Lack of a decent RSS client is one of the major things keeping me on an iPad over an e-ink tablet. I wish manufacturers like Remarkable would get serious about having software platforms.
This doesn't work for me in spite of over 10 years of trying. I am currently eating lunch and wasting time on HN on my phone, but my ebook reader full of edifying material is sitting there ignored on the table, right in front of me. I need some way of leaving the phone at home completely, but in my country so much basic everyday stuff relies on a phone (and strong bank authentication through a phone).
Roughly, you can classify apps in your phone to things that
1. are fundamentally fine (various bank/payment apps, messaging app, map apps), and
2. are known time wasters (social media)
you then just block the time wasters. you can configure it so that to edit the settings of the app, you have to enter some 150 character randomized code. it is very annoying to do.
this is the point though. there are other ways you can add friction to using your phone. setting its display to be black and white makes it much less enjoyable to use, for example. if you add in enough friction (and stick with it over an initial "hump"), you'll findi yourself reaching for other options.
I always hear the “I need my phone for bank stuff” but can’t you just leave your phone at home and then schedule going to the bank if it’s that necessary to a part of your day? I can’t imagine you need to be interacting with the bank 24/7/365.
I use Instapaper on my kobo for this, ifttt or zappier can subscribe an rss feed to Instapaper, also the browser extension is nice. See some article whilst I'm at work, click the browser extension, and when I'm on the train home Its there on my e-reader.
I like to read a physical dirty (ink dust, not content) finger newspapers whenever I can get them. At a bakery / cafe a few weeks ago, sitting outside having cherry Danish and an Americano (the international special), I was reading the NYT and the SeaTimes section by section. It was awesome. Comics, international, regional beats, magazines. I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incedible, even without considering the cheap price.
There was a couple nearby looking at the mess of papers on my table. I realized I needed to tidy my donnage pile of sections, and impulsively offered them to the couple. They almost jumped. If I didn't know better I swear they were living out some fantasy of holding a newspaper for the first time.
> I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incredible, even without considering the cheap price.
Former newspaper editor here. We took it for granted at the time, but the orchestration of different teams on a daily basis, with all kinds of cascading workflows and triggers, was something to behold. Editorial, design, special sections, ads, production, printing ... plus all of the smaller teams (copy desk, sports, etc.) and ad-hoc collaborations for instance involving a special event or major news story.
You'd go home late (or more often than not in those days, to the bar) feeling good about what your team had just shipped and looking forward to getting the hard copy early the next morning (sometimes when leaving said bar!). And then you'd start all over again around 11 am. It was far more intense than magazine or book publishing, which I got into later.
And this was in the 90s. Technology was making things faster, but there were still a lot of older analog systems in place including photography darkrooms. Once I even had to call in a breaking late story over a pay phone, dictating it to the editor on duty. Laptops were rare and expensive, and even the people who used them typically saved to a floppy which would be brought in to the newsroom later to be edited.
We had primitive terminal-based word processors (we called it "CText" but I can't locate any reference to it now) and I got started just as Quark Xpress entered the design workflow, replacing xacto knives and bits of paper and opaque plastic that was somehow imaged and sent to the printers. If you went back 30 years earlier, they were still using linotype.
Now I'm curious what you mean with "the international special"? Here (international to you perhaps; Spain) an Americano is just a espresso with lots more water, tastes more or less the same as drip coffee, perhaps a tad bit stronger as it's a diluted espresso. But never heard of a "international special" version, what could that be? :)
I similarly also like the tactile things but of things in general. Like a really good, solid, fluid and responsive knob is a really great feeling, or the keys of pianos that ranges from such a difference of emotion they give you hand. Or the surfaces of really well-made metal surfaces.
The issue with RSS on my e-reader is 1. the amount of feeds I'm subscribed to and 2. I'm often using my e-reader when I'm offline.
1. is not an issue on my computer/smartphone as I can scroll through the feeds and go through interesting links quickly, the keybindings help me do that quickly.
2. Can either be fixed by downloading all links when online (not practical in my case), or by picking and choosing which articles I want to read later.
I used to use Wallabag for this, but right now my setup is a self-hosted Readeck [0] instance with the associated KOReader plugin [1].
I really like Readeck because contrary to Wallaback (which I also used because there is a KOReader plugin for it) it captures the content from a page from the client-side through the browser extension [2]. That helps with paywalled articles which don't expose the full feed through RSS typically.
In my regular RSS reader I often have the problem that some feeds are not full feeds, or some images are missing (In case they have some gallery) and I have to click out to the page, even just to verify I got the full text. That always kinda stops me from going the eink route where I don’t have a proper browser.
Depends on which feeds you subscribe to I guess, probably works really well for long form, reliable feeds.
A majority of the feeds I subscribe to do not include the full text in the feed themselves which is one of the main reasons I use Miniflux which has an option to fetch the full article text and works very reliably. Of the more than 150 feeds I am subscribed to, I think there are fewer than 5 that Miniflux is unable to fetch the text for. Miniflux can also connect to Wallabag to quickly save pages to it using the full text. That is great because Wallabag is often unable to fetch text directly on its own.
One way to get around this in some cases is to subscribe to the feed's associated email newsletter, which, IME, is more likely to have the full text of the article. This, of course, introduces other problems[1], but if your goal is to remove reasons to habitually look at your phone, it's worth investigating.
[1] The feed needs to have a newsletter in the first place, you probably need to clean up the markdown a bit before shoving it into an epub (I've noticed that table-based layouts are much more common, for instance), and your email provider probably doesn't provide an RSS feed of your inbox. The latter two are straightforward to fix but do require a bit of programming elbow grease.
I really like the idea of reading blogs on my Kindle, so I built https://inkfeed.xyz
It's a web-based RSS reader optimized for e-ink devices (especially Kindles) that allows you to read blogs online via the Kindle browser, and download the blogs (directly on your Kindle or email it to your Kindle email).
And it does support fetching the full article using Mozilla's readability package!
It's a neat idea. I think it needs some feedback wheb you click to choose. I asked for an article in mobi as a test, and it was 30 seconds for it to give it to me. I thought it was borked.
Maybe a "queuing" or something? It let me do other things until it was ready, like download the epub.
The only thing attracting me to KOReader for my PocketBook is OPDS. The few presentations I've seen show a UI so bloated (as in, the main view for reading pages crammed full of widgets on the bottom of the screen to display wifi signal, battery percentages, and progression counters) that it makes me wonder why some people use an ereader at all.
If my PocketBook had OPDS out of the box it would be the perfect device. What has your experience been? Why are you using KOReader?
I jailbroke my kindle and this was what the guide I followed installed. I don't know what else is available!
My experience has been "fine" - I don't use anything fancy like dictionary lookup or OCR, I just put epubs/pdfs on it and browse. I find the menu UI pretty good, it's a little unintuitive but there is a short guide that covers everything I need. There is no easy way to browse your library (there is a file browser but I don't like that). Ditto I don't find browsing through a book particularly intuitive, but it has page seeking and you can scroll through pages.
I have an X4 as well and tried going down this path but it's just a bit too much friction for me to set my X4 to hotspot mode and run the calibre sync every time I want to refresh my feed.
Absolutely love the idea though. Just wish Crosspoint/X4 had the ability to schedule push/pull, but that would likely burn through the battery.
I have crossink which is awesome on the x3. I find it better with more features on top of crossink.
And then setup home assistant and picture rendering so when a package or person is detected while I'm reading on a jailbroke kindle, it pops up in the corner automatically with the feed so I can see who it is.
You can browse it on your ereader and any post can be downloaded as epub. Also for people who serialize books and put them in a collection, you can get the whole collection as a single epub.
I've been thinking about turning your /reading list into one as well but not got ten round to it.
I've been working on the same thing for my ReMarkable, but I get it uploaded as a newspaper doc every morning since you can't install apps on it. Overall it's been working reasonably well!
I still use Omnivore, just self-hosted now. I recently added a better RSS Reader to it, so now I can get my rss feeds, and save them to my read it later list - and then read them on my Supernote using the android app or web app.
I really like the idea of reading blogs on my Kindle, so I built https://inkfeed.xyz
It's a web-based RSS reader optimized for e-ink devices (especially Kindles) that allows you to read blogs online via the Kindle browser, and download the blogs (directly on your Kindle or email it to your Kindle email).
I would love to get the feedback of fellow e-ink devices enjoyers!
Nxtpaper products of tcl are almost as good as eink but without losing the color and screen speed of normal phones. Just change the mode with a switch and you have an ereader. Mate screen and colors and light like an eink device.
I think this idea is really cool but like others have said it’s the friction of syncing that stops me. I would love for CrossPoint to have a nightly sync :)
I'll throw my 2 cents into the mix of "what works for me" posts. FreshRSS (share to Wallabag enabled) + Wallabag + KOReader (on kobo). I've been toying with the idea of trying to add Wallabag sync into Crosspoint, as I have an x4 but it's pretty much just sat doing nothing.
I have a Mudita Kompact though, which I use with the Wallabag app and my best mate Alan from RHVoice to read out articles for me. I remember barely anything with this setup but I do like it...
(1) Browse my favorite sites and rss feeds. Save the urls I want to read to a specific Todoist list. I coded a little extension for firefox to do it using a keyboard shortcut https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/todoist-quick.... But in some sites, every feed is added to the list automatically using IFTTT
(2) Every day at a given hour, a cronjob runs on my raspberry pi executing the script, which builds a epub, mark the articles (tasks in todoist) as completed, and sends the ebook to my kindle email address.
In general it works well, although as more web sites implements anti bot measures, some articles are not downloaded correctly. What I do in those cases is add the domain to the exception list, and every week or so browse the articles manually, use https://dotepub.com to download every article in a given folder, and run another script that joins them in a single file and sends it to my kindle email address. I'd like to find time to code that the main script todoist2ebook detects when an article has not been correctly processed so it can automate that fallback logic using chrome headless or something like that.
Final note, I used todoist to store the articles because I was already using it for task management and have a simple rest api, but the script could be easily modified to store the articles somewhere else.
55 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 5.6 ms ] threadI built a web-based RSS reader for the Kindle browser (but it should work on other e-ink devices too).
You can read feeds online or download them directly on your device.
Please try it and let me know what you think!
https://inkfeed.xyz
(n.b. haven't tried it, but I'm a happy user of KOReader for a couple of years now.)
https://jomo.so
but I'm sure there are other competing products.
Roughly, you can classify apps in your phone to things that
1. are fundamentally fine (various bank/payment apps, messaging app, map apps), and
2. are known time wasters (social media)
you then just block the time wasters. you can configure it so that to edit the settings of the app, you have to enter some 150 character randomized code. it is very annoying to do.
this is the point though. there are other ways you can add friction to using your phone. setting its display to be black and white makes it much less enjoyable to use, for example. if you add in enough friction (and stick with it over an initial "hump"), you'll findi yourself reaching for other options.
just go out and dont buy anything
There was a couple nearby looking at the mess of papers on my table. I realized I needed to tidy my donnage pile of sections, and impulsively offered them to the couple. They almost jumped. If I didn't know better I swear they were living out some fantasy of holding a newspaper for the first time.
Former newspaper editor here. We took it for granted at the time, but the orchestration of different teams on a daily basis, with all kinds of cascading workflows and triggers, was something to behold. Editorial, design, special sections, ads, production, printing ... plus all of the smaller teams (copy desk, sports, etc.) and ad-hoc collaborations for instance involving a special event or major news story.
You'd go home late (or more often than not in those days, to the bar) feeling good about what your team had just shipped and looking forward to getting the hard copy early the next morning (sometimes when leaving said bar!). And then you'd start all over again around 11 am. It was far more intense than magazine or book publishing, which I got into later.
And this was in the 90s. Technology was making things faster, but there were still a lot of older analog systems in place including photography darkrooms. Once I even had to call in a breaking late story over a pay phone, dictating it to the editor on duty. Laptops were rare and expensive, and even the people who used them typically saved to a floppy which would be brought in to the newsroom later to be edited.
We had primitive terminal-based word processors (we called it "CText" but I can't locate any reference to it now) and I got started just as Quark Xpress entered the design workflow, replacing xacto knives and bits of paper and opaque plastic that was somehow imaged and sent to the printers. If you went back 30 years earlier, they were still using linotype.
Now I'm curious what you mean with "the international special"? Here (international to you perhaps; Spain) an Americano is just a espresso with lots more water, tastes more or less the same as drip coffee, perhaps a tad bit stronger as it's a diluted espresso. But never heard of a "international special" version, what could that be? :)
I similarly also like the tactile things but of things in general. Like a really good, solid, fluid and responsive knob is a really great feeling, or the keys of pianos that ranges from such a difference of emotion they give you hand. Or the surfaces of really well-made metal surfaces.
1. is not an issue on my computer/smartphone as I can scroll through the feeds and go through interesting links quickly, the keybindings help me do that quickly.
2. Can either be fixed by downloading all links when online (not practical in my case), or by picking and choosing which articles I want to read later.
I used to use Wallabag for this, but right now my setup is a self-hosted Readeck [0] instance with the associated KOReader plugin [1].
I really like Readeck because contrary to Wallaback (which I also used because there is a KOReader plugin for it) it captures the content from a page from the client-side through the browser extension [2]. That helps with paywalled articles which don't expose the full feed through RSS typically.
[0] https://codeberg.org/readeck/readeck
[1] https://github.com/iceyear/readeck.koplugin
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readeck/
Depends on which feeds you subscribe to I guess, probably works really well for long form, reliable feeds.
[1] The feed needs to have a newsletter in the first place, you probably need to clean up the markdown a bit before shoving it into an epub (I've noticed that table-based layouts are much more common, for instance), and your email provider probably doesn't provide an RSS feed of your inbox. The latter two are straightforward to fix but do require a bit of programming elbow grease.
Then it generates a new one that I subscribe to on my feed reader.
It's a web-based RSS reader optimized for e-ink devices (especially Kindles) that allows you to read blogs online via the Kindle browser, and download the blogs (directly on your Kindle or email it to your Kindle email).
And it does support fetching the full article using Mozilla's readability package!
Please try it and let me know what you think!
Maybe a "queuing" or something? It let me do other things until it was ready, like download the epub.
If my PocketBook had OPDS out of the box it would be the perfect device. What has your experience been? Why are you using KOReader?
My experience has been "fine" - I don't use anything fancy like dictionary lookup or OCR, I just put epubs/pdfs on it and browse. I find the menu UI pretty good, it's a little unintuitive but there is a short guide that covers everything I need. There is no easy way to browse your library (there is a file browser but I don't like that). Ditto I don't find browsing through a book particularly intuitive, but it has page seeking and you can scroll through pages.
For casual reading, I think it's just fine.
Absolutely love the idea though. Just wish Crosspoint/X4 had the ability to schedule push/pull, but that would likely burn through the battery.
And then setup home assistant and picture rendering so when a package or person is detected while I'm reading on a jailbroke kindle, it pops up in the corner automatically with the feed so I can see who it is.
Tailscale too.
Having full control of these devices is awesome.
You can browse it on your ereader and any post can be downloaded as epub. Also for people who serialize books and put them in a collection, you can get the whole collection as a single epub.
I've been thinking about turning your /reading list into one as well but not got ten round to it.
That way there’s no friction of getting new articles on my device and I can even sync progress across devices.
It's a web-based RSS reader optimized for e-ink devices (especially Kindles) that allows you to read blogs online via the Kindle browser, and download the blogs (directly on your Kindle or email it to your Kindle email).
I would love to get the feedback of fellow e-ink devices enjoyers!
I think this idea is really cool but like others have said it’s the friction of syncing that stops me. I would love for CrossPoint to have a nightly sync :)
About the only good thing to come out of the open web dying is a revitalization of open and accessible computing hobbies.
I have a Mudita Kompact though, which I use with the Wallabag app and my best mate Alan from RHVoice to read out articles for me. I remember barely anything with this setup but I do like it...
I used to read lwn.net from my e-reader, worked great.
Discussed / screenshots: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>
Unfortunately nonsubstantive HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723661>
Works quite well on an e-ink tablet, as well as on desktop.
I forked the old Pocket-Plus-Calibre-Plugin recipe when Pocket died, so it run with Todoist: https://github.com/rga5321/todoist2ebook
My workflow is:
(1) Browse my favorite sites and rss feeds. Save the urls I want to read to a specific Todoist list. I coded a little extension for firefox to do it using a keyboard shortcut https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/todoist-quick.... But in some sites, every feed is added to the list automatically using IFTTT
(2) Every day at a given hour, a cronjob runs on my raspberry pi executing the script, which builds a epub, mark the articles (tasks in todoist) as completed, and sends the ebook to my kindle email address.
In general it works well, although as more web sites implements anti bot measures, some articles are not downloaded correctly. What I do in those cases is add the domain to the exception list, and every week or so browse the articles manually, use https://dotepub.com to download every article in a given folder, and run another script that joins them in a single file and sends it to my kindle email address. I'd like to find time to code that the main script todoist2ebook detects when an article has not been correctly processed so it can automate that fallback logic using chrome headless or something like that.
Final note, I used todoist to store the articles because I was already using it for task management and have a simple rest api, but the script could be easily modified to store the articles somewhere else.