A street across the way, living its evening in real time — lamps coming on at dusk, a television flickering blue, someone crossing a room, the last lights going out one by one. The sun is worked out from arithmetic and every window’s evening from a seed, so there is nothing to fetch, no audio, and no text on the screen at all.
Warm lamps, a green-white kitchen, a television that changes scene every second or two, a cat on a ledge now and then, string lights in December. What each window does at any moment is worked out from the seed, the window and the night, so a screen that reloads at 22:40 rebuilds the same street and two screens with the same seed agree window for window.
Dusk, an evening full of life, windows going dark toward midnight, a few night owls at 3 AM, an early breakfast light, dawn. Sunrise and sunset come from the date, the place and the time zone, so a screen in Lisbon and a screen in Sapporo are each right for where they are. No outbound request is ever made.
Brownstone or city, and a time zone; a latitude and longitude if you want the sun exactly right. Rain, snow and string lights are optional. The whole picture drifts a few pixels over many minutes so nothing burns in, and it fits 16:9, 21:9, 4:3 and portrait panels from the same URL.
Setup
A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.
F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.
Configuration
Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at night-windows.livingkiosk.com/setup.
| Parameter | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
scene | brownstone | city for a wall of towers at a distance. |
tz | the device’s | An IANA zone: whose clock the street keeps. An unknown name is ignored. |
lat, lon | Greenwich’s latitude; longitude from the zone | Where the sun rises and sets. Either may be given alone. Clamped, not rejected. |
rain, snow | off | on for a gentle fall over the street. If both are given, snow wins. |
lights | auto | String lights on the brownstones after dark: on, off, or auto for December on the street’s own calendar. |
seed | — | Pins the street, who lives in it and how each evening goes. Without one each load draws a different street. |
dim | 0 | Black scrim over everything, 0 to 0.8 (fleet-wide convention). |
Night Windows is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.