A Review of the Reterminal E1004 13.3″ Full-Color Epaper Display

I’ve had the following thing on my wall since 2020:

It’s fun because it’s an epaper frame that runs on battery — so I can have it conspicuously displayed on a wall without any wires leading to it. Mysterious! Enigmatic! And it just displays the temperature and the currently playing album.

It’s fine, but it’s a bit small (I gotta put on my correct glasses to see what the temperature is)… and the firmware isn’t unproblematic: Out of every twenty times it wakes up and fetches a new image, it goes to “can’t find wifi”, which is just kinda annoying.

But then, last week, I read of a new generation of epaper devices with brilliant colours and neat features.

Wow! Bigger! Better! Gotta have it! And yesterday it arrived.

After flashing it with the ESP32 PhotoFrame firmware (from a web page! I had no idea that you could do USB flashing via web pages, but apparently there’s something called “The Web Serial API” that does that? Chrome only, of course. kids these days), and a session with Claude where it really wanted to download some Node nonsense a lot, I convinced it to just write me a bash script to upload images to the thing. The result is on Microsoft Github — it’s super duper trivial, but the clue is that the device needs to have a paletted PNG, which makes sense.

Tada! It works! I’ve set it to download a new image once every fifteen minutes, which is correctish enough…

But. Look at this.

Or perhaps — don’t look at that, because it seems likely to give you an epileptic fit.

That’s just… that’s just… that’s just ridiculous. How is this even something that’s a product? You can’t have this thing displayed somewhere people can see it and not expect people to fall on their asses, laughing. It’s ridiculous.

It makes sense as something that only updates, say, once a day — in the middle of the night, where nobody can see it. Hide the shame.

So… man… I have to rethink what I’m going to use it for, because I can’t have this hanging on my living room wall.

Man.

And in the promo pic they’re displaying a clock, sort of implying that you’d have this thing update once per minute? When it takes half a minute to do an update?

Dude.

Introducing reTerminal E1004 Spectra 6 Full Color ePaper Display: Frame What Matters to You

Heh, in the promo version they do show the frame updating… but if you look at 67s, they’re editing out bits *and* running it at, like, 10x speed (look at the laptop movements).

C’mon.

How I made a 60fps Eink Monitor, the Modos Flow

Perhaps somebody brilliant will be able to do something neat with this device, though? Partial updates would help a lot, for instance, if you’re displayin a clock or something on a bit of the display. I guess time will tell…

70% Of Drivers Really Are Above Average

You see it all the time — “70% of drivers think they’re above average” used as an example at how stupid people are. Often mixed with some confused Dunning-Krueger references.

But the thing is: Most people observe the other drivers around them and come to the conclusion that they drive better than the drivers around them. That they are better drivers. And they’re right.

The apparent contradiction here is that there is no universal norm for what makes a “good driver”.

We all have this one acquaintance who’s really into cars. She parks the car doing a j-turn, and she knows how to do an ollie, a lazy eight and a double choctaw. But the thing is, she’s constantly involved in collisions with other cars, and it’s always the other guy’s fault. She can prove it! She’s been in so many court cases and has never been found guilty!

And we all have that other acquaintance who’s not into cars, and she’s never hurt anybody. She’s not even had a little fender bender. But the thing is, you’ve been a passenger in her car, and it’s harrowing. She always goes 10km/h under the speed limit, and you can tell that all the other drivers are mad at her. She can’t even do parallel parking!

Both of these people think they drive better than the average driver… and they’re right. But they use completely different metrics for “what’s a good driver”.

If you’re now muttering “both of those drivers are insane! they shouldn’t be allowed on the street! now, on the other hand, I drive really well and I never…”

Then stop that train of thought and be enlightened.

Even more deduplication on kwakk.info

As I’ve nattered on about before, I started including text pages from comics in the comics ‘zine search engine, and this has some unique problems. I’m just dumping hundreds of thousands of comics into the grinder, picking out the text pages, and then OCR-ing them. But many comics have been scanned several times, and many include editorial pages that are more or less identical across several titles.

So I’m now running the pages through a text-based deduplicator… but it used a “quick” (FSVO) OCR, Tesseract, which behaves horribly on non-standard pages like the above, and there are now five copies of that page in the search engine. Which is just so annoying when trying to actually find stuff — you have to wade through duplicates.

Which means that I had to do something more, and that’s now in production: After doing the real OCR, with Surya, which is great even with 30 degree text and badly scanned pages on colourful backgrounds, I’m running an extra step and deduplicating again based on the output from that.

*phew*

The pipeline is basically:

1) First get rid of byte-identical CBX files. This gets rid of about 20% of the comics.

2) Identify text pages and delete all other pages. This gets rid of about 98% of pages.

c) Identify byte-identical pages and delete them. This gets rid of 15% of the text pages.

e) Run Tesseract OCR over all the pages and keep only the first “instance” of each duplicate page. This gets rid of a further 20% of the pages.

ii) Remove credits pages and the like — i.e., every page that has less than a hundred words. This gets rid of about 15% of the remaining pages.

II) Finally, do the new Surya-based OCR deduplication, which gets rid of about 5% more of the pages.

Of course, all of these numbers are trending upwards as more and more comics are added. And most of these steps may have false positives — it’s mostly probabilistic, but I’ve tried to be on the lookout for false positives. *crosses fingers*

There are also so many complete runs of classic comics in the index now that I think there’s probably a complete coverage of classic “hype” pages now, for those interested in that. For instance, if you want to do research on Wally Wood mentions on the Bullpen Bulletin pages, that should be possible.

Annoyingly enough, Surya isn’t able to parse that “On the Ledge” logo… Vertigo is so edgy…

Anyway. I think I’ve futzed around with this thing enough for a while.