Thursday, June 7, 2018

date | cowsay | lolcat Watch Face on a Verizon Wear24



In 2017, Verizon released the Wear24 smartwatch to an overwhelming lack of interest, and discontinued it soon thereafter.  However, as an Android platform it's actually not horrible once you get through the tedious and time-consuming process of rooting it.

Wear24 root instructions: https://forum.xda-developers.com/android-wear/development/how-to-install-twrp-recovery-achieve-t3781502

Once I had it rooted and installed Termux, the next obvious step was to use "date | cowsay | lolcat" as a watch face. 

  1) Termux: https://termux.com/
  2) cowsay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j12kFnXBlbs
  3) lolcat: https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat

And it works perfectly, albeit a bit slow.  (For example, lolcat requires more than a second to colorize each frame so there is a 3 second delay between screen updates.)

TL;DR, Buy a Verizon Wear24 for cheap, root it, install termux et. al., run date | cowsay | lolcat

Note: If you need to watch a video to install cowsay then you probably shouldn't try doing any of this at all. :)

2 comments:

Eric said...

So the thumbnail of the YouTube video shows that there is a BrentTucker.com. Whaaaa?!?!?!?!?!

Excitedly, I went there. Was greeting with no favicon on the one hand, but a friendly face on the other. Clicking said face, was brought back to a clone of this site.

Bait and switch?

Brent said...

Ha! Hey Eric. I can't believe you still check my blog even after I haven't posted for 5 years. :)

Let's just chalk up the circular excitement to a dearth of public content.

You can try my GitHub page, but I suspect you will be equally disappointed:
https://dilbrent.github.io/