From f8aafe88b3782ea5c6f2d37495c546e47ce59864 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Dante Catalfamo
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 23:14:28 -0500
Subject: Rough draft of emacs eink post

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+#+TITLE: Org Agenda Eink
+#+DATE: 2021-01-25T22:07:25-05:00
+#+DRAFT: true
+#+SHOWTOC: false
+#+DESCRIPTION:
+#+TAGS[]:
+#+KEYWORDS[]:
+#+SLUG:
+#+SUMMARY:
+
+I recently made a post [[]] about how I was able to make my new tab page my
+org agenda. Since then I've been working on another project similar to
+that, trying to take the concept even further.
+
+A while ago, I purchased an Inkplate 6 [[]] during its crowd funding stage
+on crowd source [[]], with the exact intention of creating something like
+this.
+
+Immediately after writing that blog post, I started working to change
+agenda-html [[]] in order to make render an output which would be
+acceptable for this project.
+
+At the core of the Inkplate 6 is the ESP32, which is an
+Arduino-compatible micro-controller which has built-int WiFi and
+Bluetooth. It draws very little power and has many libraries
+available, which makes it ideal for something like this, as it stays
+on 24/7.
+
+The way it works is very similar to the org agenda new tab page. The
+server, instead of exporting exclusively to HTML, also exports a text
+version of the agenda. The ESP32 then fetches this text and prints it
+verbatim onto the text screen. This happens every 5 minutes, so it's
+always up to date with the server version. It also handles some error
+cases, but I have yet to run into those. The sketch for this project
+can be found here [[]].
+
+What I ended up doing was exporting the org agenda as a text file,
+after converting the links to description only. I did the conversion
+because otherwise the full link markup text would show up in the
+export, which would quite ugly. It would look like the full
+=[[https://example.com][Description]]= instead of just =Description=,
+which would be quite useless, as you can't click the link on an eink
+display.
+
+I also shortened the server-side cron job repeat rate to every 5
+minutes instead of 15, so it would work better with hour and minute
+time-stamped events. That way it also reflect new tasks and TODOs much
+more quickly, at practically zero cost.
+
+This project has many benefits, at least to me. First and foremost, I
+can check my org agenda without even turning on my computer. It's
+always on off to the side, so I can check it out any time without
+having to open either a new tab or Emacs.
+
+Being an eink display is very important, as it's not bright and
+distracting, and doesn't need to be turned off at night. I can check
+it any time. It also isn't distracting at all. It sort of just looks
+like any other appliance.
+
+Between this desk version of the org agenda and the new tab version,
+my usage of the org agenda has gone up substantially. I used to only
+use org for a handful of tasks, but eventually moved over to regular
+calendar apps for most things, as they were simply more accessible in
+many situations. Now that I have this sort of appliance version of the
+org agenda view, I find myself using it for almost everything.
+
+This really highlights the extreme versatility of Emacs and Org.
+While I had to figure out how to make it work, it took very little
+modification to Emacs in order to get it to work, and those
+modifications I did have to make were all easily accomplished by
+changing a couple variables or writing a little elisp.
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