On E-paper displays - 14 January 2017
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So I read a phlog by Tomasino[0] recently where he is talking about
kindles and running terminal applications on kindles.
I would love to have a *nix console running on an epaper display (like a
kindle), it seems like a perfect match to me. Now I don't think that the
technology is quite there yet to make the terminal a pleasant
experience, as the refresh rates are really slow, but currently it is
doable, and some people have got debian to run on their kindles. There
are even e-paper displays that can display three colors: red, white, and
black; This would work well for a terminal, you could for example print
everything for standard error in red.
It would be really cool if a company would realease an e-paper laptop.
Geeks like me could run all the terminal apps we wanted, and the battery
life could be days or weeks instead of the few hours that most laptops
afford us. There is a company that is working on such a device, the boox
typewriter, but their device is just an android tablet with a keyboard
that attaches at the bottom. This is a bit dissapointing to me; Having
it preloaded with android is going to make it harder to stick a *nix iso
on the device and the IO is probably gonna suck, as it's built as a
tablet and going to have just a headphone jack and a microusb port.
What I want is a traditional laptop with an e-paper display, but sadly I
don't such a device is ever going to hit the market.
I also wish companies would make their e-readers a little more hackable.
The extra functionality wouldn't have to be exposed to the average
consumer, it could be accessed for example by plugging the e-reader into
a computer and editing a config file. It would be great if you could buy
an e-reader and out of the box use it as a monitor, run a terminal on
it, or even load your own applications on it. I wish I could do this
with my kindle paperwhite, there is alot of software descisions that I
wish I could change, like making it so that text files displayed in
monospace and had word wrapping, or if you could view webpages in a
paginated fashion instead of having to scroll through them (Scrolling
should never happen on e-paper in my opinion).
I like e-paper alot -- it has much potential but is mainly only used for
ebooks, which is a little dissapointing.
REFRENCES
[0]
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20180113-kindles
