
Make a “Literary Clock” from a Jailbroken Kindle - codesections
https://www.instructables.com/id/Literary-Clock-Made-From-E-reader/
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beardyw
"The Clock" is a 24 hour hour long movie made by Christian Marclay which
contains thousands of film clips each with a clock somewhere in them, so that
the whole thing keeps the right time. Whilst scanning for the time in text may
be tricky, the work involved in finding those clips is unimaginable. Sadly
copies are only held by few museums.

~~~
kuroguro
I heard there were attempts to stitch together a remake with all the same
scenes by some torrent site users. Not sure how far they got or if they ever
finished.

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yoz-y
At some point, in order to finish the movie you can just release a few films
just so you have a clock scene in them.

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johannes_ne
I actually adapted Jaaps work to a web version of the clock yesterday.

[http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock](http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-
clock)

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tzs
This would probably be more work than it is worth, but it would be neat to
have an option to take into account time differences between the location in
the quoted story and the user's location.

For example, this quote is used for 8:19:

> I had arranged to meet the Occupational Health Officer at 10:30. I took the
> train from Watford Junction at 8.19 and arrived at London Euston seven
> minutes late, at 8.49.|The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|Jonathan Coe

If the location aware option were enabled, it would give that to me at 1:19,
not 8:19, because I'm in PDT (UTC-0700).

(Well, 1:19 if London is not also on daylight savings time. If they are, then
I'd get it at 0:19. This is one of the reasons it is probably more work than
it is worth. You'd not only have to have the location information for the
quotes, you'd also have to deal with the rules for daylight savings time in
multiple locations. This would be a pain in the ass).

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pxndx
Why would you do that? you want to see the quote for 8:19 at your 8:19 local
time, otherwise it's not a very good clock.

~~~
tzs
I think it is meant to be an _interesting_ clock, not a _good_ clock in the
timekeeping sense. There are many times that do not have an associated quote,
so the time it shows if often off by several minutes.

If you just need a good clock, [https://time.is/](https://time.is/) is hard to
beat.

I think it would be interesting to, say, look at the clock just before 5 PM,
as I'm getting ready to knock off work and find something fun to do, to be
told that it is five minutes to midnight at Hogwarts and Dumbledore is
advising Hermione that three turns should do it.

~~~
gpvos
I think it still wants to be a _useful_ clock, i.e., you want to be able to
see at a glance how late it is where you are now. That's actually why the
current time is highlighted.

Although your idea also has some merit.

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disposedtrolley
This is awesome! I dug up my old 2nd gen Kindle in the hopes of following
along, and sadly the battery is busted :(

Instead, I'm currently in the process of making a macOS screen saver to
replicate this!

I'm blogging my updates at [http://jamesliu.io/posts/macos-
screensaver/](http://jamesliu.io/posts/macos-screensaver/)

GitHub repo: [https://github.com/disposedtrolley/literary-
screensaver](https://github.com/disposedtrolley/literary-screensaver)

~~~
iforgotpassword
If you're lucky it will still run with USB power attached. Depending on
where/how you want to set it up that should be an option.

I did the same with mine. When I found it again it was dead, but I left it
laying on my desk with the USB cord attached (accidentally). When I dug it up
again a couple days later it was up and running. It will shut down almost
immediately when I unplug it.

It's displaying a rotation of various webcomics now.

~~~
disposedtrolley
Hmm I might have to give that a shot. Thanks!

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moonka
That's awesome! Up until now the only reason I have jailbroken every kindle
I've owned is to have the screensaver be the book I'm reading rather than the
dull preset ones. Finally I've found reason 2!

~~~
pard68
Had not even thought of that. I rooted mine so I can remotely drop books into
it without having to go get it and plug it into my computers. Also, the
ability to read epub files is really nice.

~~~
spaceandshit
You can email files to your kindle directly; although I just recently started
using a kindle so I'm not sure if that's a new feature.

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Arkaad
But there's a caveat: you lose the book cover in the process. I think Amazon
does that intentionally.

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got2surf
This is awesome. It would be cool to adapt the same idea to images which
contain numbers (house numbers, highway exit signs, etc) like "1245" to
represent 12:45. Since you've identified the number in the image, you could
even blur the background slightly and add contrast between the image portion
and background (since the numbers may only be a small part of the image).

Not very efficient, but a cool way of combining screensavers and clocks. Not
sure how many "aesthetic" screensaver-quality images contain numbers though

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Animats
E-readers are so cheap now that makes sense.

Years ago I built a little clock that displays "It's a little after 2".
Ardunio-class CPU with a 2x24 character display. Looks dated now.

I'd like to build an e-ink unit that will run for a year on a battery.

~~~
userbinator
Kindle-sized e-ink displays themselves are quite cheap and can be driven from
a microcontroller:

[https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-
calendar](https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar)

...to do things that the huge expensive modules with builtin controllers
can't, like more intensity levels:

[https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-
calendar/...](https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-
calendar/log/72153-can-you-get-32-level-grayscale-out-of-an-e-ink-display)

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joosters
Slightly related: A twitter bot telling the time using photos of Flavor Flav -
[https://twitter.com/flavorflavtime](https://twitter.com/flavorflavtime)

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tejasmanohar
A colleague of mine made a photo frame out of his Kindle,
[https://twitter.com/f2prateek/status/1003019245125451776](https://twitter.com/f2prateek/status/1003019245125451776)

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WalterBright
A friend of mine in college decided to make an LED clock for an EE project.
Everyone else who decides to make an LED clock strives for accurate time. My
friend decided that nobody needs time closer than quarter hour intervals. So
that's all it displayed - it was highly accurate to within 15 minutes.

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albertgoeswoof
This is brilliant. If you panckaged this up as a product you could sell a
tonne of pre orders on Kickstarter

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roryisok
Literally just saw this on the verge, nice project. Sadly I don't have an old
kindle. I do have an old nook but I don't know if its possible to do the same
with that

~~~
fouc
Nook is linux-based too IIRC. Should be possible to adapt the author's
approach to the nook. You'd just need to root it using nook specific
instructions.

~~~
roryisok
Interesting! I might try that

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haberdasher
Very cool. Don't have a broken Kindle, so I decided to make a Chrome new tab
extension to display these!

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/literary-
clock/dka...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/literary-
clock/dkakoclgfplinfknmloejhabadnchdem)

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Quequau
I was expecting something more closely resembling a clock.

I suppose these days a clock doesn't necessarily resemble a grandfather clock
and I get that most clock don't have arms any more but still...

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Roritharr
That's cool! I was looking into doing a project that turned old Kindles into
Meeting Room Booking Signage. Did anyone stumble upon previous work in that
direction?

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hmottestad
I made this: [http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-
reader/](http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/)

It's not a kindle, but a Sony PRS-T1.

What I did was simple: Jailbreak it so I could get to the Android dev menu and
disable sleep. Make a webpage with javascript that pulls in an image from
yr.no (for weather) and gets xml from ruter.no (for subway times). Then just
use the built in web browser and put it all in a frame to cover all the ugly
parts and also covers the android status bar up top.

PS: If you just want a working meeting room booking system. We have these on
the wall by every meeting room at work: [https://www.evoko.se/products/evoko-
room-manager/](https://www.evoko.se/products/evoko-room-manager/)

~~~
Roritharr
Cool, I will look into this.

The pre-built systems all cater to larger orgs that have no qualms at spending
thousands on this nice to have feature.

If I can't hack it for fun in a day on spare hw it's not worth it to me.

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sytelus
This is so cool! Just one ask: If you have gone through all these trouble,
just make a GitHub repo to store your files so people can fork, contribute
etc.

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chedabob
I've been building something similar with a Nook Simple Touch. They run
Android 2.1, and you jailbreak them in a similar way.

~~~
ElCapitanMarkla
Nice keep us updated, I've got one with a dodgy battery which is dying to be
used for a project like this.

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HippoBaro
This is such a great, inventive idea. Would definitely like to have something
akin to that as a screensaver, for example.

~~~
techload
You can show the page [http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-
clock](http://jenevoldsen.com/literature-clock) as a screensaver. Search for
"show web page as screensaver".

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chx
I wonder whether someone made a boarding pass display out of these. Zoom will
be tricky, I guess.

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ginnungagap
Is there a way to do something similar for a phone's lock screen background?

Or maybe even for a laptop

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raister
It is amazing that you throw away working and functional Kindles around when
other parts of the world having one of those is extremelly expensive. Kudos
for "America", where everything (I mean everything) is disposable.

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eeeeeeeeeeeee
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing.

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vnglst
Oh so cool this!!

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mantenpanther
I cant‘t open this page in a sane way, because I‘m from the EU.

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KineticLensman
Reading it now, from the EU. I had to scroll to the bottom of an opt-out pop-
up and click okay, which wasn't too onerous.

