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)

🦝: 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

Been looking into how the screens work, apparently they need 22v, 15v, 3.3v for logic, -15v and -20v, I'm guessing parts of this thing need like a 40 volt difference

But the power economy is just, Unreal with these things. They wake up, flip some pixels and go to sleep again. If your eyes are good enough for small text and fewer pageturns then you don't need to take your charger on a trip

Well I got a screen, just one to try and see how much of a pain in the arse it is to swap the screens around on a PRS-505 ereader

The headline: it's a pain in the arse

I suppose I'll elaborate on that a wee bit

Here's an ereader from the most recent job lot, the screen's cracked, the battery's doornail-dead and it's pretty filthy

Gotta take off a similar flopper that holds the power and USB holes.

The blue masking tape here is 'cause this black plastic frame also holds a captive retaining nut for a screw and a slidey lever and associated tiny little spring, which I saw and went "That's gonna ping off into a dark corner at some point, I'll tape it in place so it can't escape"

Now the nasty bit, these screens were meant to be replaced as one unit, screen + metal plate + black insulating sticker in one go. My replacement screen is bare, it's just the screen itself. So we gotta re-use the metal plate and its insulating sticker.

The screen is held to the plate with three thick stripes of sticky glue. I struggled with it for a minute then went "Alright let's try getting some heat on this thing," but I didn't wanna mess up that insulating sticker so I had to be kinda wary with the heat gun y'know

All ideas I'd had about removing the old screen in one clean sweep were as shattered as this screen

I need to figure out a better process for getting the old screen off the metal plate. I've got a couple ereaders where the screen is, like, Nearly good, like it's got a little mark that you can read around, stuff like that, and I'd probably wanna replace the screen but keep the old one for Just In Case, but at present this process absolutely obliterates the screen lol

Maybe summat like injecting acetone with a syringe, IDK

So it might not be as easy as swapping out the screen and setting a voltage with a wee potentiometer like I'd hoped, we might be into waveform lookup tables and files that Sony never leaked

We might be flirting with failure here

I'd rather not fail tbqh. If I can get one good screen replacement done, then I'll have another like half a dozen really good ereaders rescued from landfill

But so far it's looking like it might actually be more complex than a tube swap, and not complex in a way that's fun, complex in a way that's honestly a bit of a bastard

If you're wondering what was on the other side of the computer board, the answer is "A whole BUNCH of test points, like whoa"

The testing station for this must've looked like a hedgehog

Alright, back together and polished clean with Novus 2, this gorgeous ereader is ready for another decade.

Screen replacement was, to sum up, a pain in the arse, but the replacement screen looks great and performs just as well as the original.

The replacement battery is just slightly the wrong size, just a hair too thick, so the top and bottom trim pieces don't quite line up properly and I had to use a tiny bit of adhesive tape. eBay has lots of folk selling these just-slightly-too-large batteries. Cameron Sino batteries are the right size, although double the cost. Maybe I'll get some more of the nice batteries.

(I was using Cameron Sino batteries in my Windows Mobile phones back in '09, they're a decent third-party battery factory who've been around for years, not some fly-by-night keymash-name amazon spammer)