Paper internet project - feedback welcome

Central Judge my App
1

Hello,

I’m new here and really eager to engage with this community, I have tons of ideas that I’d like to try out. I’m an experienced Python developer based in Europe (London) and am open to collaborating on prototypes, with entrepreneurs and the research community.

The first idea I would like to try out is a ‘paper internet’ concept. It consists of two components: 1) a notification aggregator that batches notifications based on priority/urgency, and 2) a RaspberryPi connected to a miniature thermal receipt printer: http://www.pipsta.co.uk/

The notification aggregator organises notifications are around two variables: priority and time/urgency. High, mid and low priorities are defined by the user (e.g. based on a specific communication channel, person or keyword) and then notifications are withheld in batches based on their priority. High priority notifications would arrive in a batch every 20 minutes (for example), medium every 90 minutes, and low priority every 3 hours.

These batches would be printed out on Pipsta when you are at home, assuring you that you are informed of anything important within an appropriately timely manner but with minimal interruptions. The user could read their notifications on paper without risk of getting sucked into a screen, just rip off the printout, underline anything important with a pen, and stick it on your wall as a todo list!

In terms of implementation details, I’m looking at using an linux app called RamBox (or similar) to aggregate all my communication channels and using a Python to capture RamBox’s notifications over dbus. I would open source the code so anyone is free to repurpose it for notification management.

Ross

7 Likes
3

This is really neat. One of the reasons I was apprehensive about deleting my social media is because I was nervous to miss an important update. This would help give people more of a incentive to “detatch” (to use my dad’s favorite word).

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@rossrochford, you posted a long time ago, when I was not facilitator and we were all waiting for CHT plans to unfold. You may have found other places to contribute. But I can tell you that 2019 will be an interesting one to be in this community, and we have lots of things to do. For instance the community website is based on Jekyll/Python and under development. I am still learning some basic skills on it (though also thinking of moving to Hugo + Netlify CMS).