noa ks
I know a few people who like to “unsmart” their phone, often by carrying a music player separately. While i can understand the motivation behind this, it feels more like a statement than a genuine lifestyle change: of all the things that might benefit from not being on a phone, music seems to have the least improvement. A games console gives you physical buttons; a map helps with your spatial awareness; even a headtorch is brighter and more ergonomic than using a phone. But the apps available for listening to music are generally as good as, or better than, those on dedicated devices.
One device which i do endorse keeping separate, however, is the ereader. Mostly, this comes down to the screen, where a larger, squarer ratio feels more comfortable to read on, and the e-ink technology is still kind of magical. I’m not tied to a particular brand, but i like kobo because they tend to be well-built, are kind of open both in hardware and software, and the battery life is still much better than on android-based models.
For ages, i stuck with the default interface, because it was good enough, but there are a few annoyances. The first is that in order to get some standard quality of life features you have to use the kepub format instead of the epub format, which requires converting all my books. I used to do that with calibre but calibre does not spark joy so i got rid of it, and now i have to use a command line tool which is not much better. Even with books converted to kepub, sometimes the software will randomly crash. And they had read-it-later integration formerly with pocket, now with instapaper, but i can’t use it because i’m in china and i don’t really want another account anyway.
The solution to most of these problems is koreader, an incredible piece of software that, just like emacs, leaves me banging my head against a wall as much as it leaves me feeling delighted. The default kobo interface lets you slide up and down the left edge of the screen to change the frontlight brightness; koreader adds a gesture on the right edge to adjust the warmth of the light. Amazing! How do i add my own such gestures? Look in the top menu bar at one of the three settings menus and dive deep into a series of buttons and options. There’s a lot, but it’s a lot.
Other than the better and faster rendering of vanilla epubs, one of the primary reasons i wanted to switch to using koreader is because it comes with functionality to download articles via rss. I am currently using miniflux as an rss reader, and i wanted to be able to mark articles that looked interesting but were kind of long so i could read them on a device designed for comfortable reading. Unlike some apps, miniflux doesn’t come with this functionality out of the box, but it does come with a nice api, so i was able to write a little python program that runs on the hour and makes an rss channel out of everything i star. Then i can load that in koreader, and it works really nicely.
By default, koreader acts as a file browser which is kind of ugly, but luckily it is possible out of the box to use metadata. The amount of book covers on a page is also configurable if i want, but i left it at the defaults.
So that’s my current nice place to read, both articles and books, and i don’t have to use any weird formats or obtuse workflows to get it there, now that i’ve done the initial setup. Thank you koreader!