A Eulogy to the Electric Objects E01

Electric Objects is discontinued.

The day finally arrived. Years after the demise of Electric Objects as a company, my E01 died. This is my remembrance of a long gone hardware startup’s quirky piece of hardware that grew into a treasured window on life.

I first heard about the E01 from Kickstarter, back when crowdsourcing was relatively novel and there were more interesting hardware projects. The idea was good: using a large screen to display digital art. As their marketing for the project said, the E01 was “a computer designed to bring the beauty of the Internet into your home.” Indeed, Electric Objects wanted to create a new way to experience art in one’s home.

The sleek and clean look of the hardware embodied what I’d wanted for a while. And this was far simpler than what I had dreamed of. I’d often imagined making something similar with a Raspberry Pi. But the software didn’t exist yet so that would need building. And there wasn’t a way I could make the hardware look this good. Here, someone had done all the work necessary needed and created a device with a different aspect ratio which made for interesting presentation of images. So, I happily pledged for my device at the Kickstarter price.

Kickstarter discount deal from Kickstarter.

Electric Objects dutifully delivered on the E01. Looking back, this was a small miracle in of itself. And now, I had a nice app I could use to display a library of digital art in my study easily using a sleek display. And the system included the ability to display my own photography. I was a very happy camper. And things seemed positive overall. The company was successful enough to create a successor, the E02. I didn’t upgrade because the E01 served my purposes perfectly. But the creation of a successor device suggested a viable business existed, at least to this outside observer.

But suddenly, in 2017, Electric Objects shut its hardware business down and sold the app to Giphy. The company would become a cautionary tale about the risks associated with hardware startups. And eventually, Jack Levine, the founder, reminisced about why Electric Objects failed. But the death of the company didn’t kill the device. The E01 continued to serve its purpose. But how long could this device continue to work?

The last day of service, according to Reddit, was June 28, 2023.

It was remarkable service lasted this long. And it was remarkable that the hurdles along the way didn’t kill the service before.

The first hurdle was the lack of app updates after the company’s death. iOS application developers need to keep up with Apple’s API changes or users won’t have access to the app in later iOS versions. Fortunately, throughout the E01’s life, Apple allowed the old iPad to continue receiving photo updates. But the app itself ran afoul of Apple’s guidelines. In short order, I needed to keep an old iPad around running iOS 12 to have a working copy of the Electric Objects app. Whatever changed in iOS 13 prevented the app from running there. This was fine, until my iPad decided to free up space and remove the E01 app. Since the company didn’t exist anymore, the App Store took away downloads of the app. I eventually found a way to reload the app onto the old iPad, and usage was restored. Later, I discovered the website itself included nearly all the app’s functionality.

Other hurdles were outside of my realm of control. There’d be intermittent issues with the server infrastructure, which would cause the screen to freeze or fail to load new content. Indeed, before its final days, my E01 had experienced glitches where the images didn’t rotate. But inevitably, some helpful soul would fix things and restore service. I like to imagine that someone had a computer hiding under their desk hosting all of the content. But we may never know.

Aside from software issues, the hardware itself struggled against time. Last year, my screen started experiencing some strange flickering in the corner, and then refused to boot. Several hours of research later, I placed an Amazon order for a replacement AC adapter. Someone had explained the AC adapter originally included with the device could fail and result in a boot loop. And this gave the E01 another span of faithful service.

I wasn’t the only one still loving the device. Through the years, a small subreddit of other E01 and E02 users coalesced and provided solutions to the problems I encountered. Although the community was small, we persisted.

With its recent final death, I come to realize how important the E01 had become. I initially displayed images curated by Electric Objects. They included interesting digital art, some with subtle movement details, that utilized the digital frame in an interesting way. This made for a nice conversation piece when people came over. But life changed. My new wife lamented the use of space for a display of “weird pictures,” so pictures of us started appearing. Thank you Apple for continuing to allow old iOS versions receive picture updates. This calmed her purging urges.

Then the pictures became pictures of our family with the arrival of my daughter. Instead of being a lamented use of space, the E01 became a favorite piece displaying pictures of her growth. And here, the unique aspect ratio of the E01 helped highlight some of the library of pictures of her growth in a different and interesting way. And as she grew up, my daughter came to recognize pictures of herself at a much younger age.

Now, with the death of Electric Objects, our family’s digital picture frame is gone.

Goodbye old friend, my E01. It was great while it lasted. Thank you Jack Levine along with the whole Electric Objects team for bringing the E01 to the world. Thank you to the anonymous people who kept the infrastructure running. And thank you Apple for continuing to give iOS 12 photo updates.

Clerks 3

The Clerks 3 Poster from San Diego Comic Con 2022.

Having a little monster limits the amount of time I can spend watching movies. And the pandemic certainly slowed the production line of content down. But last night, I managed to squeeze in a watch of Clerks 3.

As a caveat, I’m a fan of Kevin Smith and his movies. I didn’t discover Clerks until well after its release, but loved it. Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Clerks 2 are all favorites as well. So it isn’t a surprise I also enjoyed Clerks 3, which is a two-hour nostalgia bomb of a movie. Kevin Smith, like all of us, is much older now, with more life experience under his belt. And this shows throughout the movie, which reminds the viewer to cherish the time we have, even as it dedicates large portions to fan service. The movie wraps up the Clerks trilogy nicely in the end, and it is worth watching through the credits to hear Kevin Smith mention some dialog he omitted in the end.

The only downside is this does feel like the end of the View Askew universe. But for the sake of Jay and Silent Bob, I hope not.

Snoochie boochies.

Extreme Self-Hosting Because What is “Always Free” Anyway?

This is a strange timeline. Just a little bit over a year ago, I wrote about how I recently shifted some personal service onto Oracle’s Cloud, which had the most generous free tier available. I did this because self-hosting my own infrastructure seemed silly.

A few days ago, while filtering out spam, I notice an email from Oracle where they deem my two VM instances as idling because, well, I’ll just show you.

Oracle's new idling limitations, the impetus for my latest self-hosting adventure.
Oracle’s new terms. (February 4, 2023)

Eesh. Well, Oracle is often times referred to as the IT world’s Darth Vader after suing Google over Android, so this isn’t surprising. Fortunately this portrayal allows me to use this meme.

I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.
Oracle’s standard negotiation strategy.

My recourse? Adding a credit card and switching my account from a truly free tier to one where Oracle can bill me if/when I exceed the free usage limitations. Ok, that’s fine, but I also don’t particularly like entities holding my credit card information when I’m just trying to use their free service. And as you the reader might appreciate, avoiding Oracle’s definition of idling requires something to chew up more CPU or network utilization than this small little WordPress blog and the publicly facing personal services I run. Certainly WordPress is a large and complicated CMS in this day and age, but the amount of web traffic required to meet either of the CPU or network utilization thresholds vastly exceeds what I’ve ever seen. Shocking, right?

On one hand, this policy is understandable. Reclaiming the instances in this manner allows for reallocation of my rounding-error of a workload throughout whatever data center they live in and there’s great reasons for this. And on occasion, Oracle has moved my instances onto different hardware. Downtime is acceptable at this price so this never caused any concern. Indeed, that’s just how hosting works sometimes. This is one reason I didn’t start with self-hosting. Hardware continues to break despite our best efforts. And since my self-hosting needs are so light, it didn’t make sense to use my hardware.

The wrinkle was that not all instances were equally easy to obtain. Oracle’s Ampere A1 instances (VM.Standard.A1.Flex) were substantially faster than the AMD instances (VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro. Substantially faster in that I perceived the speed difference just serving this website! Being superior, these A1 instances are difficult to obtain. Indeed, I couldn’t get one when I first signed up in November 2021 and didn’t have one when I blogged about it. Only in March 2022 did I luck into one when just playing around with Oracle’s console. After just playing around some and noticing the speed difference just moving around the system, I migrated most of my compatible services there. My speed indicators jumped immediately, boosting my PageRank and bringing the riches of readership that I now enjoy.

Even using the much slower AMD instances, I can’t hit Oracle’s thresholds. I’m using a well liked and likely very efficient software stack to serve traffic, and have taken precautions to filter traffic through Cloudflare. Even if I removed their services, the traffic wouldn’t cause even a poorly thought out and inefficient software stack to meet Oracle’s thresholds. And to be frank, tinkering on the AMD instances wasn’t fun. They were substantially slower than anything I’ve used in recent memory, including an HP ProLiant Micro Server N40L.

The answer, after some noodling, was simply to move those services back onto my own hardware. Yes, extreme self-hosting. I already host some personal stuff at home using a Celeron G3900 server living inside a Fractal Design Node 804 case. Here too, the CPU load isn’t too high since it mostly maintains the spinning rust the case houses. But the trick is that my ISP most likely filters or blocks the traffic on ports 80 and 443 to discourage hosting. And these publicly facing services are web ones, so those are key.

Enter Cloudflare’s Tunnels which have become all the rage in some subreddits. No publicly routable IP address is necessary and instead I run a daemon on the system to create an outbound connection to Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Here’s a picture from Cloudflare themselves illustrating this configuration.

Cloudflare's handy diagram showing how Cloudflare Tunnel facilitates self-hosting.
Cloudflare’s helpful diagram.

Yes, that means I’m i) executing someone else’s code on my system at the system level to ii) explicitly introduce a middleman between myself and my traffic. But this isn’t different from trusting any other software on my server (e.g., Docker in general, my ad-filtering DNS server), and for my public-facing infrastructure, I’ve already employed Cloudflare to filter out malicious traffic. So employing Cloudflare’s tunnel only slightly changes the security profile while giving the benefit of self-hosting these small, and apparently, unwanted workloads.

So over the course of a few days, I look into what’s necessary to run Cloudflare’s daemon on my hardware. I added their Docker image to my compose file, made some tweaks, and fired things up. After fiddling with a few settings, everything started right up like it did before. Caddy’s configuration didn’t change at all because of the migration. Indeed, none of the containers needed tweaking aside from shifting everything from the default network to a specific network associated with the Cloudflare daemon. And by employing Docker, at least I have some certainty that should someone find a way into the system (e.g., through a supply chain attack on Cloudflare for example), access is restricted by the Docker engine. And I’m still running other Docker containers separately to host services that aren’t public facing.

So instead of relying on a cloud provider to host the infrastructure, I’ve brought it in house. Decentralization is the theme for 2023 it seems, and self-hosting is the way forward.