End of 2024, I got me a Huawei Band 8 on a lark, seeing that there was a used exemplar at Amazon for € 24. I mainly wanted to try out how well it works with GadgetBridge, and even if it doesn't, a small computer with a screen for € 24 sounded interesting.

Good

• works with Gadgetbridge. "Deep Sleep" is not recognized/supported, but that's not really important to me.
• saves me 10 minutes in my morning routine, as I don't reach for my phone anymore when getting up, preventing one cycle of mails and doomscrolling
• even can install custom watchfaces
• cheap replacement bands on AliExpress, in various colours

Bad

I didn't find a good way to create custom watchfaces: * Huawei SDK requires registration * Huawei Theme Design Tool is Windows only, but I didn't try it yet * nothing found on Github

GadgetBridge cannot upload my own pictures as backgrounds. I would like this, as I prefer to have pictures that I took myself around me.

Surprises

• gets too hot in direct sunlight at 25°C , warns about it and then switches off

I stumbled over this blog post. The author seems to have worked in the dating app industry and tells about some statistics (and subsequent strategies) for dating apps.

Takeaway for me is that what people tell you is not always actionable.

Linus Akesson published an interesting article on a demo by him.

The demo features 9 sprites (hence the name) displayed simultaneously on a C64, hence the name.

There is another video dissecting the demo and how it achieves its "impossible" effect. What impresses me the most is not the dissection but the debugger and scanline visualisation tools shown in the video.

In the large overview, I don't want to display looong notes:

CSS can cut off content after a given number of lines, and also add an ellipsis:

@supports (-webkit-line-clamp: 10) { overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: initial; display: -webkit-box; -webkit-line-clamp: 10; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; }

... dynamically shortening notes that are too long to 10 lines.

Again, CSS might be a far too blunt tool here, but on the other side, this means I don't need to figure out a heuristic to determine whether certain markdown text is longer than 10 lines.

Yesterday I made a change to my toys, the note taking app that was mostly CSS but still added a lot of functionality.

A note should open when clicking on it, but links within the note should be clickable from the general outside view too. Achieving this was weirdly enough done by using the z-index property of the "inner" links that should be clickable and not open the note itself. Raising these inner links "over" the outer link leading to the single note view was something I had not considered at all when thinking about the problem.

I guess this falls under "interesting how versatile a UI toolkit CSS is", and also, "interesting how overengineered the browser as a UI toolkit is"