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)

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)

@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