idk, ever since they killed custom hardware, Helium smells more and more like a pyramid scheme. The hardware needed is worth around 50$ but you don't actually get paid unless you buy hardware from an approved list of sellers where it costs upwards of 500$.
When I found this as a ~15 year old I had farmer parents who were pushing me away from computer based careers because they didn’t want me to “waste my life in front of a box”. I had done some C++ coding small adventure games but programming then still felt really cold and academic.
When I found Why’s book, I loved it. I thought it was funny, dark and moving. It wasn’t about programming, Ruby was a sidecar to this person expressing themself in an incredibly vibrant way. I felt like: wow, there are people like me in programming, too!
Now I run a 30 person product shop in NYC. I may have never learnt to code if not for Why.
I wanted to share a product that our team (https://www.sanctuary.computer) built, and has been using for the past 18 months or so. It's an implementation of pre-rendering that comes integrated tightly with a global CDN layer to ensure that your users receive rendered pages, lightning fast, regardless of where in the world they are.
We built this out of frustration with existing solutions for SSR. Nuxt, Next.js & Gatsby have become heavy handed over the years, making it really hard to change platforms, and usually come with a vendor lockin - you end up integrating your framework so tightly with the hosting provider that you're stuck!
Spirit Fish has no opinions about where you host your assets, and what tools you use. Instead, it sits between your raw assets and DNS, runs your site in serverless Chrome, and applies a bunch of optimizations and routing normalizations against the rendered result to produce optimized content every time. It takes minutes to setup, doesn't require code changes, and usually doubles your Google Lighthouse score in the process.
Thanks everyone! Please let us know what you think!
Great idea! Does this do any caching of the pages, or does it fetch it on every time there is a request?
I think Next.js do something similar where the incrementally refresh the pages, but keep a version cached on the edge for better speed which seems like another great addition.
I would say ask me anything but I’m in the middle of the Australian outback with virtually no mobile signal...!
What I can say is that working with Eink is rudimentary - we had to build everything from a custom kernel driver all the way up to the view layouts and UX. We expected Eink would give us sophisticated SDKs, but unfortunately a lot of wheels had to be reinvented. I have huge respect for the team behind the Yota Phone!
I’ve written a tear down of how it all works that I’ll be sharing soon on our company twitter if anyone is interested.
I like the premise of E-Ink as smartphone display for anyone who uses the smartphone display for text, light static graphics consumption. I'm seeing more manufacturers trying to bring cheaper E-Ink smartphones to the market[1][2].
I understand the philosophy of Light Phone and thereby it not having Internet browser; but, HN on Kindle Oasis has always been a pleasant experience to me if the linked article website uses standard web development practices(cough TechCrunch).
Thank you! And yes - including a browser was a big debate, but ultimately we wanted to ensure minimalism and restraint was enforced on the software level.
A browser means instagram, facebook and email are all readily accessible. A lot of users like our device because it’s impossible to get to those platforms...
That said - grids of instagram selfies rendered to a 2.84” Eink screen would surely be an interesting art experiment, ha!
It is a wise SW development decision, I see the browser development on Alt-SmartPhone OS like Ubuntu Touch being its Achilles heel; by removing Internet browser you've created more value for your target audience and saved yourself from the perils of browser development!
The screen helps a lot, but because the device runs full Android (we have a complete Wifi and Bluetooth stack) there’s only so much we can optimize.
In very passive use (using airplane mode liberally), it can last 7+ days but realistically most users will see it last between 3 - 7.
Some more work can go into antenna tuning, however. We support two different markets (North America and Global) which have different bands. In areas with poor mobile service, devices usually spend a lot of battery power searching for signal. We’re hoping to improve on that in a future FOTA update!
Yup, exactly. I would have liked to use something like KaiOS, but we had a short deadline and that would have meant porting/rewriting a bunch of Qualcomm drivers for the snapdragon on KaiOS.
We also couldn’t preempt the new features we’d like to add (directions, find my phone, etc), so full android felt like a safer option all things considered.
Given it's running Android underneath, does Android Auto work with it when connected to a compatible car head unit? Having no Android Auto nav and phone integration is one reason I wouldn't pick a device like this.
