einkbro

-------------------- Notes: 1. The thought does occur that Firefox/Android might benefit by an extension (or set of same) which address e-ink display characteristics. Off the top of my head those would be: - Paginated navigation. The ability to readily scroll by a full page, rather than touch-and-drag scrolling. - High-contrast / greyscale optimisation. Tweaking page colours such that reading on e-ink is optimised. Generally that would be pure black/white for foreground/background, and a limited greyscale pallette for other elements. Halftone dithering of photographic images would also be generally preferable. - An ability to absolutely freeze any animations and/or video unless specifically selected. - Perhaps: an ability to automatically render pages in reader mode, with the above settings enabled. - Other odds'n'sods, such as rejecting any autoplay (video, audio), though existing Firefox extensions probably address that. I suspect that much of that is reasonably doable. There is an "E-ink Viewable" extension which seems to detect and correct for dark-mode themes (exceedingly unreadable on tablets, somewhat ironically), though it omits other capabilities: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/e-ink-viewabl...>. "Edge Touch Pager" addresses navigation: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edge-touch-pa...>. And there's a Reddit submission for improving e-ink experiences w/ Firefox generally, which touches on most of the items I'd mentioned above: <https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/lkc0ea/tip_to_make_we...>. Future me may find this useful....

which can be set on both a per-app and overall system basis. It's reasonably easy to switch between these where needed (e.g., on a Web browser). Higher-quality rendering comes with slower refresh, and there's a trade-off for visual quality vs. speed, but even basic animation is possible with only very modest quality degradation. "X-mode" for full video sacrifices a lot of quality, but you'd typically use that only for video-intensive apps (or occasional video viewing in a Web browser). The main side-effect is ghosting at higher refresh speeds. Android devices can use third-party app stores such as F-Droid (VERY strongly recommended), with an independent selection of apps, or the Aurora Store alternative interface to Google Play Store which provides any Android app available through Google Play. I minimise the apps I've installed, and have avoided virtually all authenticated services (one article-managing app excepted), to minimise distractions, but have several installed from both sources. E-ink itself does have its strengths and weaknesses. I like to say: Persistence is free; pixels are cheap; paints are expensive; refreshes are slow (1-8 Hz rather than 60--120); shades and colours are limited or nonexistent; line-art, dithered images, and half tones render quite well (raster and gradients far less so); paginated navigation is vastly better than scrolling; graphics are reflective rather than emissive; touch/Wacom may exist; and feature-detection capabilities are limited (e.g., CSS @media queries). It's a different medium, and rewards some adaptation of design principles. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...>. I'd make one further addition: dark-on-light styles are hugely preferable to "dark-mode" (light-on-dark), which is far more difficult to read. Generally, e-ink prefers full black on full white styling. I'll note that apps which are designed for e-ink, most particularly EinkBro (an adaptation of the FOSS Browser) make for a much superior experience: <https://github.com/plateaukao/einkbro>. And yes, there are full e-ink monitors which are available for desktop systems: <https://shop.boox.com/products/mira>

which you'll be using as on a Debian-based Linux distribution to install and update specific packages. With pip (python's package manager) I also gain access to mpv and yt-dlp, which enable me to play videos (or more accurately, the audio stream from them) from a terminal session rather than as a full-screen application. Given that I'm almost always on an e-ink device for which video which, whilst possible is almost always subobptimal, that's a major win. It also avoids YouTube ads ;-) Other development package managers (e.g., Ruby, Perl, Rust, etc.) are also available. The sheer number of available packages is also impressive, well over 2,500 within apt/pkg alone (and far more under additional language-specific repos). That's still a small fraction of a full Debian distro's 70k or so distinct packages, but includes a large and quite useful portion of the actual usable userland tools, including significant dev tools. I've also found that stability of Termux sessions (that is, avoiding getting reaped by Android's memory garbage collector / process reaper) has improved tremendously over the years, and is rarely a concern (though it may still occur occasionally for a long-stagnant session). Paring Termux with a larger screen (Android-based e-book / e-ink devices are excellent) and an external bluetooth keyboard is also hugely useful. There remain limitations: access to full Android storage, root access, an unusual path prefix, many unavailable packages, limited access to systems space (e.g., /proc and /sys, networking, and the like), as well as the underlying Android weirdness do still intrude if you try to stretch limits. But Termux is absolutely useful and an absolutely welcome addition to any Android system. For those familiar with extending Linux userlands to Windows prior to WSL, it's similar in general spirit to Cygwin. ________________________________ Notes: 1. As I've noted (with some variation) for years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>. I'll admit that EinkBro, an e-ink optimised browser, is giving Termux a run for its money however: <https://github.com/plateaukao/browser>, which has some truly useful features (such as "save to ePub": <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107958709435468728>). Multiple raves and comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

r displays at lower prices. Going from Onyx's current product page: - 6": $140 -- $200 (Poke 4/5, Volta 3/4, Darwin 9, Livingstone 2, Da Vinci) - 7": $220 -- $250 (Page, Galileo) - 7.8": $280 -- $340 (Edison, Kon-Tiki, Nova Air) - 7.8" Colour: $430 -- $450 (Tab Mini C, Nova Air C) - 10.3" $450 (Note 4, Note Air 2 Plus) - 13.3" $880 (Tab X) Check the specifications for each device as some features are only offered on specific models, and systems specs (memory, CPU, storage) can vary. If you're interested in handwriting, look for "inductive + capacitive" on the screen specifications. I have an earlier 13.3" device, the Max Lumi. Price was similar. My main complaint is that storage was short-changed at 96 GB. With apps, books, and podcasts, that actually fills fairly quickly. I'm finding that app store downloads, Pocket's article archive, and podcast episodes are usually my space hogs, though documents add up as well at 1--50 MB a pop.[1] I did not think I'd be using the handwritten note-taking feature much. I actually am, and love it. Response lag is largely unnoticeable, registration is good for note-taking, though the multiple screen layers might give some parallax for art. If you're reading technical works, I'd recommend an 7.8" or 10.3" device minimum. The default bookreader (Neoreader) is good, and has zoom-and-pan modes for reading large-page and/or small-type documents. I almost never have to use that, though it works well. Other Android e-book reader apps can be installed: Kobo Reader, Kindle, FBReader, PocketBook, Moon Reader, etc., from Onyx's App store, Google Play, F-Droid, Aurora Store, APK Mirror, etc.) The devices are Android tablets, so the Android ecosystem is available to you. Google Play Store is not activated by default, and I've avoided it using instead F-Droid (mostly) and the Aurora Store interface to Google Play (for a small set of apps). For the most part I'm avoiding distractions and have no authenticated services other than Mozilla Pocket.[2] APK Mirror is another option for installing specific versions of apps.[3] I strongly recommend installing Einkbro, an e-ink optimised browser: (https://github.com/plateaukao/einkbro) And of course, Termux, a Linux userland based on apt, with over 2,500 packages: (https://termux.dev/en/) Both via F-Droid. Skip Onyx's keyboard (it's crap and failed after a couple of months). A Logitech or similar Bluetooth keyboard does come in quite handy though. I do wish there were something that fit better and was a bit more portable, but one makes do. Do get the corresponding case/cover for your device. Yes, it's spendy, but it fits perfectly and offers good protection. Onyx's pencil is decent, though I also had (and subsequently broke) a Staedtler pencil. I plan on replacing that eventually. ________________________________ Notes; 1. ePubs and generated PDFs tend to be at or under 1 MB, scanned or complex documents can run to 50 -- 100+ MB, particularly if you're downloading scanned-in 19th century texts from the Internet Archive. A copy of Lyell's Geology is the largest I've run across to date at ~300 MB. 2. I have a long and mostly unhappy relationship with that app, documented in part in prior HN comments and posts, if you're interested. The essential problem is that it gets worse the more you use it. 3. As I've ended up doing with Pocket as the last usable version dates from February of this year (8.1.1.0, 17 February 2023, FWIW).

egrated adblock. - Good bookmarking for a mobile browser. <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/38e0c53096600139106600...> As to why e-ink needs tuning: - Persistence is free. - Pixels are cheap. (Lots of them, very high DPI, 200--300+.) - Paints are expensive and slow --- draw power and even at high-performance, at best a few Hz. High-quality is more like 1 to 0.25 Hz. - Animated anything sucks. - Pagination hugely beats scroll. More: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...>

on HN: the ability to save multiple pages to a single ePub document, including updating said document at later points in time. This means the ability to compile a single document with, say, items of current interest, a day's (or week's or month's) reading dump, research on a specific topic, etc. And: when you're done with that particular interest, you can grab and nuke the entire collection in one swell foop. A major failing of tab-based browsers is clean-up, often an all-or-nothing proposition. Or copy the compilation to (an)other device(s), email it to family, friends, or cow-orkers, post to a website itself (mindful of course of the greatest impediment to information interchange ever invented, copyright law). So, Daniel Kau is single-handedly delivering one of the biggest transformations to the browser world I've seen in over two decades, and possibly three. Not as much progress as I'd like to see (it never is of course), but far more than trillion-dollar monopolists seem interested in or capable of executing.