A few different things all came together to write this post today.
My Kindle’s battery died. The Kindle hubbub (though not relevant). A failure to find a self-hosted Instapaper alternative. And Juan’s article—Tools That Just Work.
A bit of context, my everyday workflow for reading, as mentioned in my RSS article, is as follows:
“My setup for reading is FreshRSS instance on my Raspberry Pi. I read articles on my phone using Focus Reader hooked into said instance. Save articles I want to read later to Instapaper. Read articles later on my Kindle, sent from Instapaper. Ideally, I would like to get an Android E-Reader and use Focus Reader directly, but I sadly don’t have the money. Feel free to donate lol.”
Well, lately, said Kindle’s battery has gone from charging once a week to charging almost every other day, and it has kind of gotten out of hand.
The Kindle not being able to transfer books over USB scared me at first, as I thought they might be removing the send-to-Kindle feature, but for the time being, they are not. (And they also haven’t started charging for it, but it’s only a matter of time—enshittify all the things.)
Instapaper is alright for what I use it for, but I would still prefer self-hosting.
But at the end of the day, this stack kinda just works. And I like when things just work, as with tech, they tend to not.
I am not sure where I am really going with this, but I have an attachment to this Kindle in the way it just works. The buttons fit my hands. It turns on (when not dead) every time. It syncs every time. The pages turn every time. And the buttons work every time. That being said, can I justify buying a cheapo AliExpress battery? Or should I simplify and buy an Android E-Reader, which will cut down on so many steps?
But on the other hand, it just works…
For all the people freaking out about losing your books to Amazon just use Annas Archive.
Toodles
This is day 6 of #100DaysToOffload
