It sounds like there’s a lot more edge case complexity to this than the GP originally thought.
Like most DIY tinkerer solutions, unfortunately, which is why people like paying money for productised solutions - the time it takes to debug and troubleshoot home made solutions is often prohibitive for a lot of people who aren’t techheads.
This is both fair and obvious... but at the same time, the nits folk are bringing up are not fleshed out.
"I had to reboot my raspberry pi"
and
"whoops rando eInk display doesn't do javascript"
are both super weird and frankly unfair to consider as criticisms of the original solution.
... In short - if our parish priest above sees the original post, I'd suggest he give it a go. It's an hour to set up and won't cost him or his parish anything (aside from buying the eink display ofc).
If it turns out that the DIY solution is insufficient, or his parish is wealthy enough to spend money on a thing like this, great, then upgrade to that.
Kobo readers are fairly non-rando, they're the second most popular eInk readers after the Kindle I think. I agree that lack of Javascript support is not a blocking issue on the use case though (although it does make it a little more annoying).
Would an old rooted Nook Simple Touch suffice for your use case? They're very cheap these days and you've direct access to some early version of Android on them
- Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.
- After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to communicate with them.
I love every part of this. Not having things in writing is one of the most common tactics with bad contractors. And I miss their call backs because I have unknowns goto spam, so I have to remember to disable that feature...
Ha! Okay, I like this, I think it changes my mind on the whole thing being viable. There's probably some reason it wouldn't work in reality but the satisfaction from pressing the charge $1 option on spam would be huge.
I disagree about the we-adda-baby-itsa-boy issue. I don't see how that'd apply given that you can charge them $1 from the very first message.
Something related to this that I've been thinking about. We all have kind of a story of ourselves and our life through various memories that make a picture of who we are. But if you ever meet up with someone you haven't seen for 20 years, or find some old documents, or whatever, stuff can easily come up that you've completely forgotten, or reframe things in a whole different light.
We know this kind of thing happens with history - certain people become famous while others drift into obscurity, things get remembered incorrectly etc - but it also happens with your own memory of your own life. The only real way around it is keeping a journal.
It'd be so easy to do a version of the "infamous Dropbox comment" on this ("you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a MIDI cable, an audio interface, and a raspberry PI...") but of course what you have is exactly a sort of Dropbox Of MIDI here where it Just Works™ and backs up all your music automatically with no hassle.
Reminds me of in 2004-2005, I had my typical Hotmail account with 4MB storage, but Microsoft was rolling out a free upgrade for everyone to 250MB. For some reason they were taking an incredibly long time with my account, and I emailed support several times over a year or two about it. Each time they assured me that Microsoft was upgrading accounts as fast as they could, but it was just such a big job that it took years.
Eventually I read on a forum somewhere[1] that you could partly trick the system by temporarily closing your account and re-opening it, which got you a slightly larger 25MB. But still not the promised 250.
All this 2-4MB for existing accounts, 25MB for new accounts, and years-long rollout to 250MB gave the impression that finding spare storage was a huge struggle for Microsoft. Then a few months later they were having to compete with Gmail and they decided that everyone should get 2GB, which was rolled out to every Hotmail account including mine all at once! I can only assume aliens landed and delivered a UFO full of hard drives.
(sorry to be That Person, but I'm really hoping Hacker News doesn't eventually become like Reddit where the comments are almost completely divorced from the content of the article).
It sometimes happens, but I'd say it's for the best. Often the greatest value (sometimes the only value) a submitted link has is as a discussion prompt.
Agreed 100%. Additional factors on top of all those is some countries start year 1 at age five, and others at age 6, and of course there's a variety of actual ages within a grade as well.
"Wait Until 9th" would have definitely helped a lot. "Wait until 14" might be even clearer. Or even "wait until high school".
I mean as a non American, I think this is one of the most American sites I've seen all week, and do not get the impression that they will particularly mind if it's ambiguous for other people in other countries
That's a nice little aphorism. I think this happens in a lot of things in life. Like comments on Reddit always seem quite insightful until you actually read the article they're commenting on.
