unitybirb

unity

@unitybirb

software bird and IPoAC advocate

Now, you will see me one more time if you do good.

You'll see me two more times if you do bad.
Goodnight.

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glyn
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Variscite
@Variscite

Local Sergal Hacks Alarm Clock

...Well, kind of.

So, I picked up a Lenovo Smart Clock 2 a few days ago, after seeing one in person and thinking it was kind of neat.

Lenovo Smart Clock 2, displaying the time

So, I have this neat little bedside clock with a decent display... but man, seems like a bit of a waste if it's JUST a clock. Fortunately, you can enable TalkBack on this thing and use its menus... and using calendar events, you can make it say whatever you want! So, I'll make it read out something I want to Google search (in this case, "gboard.ap" so I can tap an autocomplete link for "gboard.apk") ... and then, using its settings, I can view the privacy policy, which leads to Google's site in a web browser. Paste in my text, and oh hey, found a Gboard apk! Rinse and repeat the breakout process with a launcher application (though it's now easier because I can just type things in), and, oh, hey, what do you know, it's an Android device all along

Lenovo Smart Clock 2, displaying the Nova Launcher home screen

And now I'll just install F-Droid, Syncthing to send some pictures over to it, and a gallery app... voila, tiny little picture frame without uploading a ton of stuff to Google Photos!

Lenovo Smart Clock 2, displaying artwork by remivalism in Simple Gallery Pro (If you do this yourself, resize everything down to 800x480 to fit within the screen's size and save some storage on your device!)

And that web browser? Yeah, that's a full-featured browser. You can kick open streams on it!

Lenovo Smart Clock 2, displaying a full-screen art stream

I dunno, maybe it's really niche, but this thing's been incredibly useful as a tiny auxiliary display. I keep it running pretty light, haven't gone crazy installing stuff on it... but you could if you really wanted to, so long as you remember it's only got 8GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM!

...come to think of it, the Clock 1 had a USB port on the clock itself. I wonder if you could plug a USB drive into it, or if its port is just power-only...

(oh god is it bad that I'm debating getting another one to use as a dedicated small desktop display)

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in reply to @Variscite's post:

strangebroadcasts
@strangebroadcasts

As someone who's normally not a fan of IoT/smart devices, I was immediately sold on it once I discovered you could run your own apps on it, basically making it a $30 Chumby

Does it default to the new launcher once you install it, or do you get the option to revert back to the default clock face on startup?

E: having done it, I can confirm it prompts you on startup which launcher you want to use

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Variscite
@Variscite

Huh, how'd you get it to prompt on boot?

The way I've set mine up, it boots up into Nova Launcher. It works well enough, but it seems like the way I've got it set up the clock closes or crashes frequently. It's a minor annoyance more than anything, but it'd be nice to fix. Does yours do this as well?

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strangebroadcasts
@strangebroadcasts

Restarting after the installation of Nova Launcher gives you the prompt of which launcher to use, but I wound up setting Nova Launcher as the default choice too (since the default clock app is available from the app launcher as "Assistant Core" anyhow)

I also have the problem with the default clock app crashing/closing, I suspect it might be running into an out-of-memory issue, or deliberately periodically closing itself as a hack to avoid one - I'm working on my own clock face app which should hopefully help explain which is happening, but one very silly workaround is to just use home-screen widgets for the clock/calendar/whatever you need

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