4.26.26 - I sent this from an Electron "App"
3LOLing hard. My dream is to have a computer that looks like one from those cyberpunk blade runner movies. Where you open it and it's just text. Where you can get the information you want, browse the web, etc., but never encounter an app or deal with multiple windows or see images. This has been a dream of mine for some time. My gentle brain is overwhelemed all the time.
This is something AI is good for. Making dreams a reality. During my procrastination, I have made an electron app (which is based around basic html language) that sits on top of my hard drive, and is a very bare bones skin for my computer. When I boot it, I get a password screen. Just amber on black like in the old movies, but I can also make it black on white with a toggle button (like I have on this website). Right now this is all on my macbook as a little project, but the eventual goal is a dedicated hardware setup for this UI. After I enter the password, I see a few things:
1. search my hard drive (basic search function)
2. a hard drive link, which i can open to see my hard drive and its contents in a simple text, drop down form. When I click one folder it expands, and so on. If I click content it opens in the app without opening a new window.
3. a go online link. This was the most fun part of the project. I click it, and I have a search bar which can only search wikipedia, and pulls wikipedia as only text. Under that search bar is the local weather displayed as text. Below that is a "feed" which is just the rss feeds of various blogs and news sites. WHen I click the links it pulls everything as straight text. There is something very pleasing about this. The interface never opens a new window. everything is the same font, same colors. Its just content.
4. an email link. this is what im using right now. this took some working around. i made a fastmail because they're most friendly to the IMAP setup I needed and I could use my own domain name. but basically, I click it, I see my emails as plan text, and a compose box. No images. All the same font, size, and color. I can send emails from inside this and that's what I'm doing now, seeing if I can publish to the blog from this.
5. a Write link. This takes me to a directory of my .md and .txt files (which I'm starting to use more than word, etc., for my own projects). I can edit, save, and create the documents on this page.
6. a button to "talk to a librarian." this is a longer term project. when I setup my final "kiosk," I will also get some GPUs for the whole setup, and I will run a local AI model which is trained on my entire library of content. That's my transcripts, my notes, all the PDFs I've collected--all of it. And I want to be able to ask it to retrieve something. This is a later thing.
Right now, this is all a window in my macbook, but the eventual goal is to partiion my harddrive with one part running arch linux which boots right into this "interface." So it essentially works like the "operating system."
After I prove that it works in that context, I'll get some mini pc and an old monitor, hook it up to an external hard drive with this on it, and hvae a "kiosk." The vision is to have a very barebones workspace where I have extremely limited internet connectivity, access to all my files, and can write. I'm not a crazy person so I'll still have a macbook that can remote into my hard drive and I can edit and work with all my shit in a normal interface. But I think I'd like to spend more time not staring at a proprietary UI. I have to spend so much time writing and reading and shit, I want to stop doing it on another's terms and design choices. So that's where I'm at.
I'll share pictured eventually but I don't have that capability when I post like this--on purpose.
Sincerely,
knxnts