Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

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The ht program doesn't appear to support conditional downloads. It also doesn't support a HEAD request, which is odd, as it supports GET, POST, PUT, PATH, DELETE. With a HEAD request, you could do the Etag or Last-Modified comparison yourself.

I suppose you could just download the image and do a "diff -q" or compare an MD5 checksum, or even just file size.

Or use a different tool maybe? I see that rural supports head requests. https://crates.io/crates/rural

Edit: Appears that ht may be able to get response headers. It's sort of a documentation bug. It has a -p/--print option, but the README doesn't document what the arguments are.

Found it.. "ht -p h https://google.com" returns the headers, so you could extract the Etag or Last-Modified header.

I could replace ht with another HTTP client. I just picked it because it was the easiest way I knew to compile an HTTP client with statically linking openssl.

If anyone knows an easy way to compile curl with statically linked openssl, let me know!

It would also not be difficult to build a small custom client based on Hyper or Reqwest.

Though I'm not sure if it would actually make a large difference with only 20 screen refreshes per day.

If it's really just the screen refresh that's to be avoided, I think just comparing old download /new download with "diff -q" would be a reasonable solution. Of course, perhaps the Kindle doesn't have a diff binary. But maybe it has "sum" or "md5sum" or something else in that space.

I wrote something like this using reqwest for a Waveshare 7.5inch display. Also includes a dithering step so all that is needed is a web server serving an image. No conditional requests though but should be easy to add. It is fully statically compiled (even uses musl and rustls), runs on a very bare-bones Linux environment on a Raspberry.

https://git.pixelspark.nl/pixelspark/sparkboard

Nice work!

HTTPie supports headers using header-name:value CLI parameters; I didn't check whether ht supports these. You would have to save the proper response header between requests. The question then turns to how the 304 Not Modified response is handled.

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