It’s been a long time since we’ve logged into a UNIX mainframe (other than our laptop) but one of our fond memories is the daily fortune: small, quirky, sometimes cryptic sayings that would pop up on the login screen if your system administrator had any sense of humor.
Apparently, we’re not alone. [Alastair] made his own fortune clock which gives you a new “fortune” every second instead of every login. There’s a catch, of course. It’s a QR clock — the fortune is encoded in a QR code instead of being displayed in human-readable form. You have to take a picture of the tiny OLED screen to know what it says. (Watch it sending him Shakespeare sonnets in the video below.)
You probably know QR codes are good for conveying URLs, but their use as general-purpose text containers is underappreciated in our book, so we’re glad to see this example. Now, we’ve seen QR clocks before (here, and here), and this version does have the disadvantage that you can actually tell what time it is. But we’re grateful for the trip down memory lane.
Using a 4×6 pixel font you can fit over 300 characters on the same screen and forgo the QR code.
I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re joking
Hey, it worked for the Atari 400.
4×6 is pretty reasonable. You can make each english letter, uppercase and lowercase, and numbers and punctuation. Each character is 3 pixels wide and 5 pixels tall, with a 1 pixel space on the right and bottom. Texas Instruments’ graphing calculators allow you to plot text this size onto graphs. Here’s a Hackaday project showing a font like this, with some external links:
https://hackaday.io/project/6309-vga-graphics-over-spi-and-serial-vgatonic/log/20759-a-tiny-4×6-pixel-font-that-will-fit-on-almost-any-microcontroller-license-mit
You are totally correct. I read 4×6, but was for some unknown rerason picturing 2×3. NOT a clue why, although looking at my comment it appears to be posted before 9am so that probably has sonmething to do with it
I’ve seen 3×3, 2×4, and even 2×3 done (see https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=32602.msg966834#msg966834). Granted these are more abstract and less legible, but it can be done. You don’t have to have the exact glyph but merely suggest its general shape. There was a good example of this with full paragraphs of text but it seems to have disappeared from the internet.
My favourite cookie “Now, a word for all dog lovers: kinky!”
How timely! Ahmed, the Clock Boy has just returned to the United States, apparently he found out just how short his 15 minutes of fame really was and when he ceased being a celebrity he choose to come back ‘home’ to Texas…
Wonder how that $15 M lawsuit of his is coming along?
News report: http://www.fox4news.com/news/166469852-story