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Comment by YaxelPerez | Hacker News Reader

I used Tasker to make my phone vibrate in Morse code. Now I don't have to take it out of my pocket to read a notification.

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> Now I don't have to take it out of my pocket to read a notification.

Definitely going to look into this. I'm a blind screen reader user and, when I had a phone with physical buttons, I could have it in my pocket connected to an external braille device or pair of headphones. I could easily carry on conversations, browse the web, ask for help, all sorts of things without taking it out of my pocket, and nobody had to know I was doing anything.

With a touchscreen phone I can't really do any of that. Even if I can listen to notifications in an earphone with the phone in my pocket, I can't take care of them unless I take the phone out. Plus, wearing earphones and walking around in public when you can't see isn't wise.

The AirPods might be a temporary help if you have iOS. You can plug them into your ear when needed and send a command. Probably not the most ideal but Siri seems to be getting better.

If you have an android device you might be able to slave a keyboard and an earphone to it and use it that way? I don't know how feasable that is though!!

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You led me down a rabbit hole, as I was trying to understand your 'wpm' variable... In case anybody else is interested, he's using 12wpm apparently based on formula [1], which isn't enough for a Radiotelegraph Operator License but still impressive to me :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Speed_in_words_per_...

Script responds with 404.

I was looking if this would be a nice addition for my smartwatch.

Should be fixed now. Thanks.

You should make it so you can reply by bouncing your leg up and down. (Then go have an Edward Thorp weekend in Vegas of course.)

Or tap the phone while it’s in the pocket

I doubt that software could tell the difference between (a long tap) and (a short tap followed by a pause).

With a long tap the phone would immediately "bounce" back a bit, while holding the finger down would delay that. I'm not sure how reliable that would be, though.

That’s really cool, but from an actual life utility perspective isn’t it draining of mental bandwidth to always have this communication channel open? I could see this being useful for some Jack Bauer type activities but otherwise I want to give notifs less access to me, not more. Again - very cool, not trying to detract.

That'd be even better on a smartwatch... and come to think of it, Morse code might very well be the quickest method of text entry on a smartwatch...

I've looked into this in the past (on an embedded device, not a smartwatch) and back then was convinced that it was a more difficult idea than I wanted to spend time on. Morse code is made for humans to write and humans to listen to, so it's often sloppy and difficult to parse in an automated fashion. Everyone writes a bit differently, at different speeds, and everyone has a different definition of how long a dash and a dot should be.

It's possible for sure, but like OCR there's a lot of variability in it. Just like parsing handwriting is full of edge cases, parsing morse code is as well.

That's great! Could you be convinced to share the code for it?

This is genius. I've been wanting to do some kind of mobile app with morse code functionality to scratch a nerdy itch, and this seems like an awesome project idea

That is so cool!

Does that affect battery life by much?

Haven't noticed a sizable difference on my phone.

Oh yes please share the code

Ridiculous. I love it.

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