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Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

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Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#121

Post by Qwertious »

Animats wrote: post #34

Are e-ink displays ever going to get cheap? By now the basic patents should be running out.

The patents have nothing to do with it. E-ink is expensive because it's a niche product with low scale - LCD screens are produced by the BILLIONS per quarter, and you probably have a dozen different devices with one. E-Ink does basically nothing that an LCD can't substitute for, and it's more expensive than LCD so nobody bothers.

"Patents" are a conspiracy cited without real evidence. It ignores that *E-INK HAS COMPETITION* (DES/Display Electronic Slurry screens). If E-ink corp were price-gouging then GoodDisplay would have eaten their lunch by now.

To be specific here, the conspiracy isn't that E-Ink patents exist - E-Ink patents do exist (some expired, but E-Ink corp are registering new patents as they innovate), but there are tons of LCD patents also. The conspiracy is the claim that patents are causing price-gouging and high prices that hold up adoption of the tech.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#122

Post by dartharva »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #85
SushiHippie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779

He calls it the broken nature of the patent system, but I'm sitting here wondering why the creators of that technology shouldn't be handsomely rewarded for it, for a period of time? It's not like they're sitting on it (Creative Labs comes to mind), but rather releasing displays that just make devices cost more than they otherwise will. A similar thing happened the tech behind Wacom devices--they enjoyed market domina…

From further down the thread, it seems it has been well beyond two decades and the original patents are already long expired. They are not playing fair - they are evergreening their patents with marginal changes which is illegal in countries where IP laws aren't a joke unlike the US.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#124

Post by stavros »

_flux wrote: post #106
stavros wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic, thanks! I always used to do this by hand. Though one downside is that the name is random, and it's hard to go back if you CD out. I might use diceware to make a memorable random name.

I agree that sometimes that is a problem, so I find out the latest tmp directory with ls -tr /tmp | tail. But using nicer names would help with that. So I took your tip and now I have cdtmp() { local name name=/tmp/$(diceware --no-caps -d - -n 2) mkdir $name && cd $name } I decided not to worry about the directory existing already, or of the other checks mktemp -d would do for me in my single-user system.. I suppose…

Thank you! That's very neat, I'll implement this myself as well.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#125

Post by dstroot »

Meph504 wrote: post #4

This would be far more interesting if you shared how, and did it on a platform that wasn't meant for short form content.

You said this much more constructively that I might - I really dislike when people post long form stuff on X/Twitter. For those who may not know you can reply to a tweet with “@threadreaderapp unroll” to have a reconstructed doc sent to you. The bot will reply directly to you and only you after the unrolling is complete. Hope that helps someone.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#126

Post by debugnik »

creesch wrote: post #118
Meph504 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is where his link points...

Yeah, I figured that out about 6 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158720 Though it did already point to the gist back then, and I am still unsure how I can tell it pointed to twitter originally. Thanks though?

> I am still unsure how I can tell it pointed to twitter originally.

You can usually find a comment by dang saying something like "we've changed the URL from ".

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#127

Post by bazzargh »

dstroot wrote: post #125
Meph504 wrote: post #4

This would be far more interesting if you shared how, and did it on a platform that wasn't meant for short form content.

You said this much more constructively that I might - I really dislike when people post long form stuff on X/Twitter. For those who may not know you can reply to a tweet with “@threadreaderapp unroll” to have a reconstructed doc sent to you. The bot will reply directly to you and only you after the unrolling is complete. Hope that helps someone.

I know this one has been fixed, but I also find those an annoyance - more so because if you're not logged in on twitter, you only see the first tweet, not the thread. So rather than get irritated when I click through stories, I block the links on HN with ublock-origin rules like so:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com"])+tr
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=x.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=x.com"])+tr
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=medium.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=medium.com"])+tr
2 rules each because the replies and the story titles don't share a common parent element. eg right now I can tell from the numbers beside the stories that number 23 is missing; but otherwise HN looks the same. The same trick works for google search results; I have rules like the ones below to block less useful tutorial sites when I'm looking for python/js docs:

    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.w3schools"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.geeksforgeeks"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://realpython.com"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.programiz"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.datacamp"])
Hope this helps folk too; I'm not going to fight a battle over links to these sites (and others I've blocked), I'm just trying to improve my own experience of the site.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#128

Post by sp101 »

frognumber wrote: post #116
bmsleight_ wrote: post #14

I did a similar project HDMI in https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-... to make an OK Monitor - https://barwap.com/projects/okmonitor/

FYI: I'd pay to cover costs if there was a just-works off-the-shelf version of this. I don't think there's a business model there (I suspect the sales would be in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars -- so no matter where you set your profit margin, you're not covering your time or much beyond costs), but I've sometimes seen things done like that on hobby projects just for impact. I'd love to have a wireless…

There is: https://shop.boox.com/products/mira

You could also use any eink tablet that runs Android with a screen mirroring app.

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#129

Post by naitgacem »

bazzargh wrote: post #127
dstroot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said this much more constructively that I might - I really dislike when people post long form stuff on X/Twitter. For those who may not know you can reply to a tweet with “@threadreaderapp unroll” to have a reconstructed doc sent to you. The bot will reply directly to you and only you after the unrolling is complete. Hope that helps someone.

I know this one has been fixed, but I also find those an annoyance - more so because if you're not logged in on twitter, you only see the first tweet, not the thread. So rather than get irritated when I click through stories, I block the links on HN with ublock-origin rules like so: news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com"]) news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com…

I do something similar with Google search results. I hide results from Pinterest, Quora, TikTok, ...

Re: Jailbroke my Kindle to use it as an e-ink monitor

#130

Post by adtac »

amelius wrote: post #107

They didn't answer the most important question: was it worth it?

Too early to tell. It's not useful as a primary monitor, but it's great as a secondary. In its current form, the frame rate is good but the latency is awful. This makes for a bad typing experience, but there are plenty of usecases where I don't need to type. And even in situations like a chat window, where low latency typing feedback is critical, I can just have the input text box on my LCD monitor and have the chat history on the Kindle since it's mostly static. It needs some work to get there tho, but for now, this is a good start.
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