From my experience in the generative art scene, there’s 2 main types of people making NFTs. There’s the crypto-first people who are into them for ideological or monetary reasons, and existing digital artists who saw it as a way to monetize their digital art and cash in on the gold rush.
I have a ton of issues with NFTs and while I don’t love that a lot of my favourite artists got involved with them, I at least understand that perspective a bit more.
> (…) monetize their digital art and cash in on the gold rush.
Those are the same thing. Doing it for money is doing it for money.
I do think there was a short period where established artists going into NFTs was understandable. If you’re still promoting yours in 2026, not so much.
I put koreader on my families various devices. I have Inkpalm 5, Kindle 11th Gen, and an older Kindle. My favorite is the Inkpalm 5 but they stopped making it. :(
For iOS I’ve been using iSH. It’s on GitHub (and the AppStore) and is an Alpine Linux shell for iOS. It provides no creature comforts for managing SSH connections, but does drop you into a pretty standard Linux shell. I believe it’s a stock Alpine install. iSH is an interesting project in and of itself, but in this context, you can also install a standard openssh client. This is usually as much support as I need on my phone or iPad to connect to a remote server.
ish looks quite good. I was using blink shell, until they switched and I didn’t notice in time to get grandfathered in. But I’m beginning to wonder if ish would have been a better pick in the first place (although, I don’t have a use for ssh on iOS beyond what Panic Prompt provides anymore, anyway).
I liked blink shell and panic prompt. In particular blink shell seemed very Linux-familiar. I switched back to a laptop a bit ago, though (iPad+ssh was a pandemic era fix that ended up surprisingly nice, but I can’t bring my desktop to do ssh over lan, if I want to go to a cafe or something).
"secure shellfish" has some support for images, movies, etc. I'm not sure what they're using for transfer. If you ask it to, it installs ".shellfishrc" which adds a "quicklook" shell command.
It also has some integration with the "files" app to transfer files in and out of your shell session.
Edit: and I've got a cron job checking on a web site that will send a notification if has changed to my watch via the secure shellfish "notify" command.
I was blown away by Shelved by Genre [1] this year. It’s a group of 3 reading and discussing Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series in a sort of book club format.
They’re a pretty academic lot and I’ve found their perspective on the books very rewarding as I read along. Highly recommend!
Wow this is cool! I made a sort of similar e-ink display piece that shows your current song on Spotify - https://github.com/CampbellOwen/NowPlaying. Your project is making me want to try another e-ink project! I'm especially impressed with the overall polish of the enclosure and hardware, that's always my weak point.
I saw you mentioned you wrote a custom driver for the display controller. I'm curious how you found that process? I got the feeling a lot of these devices aren't documented very well, but that sounds like a fun project to tackle.
Technically it's a driver, but in practice I'm just talking over a chip via SPI. It's weird and quirky SPI - I think this chip originally just had an I80 interface (Intel 8080 protocol) and then they added a SPI frontend that internally translates to I80. That means you have to SPI with I80-ish chip select semantics etc. which is not what the SPI APIs in the ESP-IDF or Arduino frameworks do by default (leading to things not working unexpectedly), so I had to "bit-bang" CS. Aside from quirks like this it was pretty simple and just following the datasheet to stream the right commands and data.
One thing that made it functionally worth it (aside from the hacking fun and learning) is that E-ink panels perform best if run at a particular drive voltage ('VCOM') that is determined at manufacturing time and attached as a little sticker to the flex cabling sticking out of the unit. I stumbled upon this while reading various data sheets, and as a result my custom code will set the correct voltage, driven by config. If I had used a random lib I probably wouldn't have encountered this.
That said, I've found there's very cool projects out there that go a level deeper. Instead of using an EPD controller like the IT8951 as a convenience, this project runs E-ink panels directly off a MCU by implementing the waveforms directly: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy
After reading the panel datasheets I find that approach quite interesting, and am considering doing fresh Rust impl of that as well.
The Spotify project looks cool! I dig the dithering style. Would like to try a multi-color panel as well.
Thanks for the reply, that's great info! I'll keep an eye out for the VCOM stickers, I had no idea that was a concern.
The waveshare e-paper screens I'm using come with some decent sample code for driving them, and I just found this Rust implementation that looks interesting as well https://github.com/caemor/epd-waveshare.
I do agree with you though that the idea of driving them directly with the waveforms sounds quite fun. I've seen some interesting stuff online where people have been customizing the waveforms to get even more performance out of them (maybe partial refresh would be fun to look into as well).
As someone who's only exposed to embedded development in a hobbyist way, that epdiy repo looks quite useful, thanks for linking that.
Now to find the time to add on yet more personal projects :)
Unity at least isn’t a true ECS architecture, more just Entity-Component. You can write game logic in an entity with Unity, whereas in ECS that would have to live in a System
Very much on the DIY end, but I made a similar e-ink art piece that shows off the currently playing song on Spotify. I used a 3 colour display to add some flair :)
It’s not the easiest to set up yourself - need to generate Spotify API keys and build the unnecessary separate binary for dithering, but here’s the project if anyone is interested!
Try to find a Raspberry Pi lately though, most places are currently either out of stock or selling them at a higher price since the supply can't meet the demand.
I have a ton of issues with NFTs and while I don’t love that a lot of my favourite artists got involved with them, I at least understand that perspective a bit more.