commit e2abb9069da2cd2e9cc1d2530e141033fe22e6d8
parent 72d41d3a279974058ec47e6ef09ed132e98a3975
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2024 14:53:07 -0800
Add Roll Call project
Diffstat:
4 files changed, 122 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/projects/roll-call/index.md b/content/projects/roll-call/index.md
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+title = "Roll Call"
+description = "An experiment in replacing the phone in your morning routine"
+date = 2024-12-17T14:52:00-08:00
++++
+
+Roll Call is a jury-rigged receipt printer that sits on my desk and
+dictates my morning routine. Every morning, it prints out a briefing
+of all the critical information I need to catapult me into the day that
+awaits. Phones are great—but I don't like checking mine when I wake up.
+I want my brain fresh and undistracted.
+
+
+
+I first ideated what would become Roll Call on a post-it note on the
+wall of my dorm. When the final project of [DESIGN11] rolled around and
+they asked us to "fix a bug in our lives," I knew I had to take
+advantage of the opportunity.
+
+After a flurry of on-paper ideation, I began with the software. It's all
+open-source: the bulk is [a couple hundred lines] of bespoke Python,
+supported by an iMessage library [I customized] to allow me to determine
+if a message was unread. I call out to a few [startlingly] [good]
+libraries to fetch the data that will go on the receipt: the day of the
+week, the weather, my Oura Ring stats from the night before, unread
+iMessages, my todo list, and my calendar events for the day. When that
+was done, I called every single possible retailer in the Bay Area who
+might sell me a receipt printer—no dice. I even asked a couple
+restaurants that I was eating at if I could pawn theirs, which was
+similarly unsuccessful. So I ordered one on Amazon (guided in my
+purchase by [this blog post]), married it to my code, and have been
+using it every morning since.
+
+
+
+Roll Call is one experiment in my long crusade to replace the phone. Our
+current era of mobile computing has brought benefits that are difficult
+to fully comprehend. But they have come along with deep ills. The
+combination of hardware and software in Roll Call has allowed me to
+entirely eliminate my phone from this component of my daily routine. In
+this slice of my life, I experience all the benefits of technology with
+none of its downsides. However, this only works because I can still rely
+on my phone during the rest of the day. I can replace my phone with a
+receipt in the morning and feel better because of it, but later in the
+day I still need to fall back to the harsh light of the screen to
+respond to message, mark todos as complete, and more.
+
+What the Roll Call experiment allows us to do is free our minds to
+imagine what removing the phone might look like from the rest of the
+day. This part? It's already taken care of. We've solved for this use
+case, one that is normally solved with our phones. How can we solve for
+the rest? We have an alternative way to read data, how can we rethink
+writing? How do we redesign the rest of our phone-based experiences to
+avoid falling into Instagram and a hundred other things that melt away
+all the presence and the possiblity of our beautiful lives? This part of
+the pressure is gone, now let's deal with the rest.
+
+<details>
+ <summary>
+ <i>A theoretical, optional pitch that loses people but I think is
+ conceptually neat and cool</i>
+ </summary>
+ Roll Call is paper, with a digital brain. Every morning I look at a
+ slip of paper—for all intents and purposes the same piece of
+ paper—and instead of remaining static it autonomosly reflects the
+ changing state of the world around me. The state of the world exists
+ in a Platonic ideal somewhere in conceptspace. Nowadays we represent
+ all that information about our lives, that typically is just held in
+ our heads, in various databases. That information is displayed back
+ to us in our calendar apps, and todo lists, and all the rest. Those
+ apps transform the database's zeroes and ones, which are themselves
+ representations of ideas, into a form that we view on our phones all
+ the time. Roll Call's receipts are equally valid transformations of
+ those zeroes and ones.
+</details>
+
+
+
+The current implementation of Roll Call does have some gaps, which I
+would love to address in hypothetical future versions. The most
+prominent is its deep reliance on macOS: it reads iMessage's `chat.db`
+directly from disk and searches `Contacts.app` to associate phone
+numbers with names. Beyond that, Roll Call also doesn't trigger
+automatically. Instead, I manually run the script on my laptop, which is
+significantly less sexy. The device itself is pretty large and bulky,
+and relies on some gross cabling (USB A, B, *and* C). It doesn't print
+out my gym day. Some imagined diagnoses:
+
+1. A Matrix-iMessage bridge, a-la Beeper, would make developing for the
+ messaging platform less hellish. I could also skip the middleman and
+ set up a direct API call from a Raspberry Pi to a macOS host in the
+ cloud.
+2. Developing a good CardDAV library in Python, which I shockingly
+ couldn't find, seems like a simple replacement for the `Contacts.app`
+ AppleScript-in-Python monstrosity I cooked up.
+3. Ideally, the script would run as soon as I wake up. I wear an Oura
+ Ring every night; it would be super cool to connect the printer to a
+ webhook that gets called when the ring detects that I'm awake. That
+ endpoint doesn't exist at the moment, and probably would be very
+ difficult to create given Oura's current periodic-sync-over-Bluetooth
+ technology. I'll keep my eye out though!
+4. Barring the above, I would love to hook up the whole thing to a smart
+ button (no screen!) that I can just smack and have the whole thing
+ print.
+5. Making the code asynchronous where it makes sense. Initially, I had
+ the script fetch the data and then print it all out really fast. Then
+ I introduced some styling that I had to weave throughout and couldn't
+ do before printing: I miss the smooth all-at-once feeling. I think
+ some smart code jockey-ing could bring this back.
+6. Put the gym day in my calendar?
+
+As a last component of my time in DESIGN11, we made little
+advertisements. You can check out mine [here on YouTube]! Remind me
+never to film when I have a stuffy nose ever again.
+
+[DESIGN11]: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?q=DESIGN11
+[a couple hundred lines]: https://git.sr.ht/~figbert/morning-receipt
+[I customized]: https://github.com/figbert/imessage_reader
+[startlingly]: https://github.com/hedgertronic/oura-ring
+[good]: https://github.com/thingsapi/things.py
+[this blog post]: https://aschmelyun.com/blog/i-built-a-receipt-printer-for-github-issues/
+[here on YouTube]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNGusG71qD8
diff --git a/content/projects/roll-call/notebook.png b/content/projects/roll-call/notebook.png
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diff --git a/content/projects/roll-call/poster.png b/content/projects/roll-call/poster.png
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diff --git a/content/projects/roll-call/receipt.jpg b/content/projects/roll-call/receipt.jpg
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