A small drawn figure in a pointed hat and round glasses, with a seal reading wander

wander wildwood

I make small things, mostly for a little E Ink phone, and tinker with a few home servers that several of them talk to. They keep to themselves — no accounts, nothing sent to me, nothing that needs looking after. Most of the work is deciding what to leave out.

Apps for the Mudita Kompakt

The Kompakt is a phone with a small E Ink screen, no colour, and a slow redraw. These are built for that screen: black on white, no animation, lists you can read in sunlight.

The Messaging inbox: Signal and text conversations in one list, newest first

Messaging

SMS, MMS and Signal in one inbox, and a page your phone serves to your own computer so you can text from a keyboard.

Audio Reading playing a chapter, with the sleep timer and speed above

Audio Reading

An audiobook player. Point it at a folder of books, tell it once how they are laid out, and it keeps your place in each one.

Music Box listing songs, with Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums and Radio along the foot

Music Box

A music player for a folder of your own music, a music server you run, internet radio and YouTube Music. A song you download stays on the phone.

Typewriter showing a page of writing, held sideways

Typewriter

A text editor that opens in landscape and stays there, for writing with a keyboard connected to the phone. What you write is plain text, in a folder you choose.

Clippings showing an article as plain text

Clippings

Feeds read as plain text, with Gemini, gopher and Spartan alongside them; fetched on wifi, read with the radio off. The volume keys turn the page.

Files with two documents chosen in a folder on a home server

Files

A file manager, with the shared drives on your own servers as places like any other. Choose several things at once; a copy is written whole or not at all.

Birding with a Northern Cardinal heard, and the day's other birds below

Birding

Names the birds it hears, offline, with BirdNET running on the phone itself. A bird's Wikipedia page is a press away, opened in your browser.

Mushroom Journal on Omphalotus illudens, the jack-o'-lantern, with a drawing

Mushroom Journal

Write a mushroom down while you are standing over it, and work out at home what it might be. It narrows a list, never decides, and says nothing about eating one.

Detour pointing half a mile away, south-east

Detour

Press once and it picks somewhere near you to walk to, with no particular reason to go there, and gives you an arrow and a distance to follow.

Whereabouts listing its commands

Whereabouts

Finds your phone when it is lost: where it is, a ring, a lock. With its server, the people who share with you appear on one map.

Star Chart drawing the night sky as a round map

Star Chart

The sky over you, drawn the way a paper star atlas draws it, black on white. Set any moment and any place to see what will be up.

Sky showing 60 degrees, and rain likely for the next twelve hours

Sky

The days ahead, the rain radar, and your own weather station if you have one. It says no more than the station and the forecast know.

Tuning Fork on the chromatic scale, reading A

Tuning Fork

A tuner, chromatic or by instrument, with a pitch plot, a cents readout and temperaments well past equal. The screen stays awake while you play.

Level with its bubble centred, 0.0 degrees both ways

Level

A spirit level that knows whether it is lying flat or standing on an edge, and shows the right vial for each. It says level only when it is.

Speedometer with speed, altitude, position and air pressure

Speedometer

How fast you are going, how high you are, and what the air is doing. Press the speed and it fills the screen. Not accurate enough to navigate by.

Cycle's calendar for September

Cycle

A cycle tracker with no permissions at all. It shows what you recorded, expects what comes next, and keeps everything you write on the phone.

Go, a game in progress on a nine by nine board

Go

A game of Go on a 9×9 board, against GNU Go or the person opposite, with handicaps, a hint when you want one, and the board counted at the end.

Chess+ with two players on one phone

Chess+

The phone's own chess app, with a second player added: two people on one board, passing the phone back and forth between moves.

Handheld Games playing a homebrew puzzle game

Handheld Games

Game Boy games, drawn in four greys for a screen that has no colour. The picture lands at exactly three times size, so nothing is resampled.

Stop motion

One app for a different phone: the capture half of a stop-motion practice. The film is put together elsewhere.

Stop Motion's capture screen over a frame from a stop-motion film: two felt puppets at a hole in a mossy stone wall, with the lens, shutter, Review, Settings, Lock and Compare down the side

Stop Motion

Stop-motion capture for the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, reaching all three rear lenses where other apps find one. The exposure locks for the whole film, with onion skin, drawn guides and an interval timer.

Installing

Each download is an .apk, the file an Android phone installs from. Open it on the Kompakt and allow the installation when it asks. The first time, Android will want permission to install from wherever you downloaded it.

Every release publishes a .sha256 beside the APK, so you can check the file you got is the file that was built.

To be told when there is a new version, add any of the source links above to Obtainium, which watches a repository and offers you its releases.