My Black and White Reading Setup

If you’re happy reading on your laptop or Apple device, you can skip this post.

I am extremely fond of consuming “food for thought” in all forms—podcasts, audiobooks, blogs, books, etc. To me, the internet is a choose-your-own-adventure treasure trove of interesting thoughts on any subject. I regularly reach the end of the internet in peculiar programming tasks, random “could I?” electronics projects, random history subjects.

I am part of the human population that is sensitive to back-lights. It feels like my retinas are being burned by all forms of back-lit screens. However the reading quests are in conflict with feeling like crap from the flashlight-in-eyeballs effect.

I also much prefer to live/work/sleep (though relationships make this last one impossible) outside. I think I was meant to be a nomadic shepherd.

Cool Gadget #1: Hisense Q5

It used to be that “emailing” documents to Kindle via the amazing Push-to-Kindle extension was the only way to enjoy reading web content.

HiSense Q5 was the first device that changed my life. It was an expensive gamble to try it, but I was finally able to use any android app I could side-load to read in direct sun. The display technology is RLCD, which means it can do everything an LCD can, but in black and white. It can run Kindle, reddit, twitter, any feed reader as good as any other Android tablet. Oh, and I regularly get 20-30 days of battery life, since power isn’t wasted on backlighting.

Sounds pretty good, right? But it’s also loaded with an ancient version of Android, I had to install a firewall to reduce near-constant communication with China and it’s such an extreme opposite of backlit tech that is does not have any light source at all, so it is unusable without good ambient light. Pixel density is also barely usable and contrast is far from perfect. I have yet to find a PDF reader that has good page flipping mechanics without making me fight with zoom on every page. I subscribed to the Mathpix API to convert PDFs to Markdown/HTML, but the PDF experience on the Q5 is subpar.

For most of the time I’ve had the Q5, I was quite sad that there was no successor device. The soft screen on it is getting more and more scratches and dents and it would really suck to have to be another old-stock Chinese-spyware-ridden 2020 Q5 to replace it.

Luckily there is finally a Taiwanese alternative with color, grumble , and promises of more .

Cool Gadget #2: Mobiscribe Wave 8

I wanted a second device for reading in sub-optimal lighting. I randomly stumbled on Taiwanese Mobiscribe Wave 7.8 B&W for impulse-buy priced $111 shipped.

It has warm front-light, kindle-like screen and runs Android. It took me all of 5min to open the box and adb push f-droid . It then took many days to find the perfect set of android apps:

• EInkBro : Browser that makes the web usable on e-ink
• eLauncher : Black and white mostly-static Android launcher
• I use various other apps on a need-to-use basis, but they suck on e-ink

Some notes on Mobiscribe 8:

• I haven’t found any spyware, god bless the sane culture of the Republic of Taiwan!
• There is no fancy fast-refresh e-ink tech like on recently hip Boox Palma
• The pdf reader they ship is freaking amazing. I’ve never enjoyed reading pdfs before this
• 8" screen is OK because of good PPI, contrast, etc
• Almost no Android apps are usable due to the “let’s have lots of animations, gestures, scrolling, and dark mode”.
• Don’t ever look at adb logs or you will be depressed (sunxi devices are cursed)
• Battery life is 3-5 days, due to some combination of sunxi and animations making e-ink work too hard
• The are no buttons for scrolling

Given these issues, I expected this to be my evening reading device. But the combo of EinkBro + better-than-paper(cos backlight) screen makes me forget about Q5 for weeks at a time. I basically don’t twitter and reddit anymore cos their website suck.

The web always wins

Reading on ancient android tablets turns out to be not so bad. On Q5 I have Brave and on Mobiscribe I have EInkBro.

Most of the stuff I read is fed to me via miniflux where I follow various people via blogs, twitter, HN comments. There is nothing better than picking a few hundred like-minded people as my newsources :)

EInkBro has 2 amazing features:

• Paging: you can do pgup/down via screen corners ala button-less kindle.
• Readability is easy to access

I love that EInkBro took the web (in the 1.0 hypertext sense) and made it usable in this retro-future that is black and white tablets.

PS. I can’t read people smarter than myself without asking AI to explain their words for me. For some reason https://chatcraft.org does not load on any of the browsers on this device. And even if it did, it would have too many screen updates to be usable. So I wrote the world’s most minimal LLM chat website: https://not.chatcraft.org/ .