The slidey power switch also fails to fall out.
Normally when you take apart a thing that has button on the outside, all the buttons fall off. Not so with this, because in 2007 these were Rich People's Toys and the design and build quality is *chef's kiss*
Lesson: better to buy something that was Excellent secondhand than to spend the same money on something shit from Now
So here comes the interesting part.
The case of these things is All One Piece. It's a just-thick-enough-to-feel-expensive aluminium sleeve that doesn't get in the way and is fairly unremarkable until one day you look all around for the seam where this was bending-brake'd out of sheet metal and THERE ISN'T ONE and you go "What the... how the hell was this made?"
And then you put that question out of your mind because you're distracted by your swollen battery.
See, I should be able to just reach in and pull the whole innards out of this aluminium sleeve in one go like a magician or an overenthusiastic butcher, but that battery's all Big and it's gonna make things complicated, so we've gotta cross our fingers and do the careful wiggleypush
Don't you pop you bastard don't you pop
At this point, when you're about to expose the battery against a harsh aluminium transition, start thinking "Maybe I should be doing this outside"
but it's cold
Gotta lift up this connector flap to release the ribbon cable that connects to the case's buttons WHICH STILL HAVEN'T FALLEN OUT
Sony helpfully glued a massive transparent plastic chunk to the lifty-uppy part of the connector here
It's hard to tell what's going on in this picture but this is taken from the top of the ereader looking down, once the battery's free of the aluminium.
The whole rest of the ereader just made the sound your uncle makes after he loosens his belt after thanksgiving. It's going aaaauuuuuhhhhhhhhh that's better
you can't put out a lithium fire by the way, just reminding y'all of that
The ereader with no clothes on.
Come on, this is no surprise, you know the sort of thing people read on these things when nobody can see the cover and judge you for it in the dentist's waiting room
I bet I broke the screen wrestling with it to try to get that massive battery out
To reassemble, follow previous steps in reverse order
(for avoidance of doubt do not go back outside and get the dangerpillow and glue it back in again)
And there we have it, one perfectly working gorgeous ereader, ready for another million pages!
Continuation of ereader battery replacement thread: I replaced the battery in my own ereader too (it's the same PRS-505 but in black), and I would like to remind you that we thought about batteries very differently back in 2007.
Did you forget that in 2007 you didn't have to plug your phone in every night? Remember the INDIGNITY you felt when you bought your first colour phone or even smartphone, and it sucked so much energy that you had to turn the screen off when you weren't using it?
Anyway, I put in a new battery and charged it five days ago, read for a couple of hours every day, and can report that last night the battery display dropped from four bars to three.
So that's probably three weeks between charges aye. On a 750mAh battery smaller than a box of tic-tacs.
Look what they've stolen from us. Demand better. We deserve better.
Like seriously what was I thinking owning a vintage unwifi'd ereader and not using it, just using my phone instead
🦝 Let's settle down and have a nice read of a long book! Gee, I sure hope I don't get distracted from this book, for example by a distraction machine, much like the one that I'm holding in my hand right now, and staring at,
I only bought this for the cover, but I bid a fiver for this and two broken Android tablets and nobody else put a bid in so I got this gorgeous boy for 99 cents plus a fiver to post it.
Shame about the touchscreen, not NEARLY enough buttons on this thing, but it's a gorgeous colour and it's got that reassuring Sony Aluminium Heft to it
You could legitimately accuse me of hoarding these things
...if anybody else had bid
The UI and general Experience Of Using The Device is CONSIDERABLY worse on the touch-enabled one. Whereas on the 505 every menu item had a line on the display and a corresponding button, this 600 has its interactable parts of the screen appearing without rhyme or reason in a layout that doesn't seem very thoroughly thought out.
Honestly, touchscreens aren't really good for most things
🦝 Alright, time to distribute some of these ereaders, I'd better write a quick guide on how to make new ebooks work on vintage ereaders
🕛
🕐
🕑
🕒
🦝 Well this turned into a gibbering manifesto
Everyone who's ever bought an ebook or borrowed one legally from the library: 🐧 Oh Dan, I'm so sorry, I've been there and I know it's an awful mess
Everyone who's ever pirated an ebook: 🐴 Huh? What's the problem, it's easy
🐴 Dan, this is supposed to be a quick guide on how to read ebooks, do you really need to include so many thousand-word tangents on corporate greed
🦝 It is a hard thing to write a Bullshit Removal Guide without mentioning The Bullshit to be removed
See, the root of the problem here is that publishers hate ebooks and would rather they didn't exist at all.
Ebooks are a threat to publishers because making physical books and distributing them at scale requires a large staff, lots of very expensive equipment and a network of business relationships built up over literally centuries, whereas making ebooks and distributing them at scale requires one dipshit, a computer, six cups of tea and some muttered cursing
🦝 Thank you #gameDad, #pinePhone, #eReader (#butSpecificallyAnOldEReaderWithButtonsThatDoesNotGoOnTheInternet) for being nice fidgety little devices that can go in my pockets and bring me harmless joys throughout the day
📱 Aw thanks Dan, I didn't expect
🦝 Not you
I don't know who needs to hear this right now, with the spring rain and the blossoms on the trees and the animals being all excitable and the general Spring Energy going on, but there's a plugin for Calibre called FanFicFare that downloads stories from a variety of websites (including that one) and makes them vintage-ereader-friendly
(full list of supported sites at https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki/SupportedSites)
Adding on to the ereader thread to say that I was strolling through eBay and saw this thing
https://www.ebay.com/itm/167504233404
And I thought, "Now that there's an aesthetic that SOMEONE on Fedi will absolutely wet their knickers over"
(I didn't buy it because I've just spent a frankly embarrassing amount of money on a red PRS-505)
Ectaco Jetbook Red - Working, Good Condition - Plus Original Pouch. What you see pictured is exactly what you'll get. A working, red Ectaco JetBook. The JetBook has an SD slot and and an older miniUSB slot (not microUSB) for loading books and charging the battery.
Come on fess up, two minutes after I post it here it's suddenly sold lol
Whichever one of y'all snagged that up, you better do a thread on it
In other news, Ectaco seems like a cool company? They make ebook readers (with page turn buttons - less than they used to it seems, but there's still at least a page-forward and page-back button and those're the important ones) and translation devices and their website looks like it was made in 2003, and not in a bad way either.
Here's one of their translators. You can't tell from the picture but it's on the bigger end of phone-sized.
Damn I wish this company made phones. I'd have a phone like that.
Looking through Ectaco's website and having a little yearning sigh moment of "Ohhhh, I wanna go and work at that company..."
VTech (the toy company) was the other company in the last decade or so I've felt that way about (I was just that impressed with their offline kiddy smartwatch that it made me go "Oh, I'd vibe with these people.").
(which is high praise 'cause I'm rabidly self-employed)
🦝: Taking time to organize thousands of ebooks and compress them such that they can all fit in a low-power offline ereader from 2007
🐰 is this a trauma response after the storm that cut off everyone's power for half a week
🦝 What? Pfft no
🐰 OK fair enough
🦝 *whispering* it's a trauma response to eeeeeverythiiiii
"Those cheap ones off aliexpress might not get software updates" FFS SOFTWARE UPDATES
for BOOKS
wtf lad, like the update from when we went from scrolls to edge binding?!
Reading daily on a 2007 ereader has reminded me just how tiny text is and I don't think Modern Kids even know about file sizes
one black-and-white page of manga shrunk to fit this ereader's screen takes up as much space as a novella
you can fit fifteen novels in one second of video
a 4gb SD card of books would probably have me completely sorted out for reading material until it's time to die of old
Kids don't know about file sizes and hard drives and stuff because they never got, like we did, the leap from floppy disks to CD-ROMs.
The presenter on the telly would hold up the big thick phone book and say 🐹 isn't it remarkable that all this information can fit on one plastic square. But there's a new technology coming in! Inside this new plastic circle, you can fit ALL THIS!
And there'd be this massive overflowing pile of phone books, stack them into an armchair and sit in it, more than you could read in a decade, all in this one shiny miracle circle.
Tell kids about that today and they'll say what's a floppy disk, what's a CD-ROM, what's a file, what's a phone book, what's a telly and what's information
🐀 Dad's what's information
🦝 It's like misinformation but there's less of it and it's true
I don't think we've had a massive shift like that in the last few decades. Like, now you can get multi-terabyte hard drives for cheap and that's normal, but they kinda grew in size and dropped in price pretty smoothly, that's nothing like the jump from floppies to CDs in the 90's. We went from a megabyte and a half to 700 megs in one big jump just like that.
Then DVDs were like eight gigs and okay fine but that's only ten times as much, big whoop y'know. Blu-ray, 50 gigs on a dual layer, big deal, I lived through a 400x jump
Like, imagine if tomorrow someone put out a 400 terabyte hard drive for the same price as a 1tb one today
Just gonna download 76,000-odd books from Project Gutenberg and stick them on a memory card the size of my pinky nail that I can afford with the coins on my bedside table.
Just for a laugh. Just because I can. Hmm, lazy morning, let's casually spend a couple of hours grabbing more books than I could read in ten lifetimes, for free. All legally too.
I just downloaded a book that was TEN MEGABYTES and I opened it up to go what the hell and do you know what was in there? A THOUSAND EMPTY PAGES
Literally over 1,000 copies of a blank white background at like 2,000 pixels wide resolution
Not as good as eleven for fifty bucks, but six for thirty bucks is still worth raccooning
Most of the ones I got last year have been adopted already, save for a couple with bad screens
But I found an aliexpress seller doing the screens :)
Figure if I eBay like one or two of these things then I'll make back all the cash I've spent on acquiring and fixing like seventeen of them
So if you want one I guess like this post to get the notification when I edit it to say hey here's the auction link
Yaknowwhat I'm gonna say it
Having the ereader use the same battery as the light was a bad idea
The PRS-700 had a wee reading light built in, but using it meant the difference between a charge lasting four hours or four weeks
Ereaders should have two batteries, one for the light and one for the ereader, 'cause when the light battery runs out you can light it up with something else and keep on reading but when the ereader battery runs out you're done
@ifixcoinops damn this has been a wild ride!
You got my attention tho fo sho!
Funny how that happens and I can believe it was entirely your fault.
Some guy finds Lytros cameras cheap on ebay because the company has gone under and reverse engineers some software for them mentioning how cheap they are on ebay and then it takes two years for them to be cheap again.
@ifixcoinops I remember from when floppies became too small for many files to when USB sticks came along, computer data heists in movies always had to be some made-up removable media the prop team came up with, because nothing people would be familiar with would be believable.
I just want one movie where they break in and then pull a long box of 3.5" floppies and a bunch of blank labels from their bag and get to copying.
@Doomed_Daniel @ifixcoinops And, more cynically, because software has been explicitly designed to make local storage less convenient, to justify selling more cloud storage.
There is a good argument that this makes backup and multi-device synchronization easier for non-technical users, but this problem honestly isn't *that* hard to solve.
@growlph @ifixcoinops
Sure, it's enshittification enabled by technical improvements all around.
Software needs massively more power than it did to do basically the same thing because that power is there.
Widespread internet connections that are always on enabled more predatory licensing (even for software that still runs locally).
As you said, vendors try to lock you into their "cloud", possible because of internet speed.
Same for streaming services
@ifixcoinops @growlph Then CDR and the swap from backing up one machine to many disks, to many machines to one disk.
Then shortly after: the reverse.
I reckon this is why everyone love someone else’s server. They can’t run df on it.
@ifixcoinops ZIP and then JAZ drives were short-lived, but that 1.44MB to 100MB and later 1GB jump *just* as the WWW became multimedia, was the best damn thing ever.
Now I have stupid cheap thumb drives which hold 256 JAZ disks.
There were intermediate formats. Zip drives, super floppies, probably others. The problem was that everyone tried to have a monopoly on their format so nothing took off. Everyone kept using floppies until writable CDs and USB flash drives became affordable.
@ifixcoinops It was more gradual for me- I had a 44 mb Syquest drive, then a 100 mb Zip disk on my way between floppies and CD’s.
But It is nuts. I’m a hoarder, I have files that go back to 1998 when I brought my Perfoma 630 home from work after replacing it with a Power Center 604e. (Remember those?) And ALL of it fits - audio files from at least 40 multi-track recording sessions, 47,000 photographs, 40,000 MP3’s, a few dozen 1080p movies… and everything I’ve ever drawn and written on a 4tb NVME drive that fits in my pants pocket.
But no, there’s probably not going to be a 4tb to 400tb jump in one fell swoop. It’s a much more gradual ramp now, but the sizes are so astronomical it still seems vast.
@ifixcoinops
I bring you once again, this certified hit from neil cicierega
Get the album here: http://www.neilcic.com/mouthmoods/
@ifixcoinops I pay the same price now for 20ish TB drives that I was paying in 2015 for 4TB drives, that I was paying in 2010 for 500GB drives.
And they all come in the same form factor, like almost identical all the way down.
@ifixcoinops around ‘05, I was on a project with a huuuuge (150TB) fiber channel array. Million dollar price, couple meters of rackspace wide. I did some scribbles of mainframe disk storage in my first nerd years, so ‘back 27 years, now, fwd 27 years’ ==> in 2032 I want a terabyte in a $100 wrist device, which should yield low-fi voice-grade storage of many lifetimes of audio (I forget how many) via 1k/sec ACELP compression.
A terabyte microsd tapdances near $100, years ahead of my guess. And it’d hold the text of a college library.
@Landwomble @ifixcoinops 8K video needs about 4x the storage of 4K, and more if it's using HDR rather than old-skool 32 bit colour, but it's not exponentially more and 8K is in any case cinema-equivalent resolution. We *might* go past that if AR glasses like Apple's Vision Pro catch on for movie-watching, but we're close to maxing out the bandwidth of the human eyeballs watching the show.
Of course, if you use LLMs for everything your storage requirements keep growing …
@ifixcoinops Have you seen VTech’s switch & go toys? I wouldn’t have thought you could innovate in the transformer space, but they succeeded.
And so much of their product is just solidly competent toys that have infinite copycats on Amazon. But I feel like most parents think it’s just another alphabet soup Chinese manufacturer.
@josephholsten I kinda wanted to go work for them both because their toys were solid and also because it seemed like one of the only remaining places that still tried to cram lots of goodies into tiny amounts of memory. Like, they USE their techs' competence and experience rather than just putting in more expensive chips and having the already-skint parents pay extra y'know
Also everthing's humane and normal. Like I expected this smartwatch to start bugging me for a subscription or to sign up for something to get more updates or show my kid adverts or somehow start sucking in some way and it just... didn't
@ifixcoinops @josephholsten huh. vtech. the leaked 4.8mil kids' details due to none security vtech?
https://www.troyhunt.com/when-children-are-breached-inside/
Maybe they learned online = bad. I've not been super keen to let me wee one touch their kit. But ten years can change a lot aye. Your rec gives reason to revisit, thanks mate.
I suspect we’re all getting a little bit too conditioned to data breaches lately. They’re in the mainstream news on what seems like a daily basis to the point where this is the new normal. Certainly the Ashley Madison debacle [https://www.troyhunt.com/2015/08/heres-what-ashley-madison-members-have.html]
@oeightsix @josephholsten dang, once bitten I guess. My littleun's had a bouncer, camera, globe, smartwatch and a couple other things from them and none have even the hardware to go online.
When I was plugging her (around 2022) smartwatch into my computer to put new games on it, it didn't even have me make an account or anything. Guess these are the actions of a company who learned their lesson the hard way lol
@ifixcoinops @josephholsten well whaddayaknow. Their watches and fisher price babby's first iPod Touch-alike are totally offline devices as you say.
That is genuinely nifty and refreshing when every other crack at kids watch is either 'please sign up for our atrocious overpriced proprietary monthly MVNO'd mobile service that doesn't even work from this company you've never heard of' or 'please sell what's left of your soul to us, the fruit company'
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