Cheese machine

Back in 2019 during my studies, together with my incredibly nerdy flatmates, we set up a retro terminal in our living room on top of a Raspberry Pi, an old keyboard, and a 5 EUR monitor we got from a second-hand shop. It became our personal assistant, living and breathing by a bunch of glued together shell scripts.

The creature in its natural habitat

It would, of course, have no mouse, and the interface would be typically a green-on-black terminal. It kept track of the CO2 and temperature in the house, plotting it in real time with gnuplot onto the console. If the CO2 level got too high, 2000 ppm or so, it would scream. If it was 400 ppm or less, it would play Africa by Toto. Once, we had some guests over in the room next door, and left the window to the living room open overnight. Somehow, it was very windy that day, so the air was as fresh as ever—and our robot would not shut up, playing Africa all night, not letting them sleep. But hey, at least we all knew that the air was fresh!

You could also use it to check the weather (thanks wttr.in!), or to access our select library of philosophy papers, such as Russell's In Praise of Idleness, or Grothendieck's The Responsibility of the Scientist Today. For a time, it could tell you departure times of local buses, or list nearby Too Good To Go postings—until API changes inevitably broke it.

As the pandemic hit, we were quite anxious about how the situation develops, so we added an extra (morbid?) feature. Every day, in the evening, it would scan our wifi to figure out who of us is home, greet us personally with rudimentary text-to-speech, and proceed to give an update of the number of newly detected COVID cases in our town from a local government website. As it signed off, it would finish its daily update with a cheerful Good luck. Truly a product of the times.

It was nothing complex by the standards of the wider world, but for us, it was our lil digital baby. We have since all moved out of that flat, to far away places, but when I get sentimental and look back at our time there, few things embody the spirit of the place as well as our cheesy robot.¹

Experiencing its first breath. The monitor would go on and off spontaneously after we brought it home. We were shocked it worked at all, to be honest

You could even browse the internet!

We made the screen automatically turn off at night, to save energy. It didn't always work

Those truly were times of faith