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If you’re in a low coverage area for the Helium network, I’ve heard you can make decent money setting up a miner: https://www.helium.com/

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.

Hi everyone!

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!

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!

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.

Yup, we generally prefer to underpromise on battery life.

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!

My team built the OS on a custom fork of Android (https://www.sanctuary.computer).

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.

(not sent from a light phone)

righto pied piper

i had to use it once to after this to get a big repository of fonts. aside from that, fuck dropbox