Home/1 Poem/1 Server

TL;DR: here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/jaygoldman/home1

I’ve long been a fan of Matt Webb’s, going way back to his days as half of BERG London and the Here&There horizonless projection map, which graces our dining room wall in a large framed edition:

Matt writes a fabulous blog at Interconnected.org, which always delivers some very thought-provoking mediations on the intersection of technology and humanity and how we interact with and relate to the software and devices in our lives.

That’s where I first heard about Matt launching Acts Not Facts to explore ideas at the intersection of AI, Multiplayer, and Embodiment. One of the first is the Poem/1, a physical hardware clock, he launched in a Kickstarter project that generates a new rhyming AI poem once a minute. Poem/1 got featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Ars Technica, Kickstarter Invent, TLDR AI, The Verge, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, NDTV, the New York Times, and Private Eye.

The Poem/1 website shows a live preview of the current poem

Matt has gone on to co-found Inanimate, where he and Daniel Fogg are exploring Universal Ambient Intelligence. They’ve recently shared Resident, their code sandbox with hot reload for ESP32 devices¹.

I really enjoyed following along with Matt’s 25-update journey through hardware design and manufacturing in China, including various missteps like ripples in the display and one supplier producing 1,000 cases with the wrong FCC ID laser-etched on them. Hardware is hard!

Our little Poem/1 sits happily in our living room, on a unit under our TV, and we’ve been enjoying the very random poems it generates. Some are much better than others, and you can hit the button on the top to like them and save them to your account. You can also use the web app to send notes to your Poem/1, which will appear on screen briefly.

Yesterday, we were laughing about a particularly funny and nonsensical poem, and I jokingly said, “These would be way better if they were about our cat!”

And that’s the thing about this crazy time we live in. Saying these things out loud has become akin to summoning them from the ether if you just happen to say them toward a microphone connected to Claude.

So, a few prompts later, I happily and proudly present Home/1, a Poem/1 community server. It’s available as an MIT-licensed Open Source project:

https://github.com/jaygoldman/home1

Matt built the devices so that they can point to any poem.town compatible server, avoiding device and vendor lock-in, and making it future-proof in case he ever shuts his down. There’s a well-documented Device API that I pointed Claude to, and we talked through some requirements. Home/1 serves up a little local server within your wifi network that enables you to configure:

People and pets (their relationship, traits, interests/loves, birthday, and notes)
Household info (city, teams, traditions, facts)
Poem generation model, including “claude -p” if you have it, and API keys for each vendor
Weather location and units
Timely good news lookup and inclusion in poems

Now we get a poem every minute that’s about a member of our family (including the cat!), our city, the actual weather, and good news (Canada winning their World Cup game, Toronto Pride Parade, etc.). Some recent examples:

At 1:16, the Jays take the field in blue / a sunny afternoon for the whole crew

At 1:13 the cat finds her patch of sun / curled in warm light, her napping day begun

At 1:07 the clouds drift high / a mild 26° beneath a partial sky

Some are still much better than others, but there’s a joy in each one being relevant to our family and lives. Let me know if you install it — and feel free to open PRs for any feature requests or updates!

Either you know what that means, and you excitedly clicked the link, or you don’t, and it won’t matter if you do. ↩

Footnotes