hacks

E-ink and TOTP++

E-ink (or E-paper) displays are so cool! I love them! I got one recently, and decided to use it for my TOTP project, instead of the very basic OLED that I’d put. While at it, and since this was a bigger display — I decided to fill-up the rest of the space with something. The post-Covid reopening of my office paved the way for that something!

Since this was my first week (first few days, to be precise) at work, and since they have a new location now — I was apprehensive about the travel time (both to and fro). And, it so happens that TomTom offers pretty useful Traffic APIs — not just for routing, but for real-time traffic updates as well!

E-ink display showing TOTP & Travel times

So, I decided to give it a go, and after a little bit of dabbling to find the geo-coordinates (lat,lon) of my usual route — managed to arrive at the right set of params for the API call!

Once this was in place, I used the rest of the space on the display to show the O2H and H2O travel times.

…and here’s ze ~~video~~ proof!

Video showing E-ink with display updates

Making TOTP fun (ok, less boring!)

So TOTPs are irksome in that one needs to pull out the phone, open the app, and then enter the code at the prompt. Now, the naysayers may say: “ah, well, you could install a command-line utility, or use an online one”, to which I’d say: “Suit yourself!”. For me, it would still require me to have to type or execute or, as I was doing, open something like Google Authenticator on the phone!

Guess what, the humble Pi comes to the rescue here as well!

RPi resurrection – Pt. I – Pi-hole

Couple months ago, got to know about the Pi-hole project. It’s an ad-block server that can you can configure at the network level. That is, it can be configured as the DNS in your home router.

Of course, the benefit of network-wide ad-blocking is that it does its job in all of your home devices. If however, your router does not allow configuring a DNS — then you’d have to configure the DNS on a per-device level. While it may sound painful, but trust me, it’s worth it!

Streaming (only) audio using an old AppleTV (and a few nuances, thereof)

Oh, the ever-unsettled human!

In this age of wireless everything, I chose to stay ‘wired’ for a long time, especially when it came to music. Reason: although I don’t (can’t) claim to be an audiophile, I do appreciate hi-fidelity (hi-fi) music. Hi-fi audio is soothing even at high amplitudes, and I think good tracks deserve a listening, and not just a hearing! In other words, I am not a .mp3 guy, but more of a .wav (or .flac, if you please) person. Uncompressed/lossless audio rules!

My audio rig is a simple (non-wireless) amp and a pair of monitors, and it pretty much serves my purpose.

Continue reading Streaming (only) audio using an old AppleTV (and a few nuances, thereof)

Tying snips.ai, Strava & Google Speech Engine

So, this happened a couple months ago, and I had lots of fun doing it (watch the video):

A detailed post would follow. (And yes, as mentioned in the video description, kindly ignore the choice of LED colours :)).