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Here's a fun story from back in the decade-ago-ish days: My wife couldn't stand cellphones, so I got her hooked on Google Voice for texting, which was great -- texts would show up in the gmail inbox, and you could just reply to them like emails. Calls were forwarded to the landline, voicemails showed up as attachments. Elegant, and free. She was also hooked on the brand new "Kindle Keyboard 3G", which came with unlimited cellular data so you'd be able to buy ebooks at any time, without wifi. It also had a primative web browser that was capable (just barely) of running the gmail web interface... so voila, it's actually an e-ink tablet, with email and SMS capability! She'd have to manually load the kindle browser to check for messages -- great, really, because who wants to be interrupted with a notification while reading a book? But after a few semi-urgent texts went unnoticed, I dreamed up a solution: change the Kindle's name based on the number of unread texts. This wouldn't interrupt reading, but it would be visible on the kindle's home screen, a good compromise. So I hacked up a python/applescript/firefox script running on my mac mini home server. every 5 minutes it would log into her gmail account, check for unread text messages in the gmail inbox, and then log into her amazon account and update the kindle's name from "Wife's Kindle" to "Wife's Kindle (x)". It was beautiful. It worked! It didn't work forever. Eventually the gmail web app was updated with too much javascript for the kindle browser to handle. Eventually that kindle broke. Eventually the mac mini died too. But for a while I had a full 3/5ths of FAANG cooperating for my little kindle hack. Fun times. |