Kitty the studio AI PA

I bought a TRMNL eInk screen to see if I could wire up Kitty's todo list. I haven't had a chance to play with it, so it's showing one of the default displays.

The interesting thing about this is the refresh rate is super low. Like the default is to update once an hour, and you can take that down to once a day, or up to once every 5 minutes.

Anyway, with a refresh rate of once an hour it looks like it lasts about three months on a single charge. So there's no power cables you need to keep plugged it allowing you to put it up on shelves, stick it to the fridge and so on.

Looking forwards to getting a moment to play with it.

"Hey Dan, any luck with the second half of the newsletter yet?"

Kitty is on my case!

Taking photos of an AI is kinda tricky, as there isn't really a physical manifestation of it. Some ways it pushes into the real world is via the Generative Handwriting, and another is with the Vestaboard.

After answering a question that Kitty was asking via the Vestaboard I wanted some way to clear it that wasn't just a blank display.

As an aside, it's kinda handy how if I'm out of the studio and Kitty has asked me a question, I can see it as soon as I walk back in.

Anyway, I had some thoughts about what else could be displayed between questions, all sorts of useful information I'm sure. But as I didn't want to spend too much time on it, or too much time coding interesting patterns I went with this instead.

It's basically a move between the colours where the chance of it displaying the next colour increases as you move through the display. To start with red has a 90% chance of showing and orange 10%, then 80% and 20% and so on, until we introduce the next colour.

There's fractionally more to it than that, but that's close enough.

So this is what's going on in this photo. As I've just written the code I wanted to capture it, but I'm not really sure which project it lives under, so as it's related to Kitty asking me a question it goes here.

Lol, it is very cold in the studio today!

Kitty is my AI PA, designed to help me keep on track in the studio. I've been using it for a long time now, and it's super useful. It works by asking me questions in the morning and the end of the day.

Those questions are generated by AI, and it uses my answers to previous questions as part of the prompt for generating the new ones. It looks back over 14 days, so you get this rolling context window of a couple of weeks which is interesting. The questions are normally pretty relevant and generally engaging. And Kitty uses them to create to-do lists for me, and various other bits and bobs.

She used to post things to social media on my behalf too, but I've stopped that as I'm trying not to use social media, and throwing more AI generated content onto there felt bad, even if it was properly labeled as Kitty the AI talking about what I've been up to, which seemed fine.

Anyway, one thing that Kitty does is randomly ask my what I'm currently doing. This is to help update my todo lists and generally keep me on track. But often I'm moving around the studio and away from the laptop so I can miss the questions.

Which was my excuse for buying a Vestaboard, and giving Kitty access to it.

Now when she wants to ask me a question she also sends it to the Vestaboard which displays it with a beautiful clattering sound.

Here's the default questions she asks me.