Micolithe
Agender
36 years old
Philadelphia, PA
Online Now
Last Login: 08/30/2007

Agender Enby, Trans, Gay, AND the bearer of the gamer's curse. Not a man, not a woman, but instead I am puppy.
I got a fat ass and big ears.

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Yes I did the cooking mama Let's Play way back when. I post alot about Tech (mostly how it sucks) and Cooking and Music and Television Shows and the occasional Let's Play video
💖@FadeToZac

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We all do what we can ♫

So we can do just one more thing ♫

We can all be free ♫

Maybe not in words ♫

Maybe not with a look ♫

But with your mind ♫


last.fm listening



spiders
@spiders

i think e-readers are one of the last worthwhile consumer electronics innovations. definitely the last good innovation in the realm of the tablet computer/smartphone form factor. its the last one that feels like it has a justifiable reason to exist and actually improves life in a substantial way.

every other iteration of tablet/smartphone has just been more of the same garbage. iphone, but faster, thinner, smaller, bigger. but eink readers feel like they are an actual meaningfully different and valuable thing that accomplishes a different goal.

i read so much more on an ereader than i do with physbooks because anything i want to read that has a mobi version somewhere online is available to me, and i dont have to be carrying a heavy book that tires out my wrists and neck. i dont need to be straining my eyes with text that is just too small to be comfortable to read (not in a vision problem way, its not that i have trouble focusing on the text or its blurry. its just like, too small. my brain likes big text. its more comfy and less cognitive effort to read).

its like an ebook is an accessibility device for me. and that rules. this is what i mean when i talk about technology that actually improves people's lives, not just makes life Faster and More Overstimulating and More Connected.


vogon
@vogon

I haven't had a chance to source + fab + assemble it yet1 but I love the approach to board design -- since the size of the e-paper display dictates the size of the mainboard, why not put assembly instructions and a description of the design right on the silkscreen?

edit: as @bnys noted in the comments, the creator of Open Book is working on a new revision with a more powerful processor -- so don't rush out and build it right now, but I'm sure I'll gush about the project again at some point


  1. if any of my oomfies in seattle want to get in on a group buy, hit me up on discord


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in reply to @spiders's post:

in reply to @vogon's post:

board games would just require you to write some firmware! audio per se wouldn't require much of a hardware change, but for like... good audio you would probably have to add another few bucks worth of components

FYI Joey is working on a new revision, sounds sick as hell. I got to talk to him about it at Crowd Supply Teardown in June. Also, everyone should order a Sensor Watch!!!!!

yeah! I just noticed on github -- the ESP32 is a good choice, my one concern (and one I was probably gonna mess around with a custom version of the board for! he saved me the trouble!) was that I'm not sure the pico has the grunt to handle non-plain-text ebooks

The fact that this is small bitmapped fonts makes the value of this thing dubious to me (having good typography is pretty important for an ereader), but I imagine that’s the kind of thing you get in a new design revision.

amazon's only claim to fame should be flooding the US second-hand market with $30 kindles, which are absolutely perfectly fine for all purposes and trivial to sideload files into

don't get me wrong I LOVE the open book, aesthetically, conceptually, etc. but the injection-molded consumer devices are practically bulletproof by now.

oh yeah absolutely; I just want to be able to jailbreak it completely to put a reader on it that can parse PDFs without choking to death. (that said my last kindle was a kindle 2, so maybe they've fixed that since.)

PDFs have always been a weird subject for readers, given the usual size and resolution needed. Out of curiosity I loaded a few onto my Kindle PW 4 (2018) on the current firmware and it was pretty smooth, and readable to my eyes. I'd have to throw some SVG-packed service manuals at it to make sure, though.

My big hope is that the Scribe, their late response to reMarkable, drives down the price of letter-size eink panels (which before these, hadn't been a thing since... Sony's PRS or Onyx's Boox?) and puts some of those devices in the secondary market.