You can find all the details on Calhoun’s blog, and the software is available on GitHub. Instantly I re-imagined the entire e-ink calendar as a psuedo-Mac desktop with a Moon desk accessory - perhaps calendar events displayed as the names of folders in a Finder window in “list view”… This app could double as a fond trip down memory lane. I imagined the dithered moon as some sort of “desk accessory”. Mini vMac emulates a 68k processor, System 8 requires a PPC I believe, so your best bet Id say is Sheepshaver. When I saw the wonderful Atkinson-dithered moon I was taken back to the 1-bit beauty that was my first Mac Plus. Mini vMac also has Macintosh II and 128k options. I found some nice photos of the moon in various phases online, uploaded them to be Atkinson-dithered and was pleased with the result.īut something odd happened on the way to re-skinning the eInkCalendar. You upload an image and can select the color palette and the dithering algorithm you would like. Root around the internet and you will find web sites that can do the dithering in-browser. The algorithm to do the dithering was no doubt Bill Atkinson‘s. The software driving the scanner would convert the scanned image to black and white by dithering the image. The college I attended had a flat-bed scanner (cool!) attached to a Macintosh. My first Apple computer was a Macintosh Plus - a machine also sporting a crisp, 1-bit display. To display the moon in 1-bit (literally black and white) I thought back to my early Macintosh days. The original project was simply to display a calendar and moon phases on an e-ink screen. The idea of emulating a Macintosh was actually accidental. The project uses the Mini vMac emulator to create the simulated Macintosh interface. You can set this to a day of your choosing and never have to tear up and burn your recycling overflow in the garden fire pit ever again. The trash icon shows itself as “full” on Mondays to remind them to take the bins out for collection the next day. Oh, and as Raspberry Pi notes, there’s one other delightfully quirky feature: It simply pulls in some data and displays it, but that does make it more than purely decorative.įunctionality is limited to displaying the content of a public calendar, local weather, and the current phase of the moon. It’s a DIY project which recreates the front panel of a classic Macintosh, coupled with an e-ink display to emulate the look of the original machine, while a Raspberry Pi gives it a little functionality …Ĭalhoun stresses that it’s not an interactive device. Its creator and former Apple engineer J Calhoun describes it as a ‘love-letter to my first Macintosh’ – which was a Macintosh Plus. I have a non-functional original Macintosh in my office just as nostalgic decoration, but SystemSix is a super-cute home-built alternative.
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