A Tidbyt of Sugar

While it’s easy to recognize that the Midcentury Modern aesthetic has mudslid down the mountainside of contemporary home goods design over the last 15 years or so and left in its wake a more uniform palette-terrain of polished hardwoods mixed with the color black, it’s worth mentioning that this sort of simplicity has left a great deal of upside in its wake. As a small example, 10 years ago convincing your girlfriend that Hacker Nouveau was a missing theme in her living space would have been a steeper climb, but now it can be basically effortless.

I found Tidbyt maybe 6 months ago, and up from the deep pixelated cistern of love I have for old things that are new again swam a Click on the order button that was so emphatic it should have probably snapped my index finger in half. I care about this thing for two basic reasons: it looks and feels good in real life, and its creators have made it approachable to tinker with. So far, I’ve finished 1 little project with it and am working on the next, and I think they’re indicative of 2 of the 3 levels of constructive nonsense you can get into with it.

Level 1 is the app shop, where you can hop into the Tidbyt app and pick from a bunch of pre-made options that generally rule. Things like weather apps, various info tracking stuff, and more creative things like game integrations and pets etc. Level 2 is drawing your own art pieces and displaying on your device through Xtrabyt. It’s a free service (that maybe is owned by Tidbyt? I’m not sure) that lets you draw in your browser and then add to your device via an image key. Super basic and rad, and below is a Dwarf Fortress drawing I did for mine yesterday. I also posted it on Reddit, so we’ll see what people think.

Level 3 is building your own applications for it either totally or partially from scratch. It runs on an open source platform called Pixlet, which uses a pretty simple language called Starlark, and you can check out the source code for it over on Github. I’m in the midst of seeing if I can take this earthquake tracking app (yeehaw) and update it to something that lets my girlfriend track the progress of the current Taylor Swift tour, and I’ll let you know if I find any daylight there.

In the meantime, I figured I would pass this along since I’ve had a couple weeks to fuck around with it and am still enjoying it. Odds and Ends are a minor obsession of mine, but I lose interest pretty quickly in a decent chunk of stuff I think I’m going to think is cool, if that makes sense, which is totally fine. If I dug around in any of the famous workshops from my favorite movies or books I’d probably find a bunch of shit that was half done and half-explored, and I think that just comes with the territory rather than meaning something bad about me or anyone else like that. It’s good for us to have an Oort cloud while we’re figuring out what’s going to fit into our system in a more planetary way, and while Tidbyt is, at best, a little addition to the Kuiper belt it nevertheless is a vehicle with some fun, tinkery kitsch.