Open Source Software Makes Old Device Cool

I have a long history of finding free software online to make old devices do something cool. I would load games on my school calculator in high school, and I used to load Linux on flash drives to breathe new life into old computers which had broken hard drives. Some of this was due to resource constraints as a kid with very little money and little ability to order things online because that required a credit card. As an adult with slightly more money but a lot of ability to order things online, I find myself tempted to buy fancy tech rather than immediately jumping to doing more with what I have. That way lies credit card debt for this poorly-paid graduate student.

This brings me to the topic of e-readers. I’ve had mine for four years, and I mostly use mine to read library books. It doesn’t have the distractions my phone has, and the screen is much gentler on my eyes when I’m reading before bed. The dimly backlit screen is nice if, after waking up at 2 a.m. and failing to fall back asleep, I want to read something without turning the light on and waking up my wife. It can also display PDF documents, but the screen is too small to read a whole page at once and the zooming is annoying. I read a lot of PDF documents, so I’ve recently thought about buying a bigger ereader that can fit a whole page on it and still be legible. But when I was reading through a forum about my ereader, I ran across something wonderful: some lovely internet strangers have written an entire new rendering software which you can load onto a Kobo (or jailbroken Kindle). I put it on my Kobo and it will automatically zoom to where text is in a PDF, crop out the white space, and stitch all the text together so you can scroll through it with the built-in buttons. It also has cool features I didn’t realize I wanted until I had them, like support for displaying custom photos when I power off the screen and the ability to load books onto the device wirelessly via a little ssh server.

Anyway, don’t let a company tell you you need to buy the next or higher price model of something that works fine to get some feature without checking to make sure that some internet strangers haven’t figured out how to make the thing happen already. Or learn to code and become the internet stranger, in which case, thank you so much. In spite of everything, the internet has enabled some wonderful things.