I did a little experiment with Samsung Dex to see if the Android-only environment could work. So far - I found it way less distracting not having all my current tabs/finder windows open. I could definitely see it as a nice "writing appliance" that I could put in a quiet corner for the end of the day.
I'm using termux, so I ssh in to a machine where my drafts are (although I have SyncThing installed and can theoretically use that, I haven't bothered). The ThinkSmart can lock itself in the usual ways.
What's funny is that what you did with a Pi Zero and Plan 9 is basically my ideal when put in conjunction with one of Lenovo's USB ThinkPad keyboards. The TrackPoints on those have three mouse buttons and work well, and the keyboard is sleek enough.
It is a standard LCD display with amazing contrast (black is just... black, and I use a white-on-black full screen terminal), although I wouldn't want to get into a debate regarding safety here (let's just say I don't subscribe to pseudo-science).
Kindle does not have any native app support. But it's a linux machine. If you can jailbreak it (which has become increasingly harder), then you can write/install custom apps on it.
For example, back in the day I had a epub reader app installed.
way before the kindle fire you could in fact buy "active content" for kindles on the amazon storefront. I recall buying a crossword app this way. It was fine, especially since this was an original (or 2nd generation?) kindle, which still had a physical keyboard !
At some point they dumped support for this. I recall it as being around the time the Fire came out. There doesn't seem to be a lot of info left out there, e.g. it merits just an un-cited sentence in wikipedia's article on the kind. there may have been some remnants of it as late as 2020 though: https://the-digital-reader.com/amazon-removes-active-content...
I was wondering if Amazon, instead of wasting money and time on Fire phones/tablets, had poured a portion of that resource into making native Kindle apps a thing, maybe it could have a more compelling ecosystem by now.
It's unlikely that would have worked. 2 big ecosystems seems to be what the market will bear and choosing an Android base for the fire tablets makes a lot of sense.
Very few people are going to bother writing apps for another ecosystem. Also, more apps means less control by Amazon which won't fly
This has no OS (at least that you can access). I have one, have written a number of drafts with it, and regret both purchasing it and it not being a better machine. The software is really bad and there is no way to tinker with it, no way to write custom software. Indeed, in the last update before it became abandonware, they made updates cryptographically signed to make it more difficult for people to jailbreak it. The hardware is pretty and the keyboard is nice but the battery is really bad. It lasts only a few hours and takes forever to charge. And if the battery is depleted, it takes too long to get to the charge level necessary for using it even while plugged. Please don't buy this.
I have one of these sitting next to me right now, and it's essentially unusable due to the dispaly lag, and largely (though not completely) reliant on a service from the vendor for syncing. The hardware is passable, but the software is not, and it seems to be at a very slow drip of maintenance, if not completely abandoned.
The screen and battery are too small; you really want a laptop or subnotebook form factor where the screen opens like a book so screen and keyboard can both be large enough to be useful.
A5 format (like a book, slightly less than most laptops) seems a sweet spot, also for keeping it in a larger jacket pocket.
There are a few writing appliances out there trying to do that, but they are all based on proprietary solutions. It _might_ be possible to get a decent e-ink display with a passable refresh rate at non-monopolistic prices and bypass the Rube Goldberg-esque setup by just plugging that into a Pi via SPI, but right now there just aren't many options for that out there.
I don’t have the Folio case, but I have a Remarkable 2 and the screen refresh time is not as nice as the Paperwhite by quite a margin. I had actually managed to plug a USB keyboard to the RM2 (can be done, you need to tweak several things and power it) and the experience was quite “meh”. Also on a personal note, I prefer the form factor/size of the Kindle for this. The RM2 always feels flimsy!
That seems strange. You can use the pen on it, and the screen changes near instantly. There is not much of a lag. I would think that typing would be almost as good.
Writing latency on the RM is good: for typing is very likely to be well above OK… as long as you don't have to scroll the text/screen. Because page turning latency/refresh speed is quite bad. No "this is shitty bad, gimme my money back" but slow enough that it makes skimming impossible and normal page turning slightly annoying (worsened the larger the PDF). A similar kind of latency can be seen particularly when using the cut/move tool, for example.
To be fair when typing (a few minutes after the time in the video you shared) the latency for refreshing the screen does not seem that bad. But they keyboard looks annoying to use… I way prefer having a full choice of keyboards (aside from the fun of having written the code of course).
Typing latency on my contraption is pretty similar to what can be seen in the video, maybe slightly slower but not by much. Since two weeks ago I have written several drafts of blog posts (while I added some features that were needed, or fixed some annoyances) and it is usable, although I miss adding a "read mode" (scrolling via cursor is slow, and I have not added `:num`, `gg` or `G` yet which makes reading what you have written not great.
I don't have one, but I use the Android app Termux on my stock Kindle Fire tablet. It's a rather complete Linux on Android. Not emulation.
CLI environment just works, and I've been able to run GUI apps with some configuration and an additional Android app for X or RDP or VNC. I generally don't use a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse with my setup, and I tend to avoid the GUI stuff.
But for extended shell scripting or writing CLI Python C code all native, all local, no networking needed. And I use it all the time for SSH.
I have always eyed similar solutions, but getting root access to the Kindle has been getting more convoluted each time: I always chose to not try to avoid being a few days without reading if I bricked it. This is one of the reasons why I wrote this: should work as long as the Kindle has a decent-ish browser.
Took me awhile to get there, but my ideal mono-tasking "typewriter-like" setup is:
- iPad Air
- iA Writer iPad App[1] (or: Simplenote)
- TwelveSouth Compass Pro, for use in portrait mode[2]
- Standard Apple Bluetooth Keyboard + Apple Pencil clipped on side[3]
Also, I might be old-fashioned, but when I need to type outside -- which is often -- I just bring my laptop! Lenovo X1C (excellent keyboard) with a great matte screen[4]. Since that's Linux, I usually use vim + goyo, Typora, or Simplenote.
Also, about a year, I wrote down some of the requirements for an e-paper RPI Pico-based e-ink writer in a comment. I wanted to dub mine, 'the microWrite', 'μWrite', 'uWrite', or 'you write' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092930.
I suppose the question is whether it is feasible to adapt PiWrite to run in MicroPython. The next question is whether one could ditch the webserver-based approach and interface an e-paper screen directly to the RP2040. Waveshare offers MicroPython libraries for their e-paper displays. This might offer better latency.
Super, this has inspired me to look more into using a keyboard to write on a Kindle on an external server, and now I have a much better writing set up.
I've found I enjoy writing on Kindle, despite how limited it was. I make notes by highlighting words in a book and writing them down in a note that was associated with the highlighted word. Clunky but it works.
Using an external server is much better though as it works with my keyboard, allows to keep the writing elsewhere. Very happy with it.
It’s not as bad as I expected before trying the project. You can try with SolarWriter (which is easier to set up than this weird thing I did) to get an idea. I consider it “mechanical typewriter” level. For me, good enough.
The Kindle can’t handle USB networking, so it wouldn’t be a viable option. The private network is only needed if you are not in a WiFi capable area: at home I use it without AP
