Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app

I had the idea for BIGWORDS.PAGE when I wanted to display a message on a tablet that I had remote management control over, but no physical access. Configuring it to be a kiosk browser is easy, but how do I get the browser to show my message? So I made the URL be the message. It uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage. All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy. https://bigwords.page/#Hello,%20HN!&bg=ff6600&fg=000000&font... There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful. I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier. It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing. Let me know what you think.

• idw · 23 hours ago

  Really nicely done

• notpushkin · 22 hours ago

  > The URL is the app LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t even care that much about the code, but please write prose by hand, in your own voice, if you want us to read it. Edit: rephrased the last sentence. Also, here’s my take on the title: > Show HN: Bigwords.page – turn any screen into a sign, controlled by the URL params

  • dylanhouli · 22 hours ago

    Wait how is "The URL is the app" LLM-speak? Genuine question, sounded fine to me when I read it, not sure what a better way to phrase it would be

    • rpdillon · 22 hours ago

      It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. The app is the app, and it lives on the server. The URL just contains the content of the sign.

      • dec0dedab0de · 22 hours ago

        I thought they meant the outputted javascript is embedded in the url, like a bookmarklet. But looking closer, it clearly isn't.

      • notpushkin · 22 hours ago

        I’ve read it as “the URL is the UI”... sorry; I mean, you can change URL params (remotely) to control the app. It is a good idea perhaps (if you have the means to open a URL remotely), but evidently the title does not get the idea across. (Maybe I’m also wrong, I haven’t read the docs yet :)

      • bryanrasmussen · 21 hours ago

        it's marketing speech, following the rules of how to make memorable slogans that have been around for decades and in many different formats. Elevator pitches, explain it to me like I'm five, keep it simple, stupid, and so forth. It sounds like an LLM because LLMs learned from the digested wisdom of a million marketers. It may be an LLM produced it or it may just as well be someone who has cracked a marketing textbook some time in their life or hell, has watched the full run of Mad Men and thought, now what is a pithy way to express the selling point of this thing? on edit: That said, I would probably have said "Turn Any Screen Into A Sign with Just A URL!"

      • onion2k · 19 hours ago

        It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. That's all marketing.

    • notpushkin · 22 hours ago

      “The [A] is the [B]” (and variations with “the” replaced with “your”) is screaming LLM to me. It’s been used by real people too, but it sounds very corporate, and is not something I’ve seen used to describe a personal project before LLMs.

      • 2III7 · 22 hours ago

        LLM apophenia is so widespread in HN that it's becoming quite sickening.

      • rdiddly · 21 hours ago

        It must have been used by humans before LLMs, because where do you think they learned it?

        • notpushkin · 21 hours ago

          It has been used before LLMs. I have no idea why LLMs prefer it, though.

        • ape4 · 21 hours ago

          The network is the computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer

        • seb1204 · 21 hours ago

          All the marketing materials that got used for training. Marketing speak is not my cup of team.

        • gwerbin · 19 hours ago

          It was always corny except in very specific cases.

        • chabska · 15 hours ago

          The training data set is a huge corpus of text from a wide variety of styles and time period. A human writer knows to adjust their writing style to fit their intended audience. A skilled LLM user knows to direct the LLM to generate in the appropriate style. A naive LLM user doesn't, so that's how we get this uncanny valley ick, where the text feels wrong.

    • stavros · 17 hours ago

      This is like asking "how do you know a cat is a cat and not a dog?". If you've seen enough samples, you recognise the pattern.

  • rpdillon · 22 hours ago

    Yeah, the issue here is that the URL is not the app. This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.

  • rendleflag · 22 hours ago

    Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI". I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.

    • IncreasePosts · 22 hours ago

      OP didn't quote the part with the em dash, they quoted the part with the "The X is the Y", which is a common LLMism.

      • chrisweekly · 2 hours ago

        It's also a concise and accurate description of the service. All this gnashing of teeth over "could've been AI-generated" is overblown and tiresome.

        • notpushkin · 1 hour ago

          > It's also a concise and accurate description of the service. If it was a clever expression that does get the idea across, I would be okay with it. “The API is the UI” is of similar form and I love it. It’s simple, catchy, and it does convey a meaning: designing an API is just designing a UI for developers. “The URL is the app” makes literally no sense without additional context? I’m not sure this is a “concise and accurate description of the service”. I did take a guess [1] and I was correct, but that was after I’ve seen the examples. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997420

    • notpushkin · 22 hours ago

      That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.) It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post. --- Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255

      • rendleflag · 21 hours ago

        I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-). The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.

        • notpushkin · 21 hours ago

          > I always get en and em confused Yeah, it’s somewhat a typography-nerdy thing :–) (gosh that looks terrible probably; edit: actually it’s surprisingly fine) > indicating that these things are not supported Of course, but it does sound a bit unnatural IMO. Then again, I’m going by the vibes here.

        • xoxxala · 19 hours ago

          I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names. En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

          • hunter2_ · 13 hours ago

            Not unlike how in the trades, a tee is T-shaped, a wye is Y-shaped, a delta is Δ-shaped. Spelled-out letters aren't always geometric metaphors, but it's a thing. Then you've got the first syllable of Ω (omega) being a homophone of Ohm, for what that's worth. From there we have ℧ (mho) for conductance... It's all quite clever. But I digress; I'll get back to emceeing and deejaying, cueing these elpees after a quick pee, okay?

          • notpushkin · 8 hours ago

            Different fonts use different lengths (sometimes en dash is the width of an uppercase “N” instead of lowercase, sometimes it’s half of the em dash which itself is `1em` which may or may not equal the width of the “M”...) But it’s a good way to remember that indeed, yeah!

      • foobar1962 · 18 hours ago

        > (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.) I saw what you did there.

      • dannyw · 15 hours ago

        After enough time spent reading LLM speak, I’ve found its phrasing and particularities subconsciously work into the way I write as well, entirely by hand. It’s not always AI. It could be a human ;) I really despise LLM-written writing too; but I think it’s nice to be not super paranoid about it.

        • W0lfEagle · 9 hours ago

          Agreed. I've noticed the same too. I'm afraid we've probably already reached the time where text written by humans sounds llmish

    • GrinningFool · 21 hours ago

      For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.

    • ajkjk · 20 hours ago

      not that

    • slacktivism123 · 11 hours ago

      This isn't human writing. This is blustering, bloviated Claudespeak we have seen a thousand times over. Try Opus 5 and its ilk sometime and maybe you'll see it too. The initial commit: https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11... https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11... https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11... https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11... https://github.com/SpeakingOfBrad/BIGWORDS.PAGE/commit/d5a11... The highlights: The URL is the whole display: no accounts, no login, no backend. Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules. Underscores inside words are left alone, as in standard Markdown, so names like Home_Guest_5G, snake_case or first_name@example.com show exactly as typed. Only an underscore at a word boundary starts or ends emphasis. Code is shown exactly as typed. Nothing inside backticks is treated as formatting, a slide break, {countdown} or an escape, which makes it the easy way to show passwords and codes with symbols in them. A code span has to open and close on the same line. Browsers may write a typed backtick as %60 in the address bar; both forms work. All fonts ship with the site, each next to its license file. A font is only downloaded, from this site, when a display uses it. Screen wake: with wake=on (the default) the viewer asks the browser to keep the screen on. It asks again whenever the tab becomes visible. Browsers without support ignore it. The viewer can be embedded anywhere (OBS, dashboards); the editor and docs can't. HSTS is left to the TLS-terminating reverse proxy. The app reads all state from the URL fragment, so / serves every display. /editor and /docs are their own files (editor.html, docs.html); anything else is a real 404. img-src stays open because displays show images from any host. Inline styles are needed for the runtime @font-face rules and style attributes. A snippet, so 404 responses get these headers too. Exercises the canonical URLs, social cards and sitemap, which are only built when SITE_URL is set. The smoke test reads it too. Don't get me started on the docstrings and code comments.

    • camillomiller · 11 hours ago

      My man, that web design is absolutely pure Claude. But hey that’s ok, the app is a good idea and works well, I have no issue with that. Clearly the person making it knows how to structure a web app and make it usable and it shows it’s not just slop. This is good use of AI coding

    • slacktivism123 · 10 hours ago

      >I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out. I posted a detailed reply to your comment with lots of examples and HN's new slop filter just killed it... due to overabundance of slop. :-) I recommend turning on showdead to read it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002280

      • notpushkin · 8 hours ago

        I think you’ve been resurrected now :)

  • okaleniuk · 22 hours ago

    Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets." Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.

    • notpushkin · 21 hours ago

      I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay. LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers. Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.

      • GrinningFool · 21 hours ago

        Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.

    • bmacho · 21 hours ago

      > If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored. Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.

    • ShinyLeftPad · 19 hours ago

      it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words , what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.

  • nonethewiser · 14 hours ago

    I think “The URL is the app.” Is AI generated and it weakens the title but that’s ultimately only so important. You are classifying well and optimizing poorly.

• okaleniuk · 22 hours ago

  I love it! In fact I employed the same idea for the slide stack site I use for teaching. Not exactly "URL is an app" but "URL is a slide" https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/_1.html?sequence=... The same consideration applies. No backend, no storage, also no user data collection, no authorization, no hurdles in general. Everyone can use it.

• NoDodgeQuestion · 21 hours ago

  Curious, did you use AI model?

• abejfehr · 21 hours ago

  We had similar ideas! Except mine is less customizable, I never thought to add formatting. https://github.com/abejfehr/bigtext https://www.abefehr.com/bigtext/

  • xd1936 · 19 hours ago

    Same! This solution is way more flexible than mine was. https://github.com/leoherzog/ParameterPage https://parameter.page/?title=This%20is%20an%20Example%20Pag... !

• rinconrex · 21 hours ago

  Great execution.

• zie · 18 hours ago

  This is neat. I'm deaf, so I have to write people all the time with big text. I have a mobile app that does this, but it's neat you have something web based. Thanks for this. I'm going to self-host it as I can see a lot of use and I don't want to spam your servers. Thanks!

  • SpeakingOfBrad · 18 hours ago

    The hosted version runs through Cloudflare, and since it’s a static site it caches really well! Don’t ever feel bad about using the hosted version. I’m not worried about bandwidth there. (But self-hosting is fun too!)

• jluxenberg · 17 hours ago

  Neat idea! Fun fact; it's not as widely usable but data URLs work for this too. Maybe you could add an option to copy the data URL for a page? e.g. this one https://bigwords.page/#%23%20Gate%2012%0ABoarding%20now&bg=0... becomes data:text/html,<!doctype html><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><body style="margin:0;height:100vh;display:flex;flex-direction:column;align-items:center;justify-content:center;background:%230b3d91;color:%23fff;font-family:sans-serif;text-align:center"><h1 style="font-size:18vw;margin:0">Gate 12</h1><p style="font-size:9vw;margin:0">Boarding now</p> (paste this ^^ into your URL bar)

  • voooduuuuu · 7 hours ago

    Neat!!! Does this work with mailto, can you embed html into emails?

    • contravariant · 5 hours ago

      You can set the content of the mail, whether it accepts html is up to the email clients I think.

• nicbou · 15 hours ago

  It's a really cool idea with lots of potential uses, and the extra features are also neat. No notes, well done!

• arpakuutio · 3 hours ago

  Good work! Funnily enough, I actually very recently also made a document sharing tool with very similar approach to sharing an "app as URL", but for a different kind of use case. I'm sharing arbitrary files, code snippets and scraped articles to friends or other devices of mine. https://linkify.ink/about Readability of the link itself wasn't a goal for me, so I've opted to zstd compress the content instead for shorter urls. Can still get quite big of course, depending on content. But I have successfully shared even some small image files with this. https://linkify.ink/#AgACe30otS_9YAATHRMAcsgaGHBZBwCDZiUYf1d...

Brilliant

> The URL is the app We used to call them websites

Really clever! Definitely feels like positive hacker creativity. Thanks for making it open source.

this is actually awesome, i've had something similar on my todo list forever. thanks!!! https://bigwords.page/#%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F

• mariotacke · 19 hours ago

  https://bigwords.page/#%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F&anim=pulse ;)

Really well done, can think of a few times this would have been useful in the recent past. Would be great for conferences in particular!

Hook it up to voice control so I can put an iPad in the back window of the car and tell other drivers… things.

• a3w · 23 hours ago

  Won't it say > You are a poo-emoji bomb-emoji #!! driver ?

  • ceejayoz · 23 hours ago

    I am exercising my Fifth Amendment right to silence at this time.

• GoRudy · 23 hours ago

  I had this idea ten years ago. Told my parents it’d be nice to say “have a good day” and my moms initial reaction was she’d say “** you”. End of that idea.

  • seb1204 · 21 hours ago

    Ouch, life long child trauma created. No idea is good enough to impress mum.

    • ShinyLeftPad · 19 hours ago

      i think it was the message she would put on the screen, not her reaction to childs invention

• trallnag · 23 hours ago

  I considered something similar with LED lights but I deemed it illegal in Germany

  • w0rd-driven · 19 hours ago

    I thought of something similar to both. A display would be nice but car to car/peer to peer communication would work too. It'd be a nightmare though considering I know how depraved the internet is. It's not anywhere near as anonymous but I don't think people generally care as much as they probably should.

I've used something like this on a phone to tell another car something was wrong with their vehicle.

The URL is the state but clearly there is an actual app here

• SpeakingOfBrad · 22 hours ago

  You right. But I only had 80 characters to work with.

• wcv · 1 hour ago

  If you liked hateoas, you'll love urlateoas!

Suggestion: make it a GoogleTV / AppleTV app so users can set it up in a few clicks and transform any screen laying around into a sign.

• SpeakingOfBrad · 22 hours ago

  I think BIGWORDS.PAGE would be a great companion to a web browser app on those TV devices. I haven't found any good web browser for AppleTV, but if somebody has a browser/kiosk app that let's you send a URL from your phone, that would be really great!

  • wiradikusuma · 22 hours ago

    Unfortunately Apple TV doesn't support WebView. I'm procuring a second-hand device so I can test my app there. I'm thinking of rendering it on the server and sending a series of images. Not sure of the cost, though.

• wiradikusuma · 22 hours ago

  I built https://signagesync.app for my cafe. It can be used to create a video wall (combine multiple screens to make a bigger screen).

• michaelsalim · 16 hours ago

  Shameless plug: I made Theopenpresenter.com that can do this. You can find the app in GoogleTV (not AppleTV due to browser limitation). And you can control it from phone or anywhere else.

Site is blocked - getting an SSL warning on Firefox.

Love this. Simple idea. Nice execution.

Who remembers https://bigassmessage.com/

• yunruse · 21 hours ago

  epilepsy warning for the 'MAGIC' style :(

  • megraf · 19 hours ago

    Can epileptics drive to a movie theater and watch a movie?

    • jedbrooke · 19 hours ago

      epileptics typically aren’t allowed to drive if there’s any risk of having a seizure while driving (depends on the type and severity of the epilepsy)

    • pbhjpbhj · 19 hours ago

      That's an interesting question. What motivated it? In the UK it depends, some epileptics aren't allowed to drive. Not all epileptics are photosensitive and not all movies trip people.

I love solutions like this. Make the URL the entirety of the data needed. Awesome

• below43 · 21 hours ago

  I did a similar thing to share files via a URL :) https://urlfile.app

  • mncharity · 17 hours ago

    Any learnings from pushing the envelope on URL payloads? Years ago I prototyped a customizable Powers of Ten -ish zoomer, with the stack of images/videos/maps/molecules specified in the URL. I should reprise it at some point if no one else does - wondering if you encountered anything unexpected, or Just Worked?

    • purple-leafy · 9 hours ago

      Heaps of Learnings here [0] from getting an entire games state into a url or QR code (a pretty damn complex game, 5-10 minute games comfortably fit in a QR code such that games can be replayed exactly as they happened - no server) [0] - https://github.com/con-dog/snibble/blob/master/README.md

I use to try and coordinate game nights across the world, and a url with the Unix timestamp of the event and a countdown showing how many days and hours worked quite well.

"Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules." Claudish needs to be cleaned up.

• efilife · 16 hours ago

  where did you find this? has this been removed?

Love this and I already have a use for this

Nice work! This is great.

I like that the fragment is basically argv for a static web app.

how to hide the Preview when sharing on messages? id prefer something more neutral.

• SpeakingOfBrad · 22 hours ago

  That's the OG (Open Graph) Image. It's an image built into the site that's used as the thumbnail for shares on social media and messaging apps. (More info on OG Images here: https://layerre.com/glossary/open-graph-image/ ) How could I change the image to be less intrusive? I can't have it show an image of the message you're trying to share, because the server never sees that message. But can I make the default image nicer on the eyes.

  • taoji1994 · 20 hours ago

    Make the default og.png calm and generic, just the wordmark on a plain background, so the preview reads as "here's a sign link" rather than a big ad.

how to hide or change the gigantic preview when sharing on apple messages? id prefer to change it, the default is obtrusive

• slater · 22 hours ago

  IIRC with any link thru Messages, before sending, you can press and hold it and it'll give u the option to send just as a text link

I used to order drinks like this when the bar was full

I like this site because it exemplifies DOTADIW, do one thing and do it well.

Cool project. But why not built with php so I can simply throw it on my running web server?

• pvillano · 21 hours ago

  It's a static site.

Completely different architecture, but would be amazing if another device could control what message (or photo, embedded video) is displayed. There's a huge industry around digital signage and I've always felt it could be replaced with a simple Chromium kiosk + auto-refreshed webpage content. There's really no need for expensive HDMI connections or custom video streams when we already have browsers.

• w0rd-driven · 19 hours ago

  I worked for a company creating apps for Kiosks that used SiteKiosk. It was a tight sandbox around Internet Explorer on Windows. This was 2014. Browsers are highly viable but properly locked kiosk mode wasn't. We used custom enclosures for $$$ with micro ATX Intel. Now Raspberry Pi or smaller could run circles around those workloads. That period was a fun time and one I think about all the time. The profit margins and costs have come down so much I don't know if an equivalent workload or company would stay afloat as long.

• michaelsalim · 16 hours ago

  I'm working on TheOpenPresenter for this, do give it a try. You can pretty much open the landing page, scan the QR code and you're set. It's also open-source and pretty mature now.

I use a similar thing but designed to be as few steps as possible: https://bigtext.k55.io/

This is a new project and a great place to start. So many fun rabbit holes from here with the different ways to get this working (and keeping displaying) on a chromecast, etc.

https://bigwords.page/#smol!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!... ! You seem to have the same bug I had when I first implemented https://screaming.saej.in/ In Firefox, scrollWidth includes spaces that extend into the margin, so it's possible for text to fit perfectly on the screen, but scrollWidth > clientWidth. Fix here https://saej.in/posts/screaming/

• SpeakingOfBrad · 20 hours ago

  Thanks! Like a dummy, I never tested in anything but my own browser. I found a couple of other bugs as well that weren't obvious without Firefox.

Damn, you triggered my old memories of clicking one of these on some old forum: https://disco.[EPILEPSY WARNING]fleo.se/hello

In the make one by hand section, you probably don't need to tell people %20 is a space. If they type it in naturally, the browser should encode automatically

• SpeakingOfBrad · 20 hours ago

  Good call. Removed it.

I did something similar years ago but for live satellite imagery https://earth.wooleys.us . I wanted to show my kids hurricane/typhoon imagery live. Worked great to throw up on a chromecast and let it run.

This sort of incredibly simple, crisp idea is what changes the world. Great job!

This reminds me of at a previous job people would leave their laptops unlocked. Security threatened people with yubikeys. So I used that opportunity to create https://butts.netlify.app so that any time someone left their laptop unlocked I’d go there and they’d be met with the word butts.

Cool project and nicely done but "the URL is the app" is just meaningless and it sounds exactly like what an llm would drop in every other paragraph.

• efilife · 16 hours ago

  because this is exactly what happened > No account, no app, nothing stored on a server. > No app. No login. Just a URL. > No app, no account, free. these two are from the front page

• rrr_oh_man · 10 hours ago

  You took the words right out of my LLM

  • altmanaltman · 7 hours ago

    the LLM took the words right out of humans first though

1. this is great! 2. QR code support? %QR=256x256&QR_ECC=min etc.? 3. prolly other natural / ez "make it big" - base64 tho not all browsers will support long enough URL to be worth it

• SpeakingOfBrad · 18 hours ago

  The QR code support is documented here: https://bigwords.page/docs#qr-code It’s “EZ” in that you don’t control the parameters of how the QR gets created. You can just control where it gets shown, and what it links to (though it does support telephone, SMS, Wi-Fi, email, and location).

Neat! For mobile, it would be nice to have an on-screen button to toggle full screen and turn the page landscape.

Very cool. Could you add base64 encoding to the query part so that it doesn’t hint at what the screen will say from the link text. Kind of gives the joke away sometimes.

• hunter2_ · 12 hours ago

  Might need to be careful: there's actually a URL-safe variant of base64 [0] that might be better, although the problematic + and / characters are probably not actually problematic within a fragment (+ only means space within the query, and / only means folder within a path and if a server wants it to) in which case standard base64 could be fine. The example with the coffee bean background image already uses base64 for the image data, so I guess that would get double-encoded. [0] https://medium.com/@bagdasaryanaleksandr97/understanding-bas...

Nice feature-set, cool project.

A brilliant example of zero-install, URL-driven utility design. Keeping the interface footprint minimal maximizes accessibility across diverse endpoints.

Tip: you can install this as a PWA (progress web app) onto your mobile device home screen. (If you have recent iOS 26+ or Android.) If the site adds a PWA manifest, Android (Chrome/Google app) will show a prompt to install as app on load. Also PWA install will be available for older iOS. I made a simple tool that generates a minimal PWA manifest: https://logo.leftium.com/logo

Hey Brad - I recently spent some effort creating a library of animating text effects and slide transitions. Similar idea, but hardware. Anyway, feel free to rip anything you like: https://openmarquee.com/demo/ https://github.com/qarl/openmarquee

Love this!!!

I always liked how lower budget entities would just full screen a power point slide. Like my local hockey arena rooms schedule or a Chinese food restaurant. I like flexible tools.

I absolutely love little tools where the URL defines the app's data. Cassidy Williams's pocketcal.com is another really simple but really useful one.

First thing this made me think of was Tom Green’s 1999 Super Bowl ads: https://youtu.be/7XoFThsG2jc?t=5

The Wake Lock API was made for stuff like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WakeLock

Thanks AI. Also this is authentic sentiment.

I've always used https://screenmessage.com/ for this. bigwords has the advantage of accepting inline parameters though.

Beautiful Idea. keep improving. One small suggestion- If you can modify the providers in more attractive way it may really do good.

• vivacious_cloud · 12 hours ago

  One more thing - also improve the visuals.

This is rather neat. Using hash to save bandwidth.

This is so brilliantly simple. I semi-regularly chair or panels and very often the venue hasn’t thought about a countdown timer so that I and the speakers know how long we have left. Having a timer massively improves the quality of a panel from an audience perspective as you can better pace things, move speakers on, wrap up without rushing, and so on. Because of how often a timer wasn’t available last year I made something where I could quickly spin one up using ffmpeg. This is much easier and much more useful. (And doesn’t require having my Mac with me!) Being able to stick one of these on an iPad on a table so that speakers can see it but audience can’t will be really useful. Thank you!

Same idea but as an iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/big-words/id296290510 It needs an update, but still works. Very useful to show your name, address or reference number in a post office and other similar places.

Reminds me of fakeimg.pl I did in the past

I needed something so similar to build a web page that does than but it's heavy on sanitizing special characters https://salamwaddah.com/tools/say/hi

looks nice

Love this pattern. I used the same trick for the async duel mode in a mobile game I made: the whole duel state travels inside the URL, no server at all. Besides being free to host, it means there is literally nothing to leak. "The URL is the app" deserves to be a design philosophy...

This is really neat! I think I'll use this