LivingKiosk
Ambient displays for the screens around you.
Full-screen channels that refresh themselves and are built to be glanced at, not operated. Put one on a wall tablet, a spare monitor, a TV in the corner, or straight onto your Mac desktop.
Editors’ picks
Somewhere to start.
Eight of the twelve, picked by hand for the range they show. The full set, grouped by kind, is at every display.
Who this is for
Built for whoever leaves a screen running.
Business owners
Menus and signage that aren’t a muted cable feed.
A lobby, a waiting room, a front counter — put something worth looking at on the screen that’s already there. Market Board and Newsprint both refresh themselves; nobody has to remember to update a slide deck.
Events & weddings
A frame or a poem, running quietly all night.
Gallery Frame and Passage both hold still long enough to actually look at, and neither one needs a laptop babysitting it in the corner of the room.
At home
Turn the TV nobody’s watching into a gallery.
A TV that spends most of the day off, or looping the same streaming-service screensaver, can just as easily be showing real paintings or a channel that was already running before you walked in.
Desktop backgrounds
Like the creator actually uses it.
Every display is a web page, so Plash turns any of them into a live desktop background today — this is genuinely how Joey runs his own machines. A dedicated Mac app for picking and switching displays is in development.
Run it yourself
Every display is open source.
Not a trial, not a limited edition — the whole thing, MIT licensed, running on your own machine with nothing held back. No account, no telemetry, no CDN.
One command
git clone https://github.com/hellojoey/overhead
cd overhead
docker compose up -dThe repositories are private until launch, so this clone will not resolve yet. Every display is MIT licensed and goes public the same day the gallery does.
Then point a screen at http://your-host:8353. Every display follows the same shape: a Dockerfile, a compose file with the settings documented inline, and a /setup page that builds the URL for you.
Prefer not to run anything? Some displays need a server holding data on your behalf — those are the ones that will cost money later. The rest never will.
The repositories
- NewsprintRSS, set like a front page
- OverheadConstellations, computed offline
- Gallery FramePublic-domain art, with placards
- Flights OverheadLive aircraft, no map tiles
- Channel ZeroA channel scheduled by the clock
- PassageA poem, set large, changed slowly
- AlmanacThe sun and moon, computed locally
- Heartbeat 3000Watch telemetry, as a scope terminal
- LavaMetaball lava-lamp ambient backdrop
- RainDigital glyph rain, an original glyph set
- Market BoardIndices and a watchlist, kept quiet
- ScoreboardYour teams, live or next up
- This siteThe gallery you are looking at
One more thing
A note from the creator
I am well aware this is a tool built on a foundation of AI. I’m not a coder, nor very skilled in tech. I wanted something cute… er, cool. I had a keyboard and a subscription to Claude. So I had it make this, and I thought I’d share it with all of you who might also think it’s ‘cool.’
This is mostly an open source project. The premium displays are premium to cover external server fees, plus a little on top. Do I want to make money off of this? Sure, I’d love to quit my day job. But I’m not expecting to.
I’m also open to anyone with more of a tech background who’s interested in making this project bigger and better coming onboard as a technical founder. I’m well aware you’d have my metaphorical balls in a vise, since I’ll have no protection from those with the wherewithal to just take my idea from me. But be forewarned: I do own swords and a whetstone.
— Joey
Chip in for hosting
The premium displays cost real money to keep running. If LivingKiosk made one of your screens nicer, the price of a coffee helps keep the lights on.
Buy me a coffee →