. And from my European perspective, I believe that it is responsible for America (its culture, way of life, the ‘American way’) fracturing and falling apart.
We had a live Christmas tree another year that is still growing in the yard too.
Save your money from over-priced clocks, plant a tree yourself and enjoy it for a long time.
ps. i am not suggesting that the author clock is externality-free. it probably is not. nor am i forgetting that it will be purchased mostly by people on the upside of that inequality.
Instead of segmenting/targeting the high-income market by product quality, they target by emotional manipulation claiming good causes. (i.e. higher-priced product that does not have to be higher quality).
They plant a seedling.
This means (a) it may not survive to be a tree, but that's not the mental image they want you to have and (b) it might be in a tree farm, which means it's not a ecosystem-tree but a product to be harvested and processed (with fossile fuels). So, you know, it's more likely about giving you the warm-fuzzies than any particular concern for the environment.
That said, kudos to them for making the device easy to disassemble and repair. That in itself is a laudable thing.
> An ever-expanding library > What a vision that is. We are continuously adding new quotes to Author Clock. Once it's connected to your WiFi they'll simply begin to... apparate.
The device's firmware is easily available via their website - the Mac Installer contains a pair of 9MB binaries (in addition to 200MB of Electron), which seems to just be an unencrypted ESP32 blob. Running `strings` on the blob gives plenty of human-readable stuff (including entire html pages), but nothing resembling quotes. Maybe they are compressed in some way?
Assuming 140 characters per quote, the entire 13000-entry quote database should fit uncompressed in about 2MB, so who knows.
https://github.com/JohannesNE/literature-clock/blob/master/l...
One would have to make a full audit to be entirely sure that no more recent literature has crept in.
Retail price will be about 5x BoM cost, or about 3x overall cost of goods, though of course it can vary wildly depending on volume and market.
HP famously aimed for a markup of pi (3.14x cost, ie gross margin > 60%), or e (2.71..) if they wanted to be especially competitive.
A Kindle is ~$80, and the Paperwhite without ads is $180.
A cheap Android tablet is ~$70 without an eInk display.
Just a 4 or 5 inch eInk display would cost me ~$70 or so.
This is a finished product, in a gorgeous timber case (if you like that sort of thing) with a beautiful knurled knob. And a bunch of custom written software and a collected database of quotes.
I reckon it'd sell - at least to the right crowd - at 4-5 times that price.
Those of use who are capable of making their own probably wouldn't buy one anyway - but as a high end gift or executive toy, I could see them selling these at $700 or $800.
(And yeah, I'm considering grabbing a 2nd hand Kindle and firing up my CNC mill or laser cutter to make a case for it, but people like me are very much in the 0.1% or 0.01% of all the people who'd like to own one of these.)
Not that it isn't expensive for what it does. Just that it probably isn't cheap to make.
I’m at a loss as to why they’d hard-code an IP address instead of pulling a DHCP lease. I suppose they chose that subnet with the thought that it isn’t in use for most people, but it would in fact collide with a VLAN on my network.