Random Thoughts

The Making of a Kitchen Clock: A Photo Essay

I used to have a all-in-one computer on this kitchen bench, because I thought it would be useful to use to look up recipes and stuff. But I never used it, so half a year ago I downsized to the two boxes you see above. The one to the right has an Emacs-based music player, which is all I thought I needed.

But I forgot how useful it was to have the time and date in the kitchen: The time to say how long to cook things, and the date to throw away spoiled goods.

I could be sensible and just buy a clock, or I could cobble together a mess of Raspberry Pis, Emacsen and lots of wifi, so of course I bought a Pi Zero 2 W and a round screen and started hacking.

But what should the clock look like?

I’m kinda averse to using colours for designs, but it’s a shame to THROW AWAY ALL THOSE MILLIONS OF COLOURS and just go for black and white, eh?

But you gotta admit that simple looks better.

Oh, yeah, the date…

Eh… Oh yeah, I also wanted it to display the outdoors temperature (I’ve got a Weathergoose hanging out the window).

Eh? Eh?

Eh?

Oh well, I don’t know. In any case, there’ll be virtually no code running on the Pi, because it’s just 512MB and I’m using Emacs to generate SVGs to make the clocks. So it’s generating these on a server and pushing them to the Pi ahead of time via ssh (i.e., it’s generating the next minute), and then once a minute, the Pi changes the display. (It doesn’t display the seconds, you see.)

Anyway, this means that I can tweak the look endlessly on the server, which I, er, probably will do.

I got this stupid case for the Pi… so many tiny parts.

After procrastinating for half a year, I’m now actually going to build the clock today!

The connectors on the clock are side mounted…

… but there’s all these adapters.

So… like this? But are there any Pis that have connectors in that configuration? I mean, it’s a full size HDMI and a USB A, side by side, and I can’t recall any that looked like that? I’m probably misremembering.

In any case, this doesn’t fit the Pi Zero at all, so I guess I’ll have to do, er, something… It would have been more useful if the adapters didn’t change the gender of the ports, but I guess that’s DIE for you.

It’s alive!

Oh, yeah, I need a keyboard while futzing around initially (before I get ssh up), so I need a third connector, and the Zero only has two, so it’s hubbin’ time.

See! LOOK HOW EASY.

I wondered how a round HDMI screen would work, but it (of course) just reports itself as a 720×720 screen, and then throws away all the pixels that are outside the circular screen.

Which makes things, er, fun to work with, but I just need to get wifi and ssh up and running, and then I can do everything remotely.

Tada!

But what’s that banding? Er…

This is what it looks like on my laptop screen.

dmesg says:

simple-framebuffer 1e876000.framebuffer: format=a8r8g8b8, mode=1280x720x32, linelength=5120

But fbset says:

fbset
mode “720×720”
geometry 720 720 720 720 16
timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
rgba 5/11,6/5,5/0,0/0
endmode

So the framebuffer is only 16 bits!? Whut?

The banding effect is kinda cool, but I wanted to figure out how to get 24/32 bit colour depth, and I failed.

I spent several hours googling, trying things, and rebooting: The decidedly most time consuming part of this project, and I still failed. Yes, I’ve tried all the video=HDMI-A-1:720x720M-32@60D kernel parameters and /boot/firmware/config.txt variations I can google myself to, but I failed.

So here’s my data: I’m using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, running Raspbian 12 (bookworm), and I’m using the standard framebuffer to display things, and I’m only getting 16 bits. Do you know how to fix this? (Only answer if you’ve fixed this yourself, not if you’ve googled an answer that doesn’t include all those three things.)

To display the image on the frambuffer, I first tried using fbi. It works, but it’s fiddly: It needs to run continuously — you can’t just call it to set the framebuffer (because then it’ll blink, for some reason or other), and it caches images, but only three of them. So you need to point it to three images, and then tell it to update every second, and then switch out the three images, and eh.

But I’d totally forgotten how simple frambuffers are: You just need to squirt RGB values to /dev/fb0, and that what appears on screen!

Er uhm. Oh yeah, it’s 16 bits, with 5 bits for blue, 6 for green and 5 for red… er..

convert ~/clock.png -type truecolor +flip -strip -define bmp:subtype=RGB565 bmp:- | tail -c $(( 720 * 720 * 16 / 8 )) > /dev/fb0

ImageMagick to the rescue! So I just convert the png to bmp and then chop off the header, and the squirt it to the device. High tech.

Anyway, back to the building the clock: I think I have to use the connectors, because just using normal side-mounted plugs will get in the way of the walls of the box.

Look what I found in a drawer! That looks promising… and now for the power?

Yeah, this isn’t going to work…

But yes! The snakey thing fits!

One last test… OH NO I”VE GOT AN OFF BY ONE ERROR IN THE MONTH no I didn’t. It’s not showing the months, but instead the day of the week — in French. Oh la la, trés a la mode.

OK, it’s cutting time. But not this box.

This box.

See?

So it’s 80mm in width (the bits that need to go into the box).

I bought a Dremel set to do the cutting this time, but er I forgot to read the instruction manual, and I don’t wanna do that now, so let’s just use a drill and a jigsaw.

Drill baby.

OOPS! I totally didn’t notice that the blade on this new battery jigsaw is super duper coarse. It says “Fast Wood” — it rips the box to shreds. And I seem to not have bought any appropriate blades for this jigsaw…

Fortunately, I still have my old mains powered jigsaw.

Behold! The difference!

Cut cut cut…

Done! You’ve never seen such even and straight cuts ever!

And I adhered to that age old saying “measure once, cut twice”. I don’t know why it’s better to cut twice, but who am I to argue against passed-down wisdom like that.

(What I’m saying is that the width was actually 83mm, not 80mm.)

So dirty!

Yes, everything fits! Actually, I could probably have used the side-mounted plugs — I forgot how thin the walls of this box is.

Pluggeti-plug… Nice and snug.

Yeah, this also goes into the box — power to various other things here, and USB power for the Pi.

IT WORKS!!!

See? So much better than just buying a clock.

[Edit five minutes later:]

Oops. It lost its wifi… *sigh* Do I need to put an access point nearby or something? Came back on reboot, but how annoying.

Book Club 2025: The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I discovered that they’d published a complete, illustrated version of the Earthsea cycle a couple weeks ago. I’m not overly fond of omnibus editions, but this is illustrated by Charles Vess, and I love his artwork, so I thought that this might be a good time to re-read these books.

Because of course I’ve read these books before. I read the first one (in translation) when I was about 10-11 years old, and it had the cover above. I had that book, so I read it several times, but the other two of the first trilogy I borrowed from the library, so I probably just read them once?

(Man, that’s a weird cover. Le Guin complains about horrible covers, but she doesn’t mention this one.)

This book is massive. It’s just almost 1K pages, but they’re big pages. Looking at the original editions, it looks like the six books altogether were 1,400 pages, and this one also includes some other short stories and stuff, so there’s some heft to this book.

Vess does illustrations of key scenes, as well as title plates…

… and one colour piece per book.

Charles Vess has done some extremely stylish comics, and those are mostly pen and ink. This is just pencil, and of course it’s good looking, but I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed.

I was also going to quibble about how he depicts some things, like the dragons, but the artwork was done over four years, and in collaboration with Le Guin. I guess if she say’s that that’s correct, I can’t really argue. Darn!

Now, as for the text itself… I mean, just reading it, I don’t think this format is ideal? I guess they had to limit themselves to under 1K pages or something, so they had to step down the font size slightly. I mean, it’s not uncomfortable, but it’s just a smidgen too small. And since the pages are so big, they felt the need to increase the line height, so that your eyes can snap back to the left side of the page without losing place.

I just thing the look of these pages isn’t ideal. But it does give you the feeling you’re reading some old huge grimoire, which is probably what they were going for, and that’s fun.

But since it’s uncomfortable to hold, and also slightly uncomfortable to read, I just read the old editions I had. D’oh! But I did look at the illustrations, too.

(And I couldn’t find The Other Wind, so I read that from this new collection, along with the afterwords and the extra included short stories and stuff.)

So how is it? Presumably, you’ve all read these books — or at least the first three.

I had forgotten how oldee tymey the first book is. It’s written in a style halfway between fairy tales and modern “classic” fantasy. That is, people are introduced like “and then he met Grumbledork, who would go on to sail to Vinklebump and vanquish Zomplefart, the dragon, but that’s a story for another day”, etc etc. As someone who hates fairy tales… I really enjoyed it. As much as I did when I was 11.

I think the second book, The Tombs of Atuan is generally considered to be the best? It’s written in a very different way, and it is indeed very good. But I think of the first three books, I prefer the third, The Farthest Shore. It’s like a remake of the first book (a road movie, but at sea), but the encounters are more memorable and vivid — like the people who live at sea all their lives, in the floating cities, and so on. And it has the most moving end.

Then 30 years passed, and the fourth book came, Tehanu. If you were 11 years old in 1991, and read the four books in quick succession, you’d get whiplash when you got to the fourth one: It starts with a five year old girl who was raped and then put into a campfire to burn to death. (And that’s just the first page.) But if you grew up with the first three books, and then got to the fourth as an adult (as I did), then it seemed quite natural: It’s a brutal, angry book, and it’s fantastic.

Ten more years passed, and we got a short story collection — but times have moved on, and “short” isn’t the same as in the olden days. The first story in the collection is about two thirds the length of the first novel. All the stories are solid, and we retrench a lot from the harshness of Tehanu. Le Guin says she wrote the stories to figure out herself how to finish off the series with the fifth novel, and to explore things about Earthsea. Now, nothing strikes more fear into a reader’s heart than an author who wants to “explore things” in their universe: You’re likely to get a story filling you in on the “lore” of the second lieutenant mentioned in half of a sentence in book two, and nothing in the short story must affect the “proper” novels whatsoever. But of course, Le Guin does nothing of the kind: She writes interesting stories that fill in the milieu and enriches your love for the world, and not trite info dumps or backstory you’ve never asked for.

And finally, the sixth and final book came hot on the heels of the fifth, and it’s a novel that manages to be a wonderful ending to the entire series. I had totally forgotten that. It echoes the first and third books storytelling wise, and concludes the storylines started in the fourth book, while starring (sort of) Tenar from the second book. Some people when they finish a series like this seem to have a checklist of points they go through and make everything neat — Le Guin is way too smart to do something like that, but it’s a really solid ending to the cycle.

(Except that there are a few more short stories included in this collecion. The final story was published in The Paris Review originally in 2018, after Le Guin had died, and is a very moving coda.)

So to sum up: These books are still darn good, and even better than I remembered.

And now I want to read something that’s not fantasy.

The Books of Earthsea (2018) by Ursula K. Le Guin (buy new, buy used, 4.46 on Goodreads)

Is it a good sign when a screen does this?

Random Comics

Yes indeed, I’ve read some comics over the past few weeks.

It’s taken a while for me to get through this Iznogoud omnibus.

I’ve read all these stories as a child (in translation), of course, and… er… I wasn’t a big fan then, so I’m not sure why I bought this now. In French. I thought I remembered this being more for younger children than Asterix, so I thought it’d be easier to read, and perhaps it is, but it can still get pretty rough — Goscinny sometimes does pun after pun after pun (and then ends the series of puns with “(no wonder we never win any prizes for best-written comics)” or similar, and I’m not at a level where I can really parse those puns.

And I wonder how many of them survived translation, and whether that might explain why I didn’t much like this series as a child. It’s very repetetive, though, and that might explain it in any case: The stories are pretty short, typically eight pages, and each involve a new way for the evil, evil grand vizier Iznogood to try to topple the Calif, and every one ends with abject failure.

These probably read a lot better when serialised, because then you just get one of these plots.

I have to say that I liked it a whole lot better now then as a child, really, even if the (bad, bad) puns were a struggle.

Here’s another one I’m not a fan of, but it much newer.

And again, I kinda like it more now than I did when I read it in translation. The language Van Hamme uses is pretty much idea for someone who’s learning French, because he uses virtually no slang, and people talk very straightforwardly.

The artwork is pretty stylish, if somewhat standard, but Francq is totally unable to draw children or teenagers, which is a real problem in this series, because we flip back and forth throughout the protagonist’s life story constamment: In the second panel there, he’s a grown-up, and in the rest of these panels, he’s 17 years old, but the only difference is that he’s slightly less tall.

I’ve picked up half a dozen of these albums at a used comics book store here. Cheap!

Speaking of things that I’m not quite sure why I’ve bought… This is a series that ran in the 70s, by Seron and Mittéï.

Seron was, er, “inspired” by Franquin. He mimics Franquin so completely that every time I open a new spread, by brain unconsciously goes “oo Franquin!” and then I read the swill, and it’s such a letdown.

It’s just depressing to read this stuff, because it’s so badly written. There’s no tension, the gags are bad, and the stories make little sense.

I picked this up at a sale…

And it’s really funny.

It’s a Swedish comic about hating the world of today, and surely that’s something we can all agree with.

The reason I bought this is because Deniz Camp sometimes tweets fun stuff.

This is how it starts — so this is part of some crossover thing I’m vaguely aware of, but anyway, this is, like, so symptomatic of Marvel these days: The original Ultimate Universe (of which I’ve read nothing) was apparently about bringing new readers in, but this is pretty hermetically sealed — it’s hard to see how this book would appeal to anybody but the hardiest Marvel fan.

First there’s an issue of a series called Ultimate Universe, and then we get a story from a Free Comic Book Day book, and then we get Ultimates #1. By which time I’ve totally lost interest.

And it’s just… meh. Half the book is odd versions of Marvel super-heroes fighting each other, and half is Such Shocking. It’s tedious beyond belief.

I’ve read a few of Strömquists books, and she writes about, er, current affairs. Her latest book was about how horrible the culture of self optimisation is (and how risible the manosphere is), so I assumed that this was going to be a fun look at astrology.