Roll Call is a jury-rigged receipt printer that sits on my desk and dictates my morning routine. Every morning, it prints out a briefing of all the critical information I need to catapult me into the day that awaits. Phones are great—but I don’t like checking mine when I wake up. I want my brain fresh and undistracted.
I first ideated what would become Roll Call on a post-it note on the wall of my dorm. When the final project of DESIGN11 rolled around and they asked us to “fix a bug in our lives,” I knew I had to take advantage of the opportunity.
After a flurry of on-paper ideation, I began with the software. It’s all open-source: the bulk is a couple hundred lines of bespoke Python, supported by an iMessage library I customized to allow me to determine if a message was unread. I call out to a few startlingly good libraries to fetch the data that will go on the receipt: the day of the week, the weather, my Oura Ring stats from the night before, unread iMessages, my todo list, and my calendar events for the day. When that was done, I called every single possible retailer in the Bay Area who might sell me a receipt printer—no dice. I even asked a couple restaurants that I was eating at if I could pawn theirs, which was similarly unsuccessful. So I ordered one on Amazon (guided in my purchase by this blog post), married it to my code, and have been using it every morning since.
Roll Call is one experiment in my long crusade to replace the phone. Our current era of mobile computing has brought benefits that are difficult to fully comprehend. But they have come along with deep ills. The combination of hardware and software in Roll Call has allowed me to entirely eliminate my phone from this component of my daily routine. In this slice of my life, I experience all the benefits of technology with none of its downsides. However, this only works because I can still rely on my phone during the rest of the day. I can replace my phone with a receipt in the morning and feel better because of it, but later in the day I still need to fall back to the harsh light of the screen to respond to message, mark todos as complete, and more.
What the Roll Call experiment allows us to do is free our minds to imagine what removing the phone might look like from the rest of the day. This part? It’s already taken care of. We’ve solved for this use case, one that is normally solved with our phones. How can we solve for the rest? We have an alternative way to read data, how can we rethink writing? How do we redesign the rest of our phone-based experiences to avoid falling into Instagram and a hundred other things that melt away all the presence and the possiblity of our beautiful lives? This part of the pressure is gone, now let’s deal with the rest.
A theoretical, optional pitch that loses people but I think is conceptually neat and cool
Roll Call is paper, with a digital brain. Every morning I look at a slip of paper—for all intents and purposes the same piece of paper—and instead of remaining static it autonomosly reflects the changing state of the world around me. The state of the world exists in a Platonic ideal somewhere in conceptspace. Nowadays we represent all that information about our lives, that typically is just held in our heads, in various databases. That information is displayed back to us in our calendar apps, and todo lists, and all the rest. Those apps transform the database's zeroes and ones, which are themselves representations of ideas, into a form that we view on our phones all the time. Roll Call's receipts are equally valid transformations of those zeroes and ones.
The current implementation of Roll Call does have some gaps, which I would love to address in hypothetical future versions. The most prominent is its deep reliance on macOS: it reads iMessage’s chat.db directly from disk and searches Contacts.app to associate phone numbers with names. Beyond that, Roll Call also doesn’t trigger automatically. Instead, I manually run the script on my laptop, which is significantly less sexy. The device itself is pretty large and bulky, and relies on some gross cabling (USB A, B, and C). It doesn’t print out my gym day. Some imagined diagnoses:
- A Matrix-iMessage bridge, a-la Beeper, would make developing for the messaging platform less hellish. I could also skip the middleman and set up a direct API call from a Raspberry Pi to a macOS host in the cloud.
- Developing a good CardDAV library in Python, which I shockingly couldn’t find, seems like a simple replacement for the
Contacts.appAppleScript-in-Python monstrosity I cooked up. - Ideally, the script would run as soon as I wake up. I wear an Oura Ring every night; it would be super cool to connect the printer to a webhook that gets called when the ring detects that I’m awake. That endpoint doesn’t exist at the moment, and probably would be very difficult to create given Oura’s current periodic-sync-over-Bluetooth technology. I’ll keep my eye out though!
- Barring the above, I would love to hook up the whole thing to a smart button (no screen!) that I can just smack and have the whole thing print.
- Making the code asynchronous where it makes sense. Initially, I had the script fetch the data and then print it all out really fast. Then I introduced some styling that I had to weave throughout and couldn’t do before printing: I miss the smooth all-at-once feeling. I think some smart code jockey-ing could bring this back.
- Put the gym day in my calendar?
As a last component of my time in DESIGN11, we made little advertisements. You can check out mine here on YouTube! Remind me never to film when I have a stuffy nose ever again.