A Geek Goes Flying

I have a Kobo Elipsa 2E  (came with a stylus) and I’m thinking about adding a Libra Colour , which also supports a stylus. (My Libra 2  does not ; the other models that do  are the discontinued Sage and the original Elipsa .) I want to be able to easily highlight text, and add notes. The official stylus is $70, but, it turns out it uses the Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP) , so any stylus that works with a modern Microsoft Surface tablet should work with the Kobo. Like this $20 unit (or this $29 model ). (The former can be equipped with these replacement nibs ; not sure about the latter.) The $20 SKU, Amazon’s AI said it wouldn’t work, but multiple reviews said it works just fine (search for “Kobo” and use the “Show related customer reviews and Q&A” option); for the $29 product, Amazon’s AI offers: Yes, the ASUS Stylus Pen you're looking at works with Kobo devices! One customer specifically mentions it "works well with Kobo devices" in their review. Key features for Kob...

I picked up a cheap Kindle; after reviewing this matrix , I opted for a 16GB  Kindle Paperwhite 5 (11th generation, from 2021: 6.8" E Ink Carta 1200 display, USB-C, IPX8 water resistance, etc.). I got it on eBay, on the assumption that such a unit would be less likely to have been updated to a later firmware for which a jailbreak wasn’t (yet?) available; I also added a $7 origami-style cover (which some don’t recommend, since the cover is weaker along the fold lines, but for my use case it was a good compromise). Used a jailbreak  and installed KOReader to use it to natively read ePubs (etc), that can just be dragged-and-dropped into the 'books' directory when mounting it as a mass storage device over USB. So far, I like it, and I can leave my slightly bulkier, more expensive Kobo Libra 2 and huge Kobo Elipsa 2E at home. Spent a little more than the $79 I had originally planned to spend on a refurbished Kobo Nia (or $89 for a refurb’d Clara HD ), but both were sold ou...

Nexus 7 [2012] running CyanogenMod 12.1 (Android 5.1.1) I’ve had this thing for more than a decade. Stopped using it when it updated from Android 4.x to 5.x and became unusably sluggish. At one point, I evidently unlocked it and installed Linux (LineageOS probably) onto it, but that wasn’t really usable on the 7" screen either, so it sat. I tried a couple of times half-heartedly to restore it using the built-in utilities, but never got anywhere and wasn’t honestly that interested, so it sat in a pile ready to be e-waste recycled. (The Fire tablets I’ve picked up over the years are going that route though, except for the one I’ve used semi-regularly with its “waterproof” housing, as they don’t seem to recharge and won’t turn on. Meh. OTOH they were disposable-cheap. But I digress.) I was stuck waiting to be called via remote court this morning (75 minutes) and, inspired by a Facebook conversation I’d had with a friend who’s also a bit of a geek, I decided to see if I could breath s...

NOOKcolor showing Android home screen Holy cow, this thing still works!(?!) Picked up this O.G. Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor ($249) in 2010 (IIRC) when I coudln’t afford an iPad ($499), because “ they” had figured out how to load an unrestricted Android build onto it ( CyanogenMod ; this thing reports it’s running Android version 2.3.7, kernel 2.6.32.9,  CyanogenMod-7.2.0-RC2-encore, on an ARMv7 CPU with 480MB reported RAM... ). This thing has been sitting without a charge for probably a couple of years at least, but a few minutes on its charger and it fired right up. (Compare with a couple of Kindle Fire tablets I had, that are much newer and totally dead, and headed to e-waste recycling.) This was a device designed and shipped when USB charging beyond the 5V 500ma standard was still in its infancy , so it came with a "proprietary" cable that ends in a weirdly long USB Mini B plug that illuminates to show charging state (I don’t recall if it will charge at all on the stan...

I present the Nook GlowLight Plus (model BNVR510):         Nook GlowLight Plus (BNVR510) eReader I have no idea when, where, or how I acquired this thing, or how much I spent on it, but even though it’s almost 10 years old, it’s still a compelling little gadget. Mine already has a couple of small marks in the screen that aren’t gonna “buff out,” so when I decided to carry an eReader in my unisex shoulder bag , I figured I’d load this up and not risk my more expensive, larger, Libra 2 or Elipsa 2E . In the process, I found out I really like it. It’s diminutive (6.4x4.7x0.34"), light, backlit, has 4GB of storage (about 2.5 GB usable) which is plenty to carry a reasonable number of books around, it’s IP67 certified for dust / water protection, and it shares an E Ink Carta HD display (1080 by 1440 resolution on the 6" screen for 300 ppi) it shares with the Kindle Voyage, Oasis, Scribe, Paperwhite 3 and newer, Tolino Vision 2, Kobo Klo HD, PocketBook Touch HD and HD 2...

Followed this quick guide: Send to Kindle for Email But encountered some gotchas along the way. So, here goes. Go to ☰ All: Then in the menu that pops up, browse to Digital Content & Devices / Kindle E-readers & Books → Apps & Resources / Manage Your Content and Devices, which will bring you to your Digital Content: From here, Preferences → Personal Document Settings and you’ll find a list of your devices (Kindles, Fire tablets, other devices with the Kindle app installed): For each device there will be a unique email address where you can send ePub (and other file types), to have them automatically sync to that device. Scroll down a bit on the same screen and make sure whatever email address you’re going to be sending the files from is listed: So once all that was setup and configured, I sent myself an ePub file I created: But, even though my email address was on the approved list, I got an email from Amazon asking me to “Verify your Send to Kindle document request,” s...

Kobo Libra 2 I didn’t feel like creating an account just to use the Kobo Libra 2 I picked up on sale, to replace my prematurely shattered Libra H2O . Fortunately, it was easy to find instructions on how to bypass that requirement: Mount it. Change to (on a Mac) /Volumes/KOBOeReader/.kobo/ sqlite3 KoboReader.sqlite INSERT INTO user(UserID,UserKey) VALUES('1',''); .exit out of SQLite Unmount the Kobo and disconnect it That’s it. Easy. Now that that’s done, I copied over a bunch of ePubs and fired it up. I don’t have the H2O handy to compare the two, but my initial impressions: I was worried the “ridge” and button placement would be uncomfortable or awkward. So far, I don’t even notice them, they fit comfortably under my left thumb. (I went into the settings and inverted the buttons, so the top one (held with the buttons on the left) moves to the next page.) The screen (Carte 1200) does seem to be better, with higher contrast. Page turns seem faster than I remember on t...