mawise

I love to see the human-centric vision! This reminds me of Lenovo and Microsoft's "table computer" experiments from ~15 years ago. I remember being really excited at the possibility of my coffee table also being a computer--shared experiences, board games (I think lenovo even sold dice and pawns that connected to it). I had visions of having it also connected to the TV/Projector for controlling media. That was even before I had my first "smartphone". It could have been really cool!

In the animations of the screw cutter, is the threading reversed on the screw that moves the cutting tool? I was staring at the point where the threaded screw meets the carriage in the first animation to see if the carriage was moving very slowly, or just looping in place. It looks like the threads would push the cutting tool in the opposite direction of where it is actually moving.

Very nice work, thank you for sharing!

What's your app? I'd love to try it out!

This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration.

This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a registrar. The lack of a standard (consumer accessible) domain registration API is a huge hole in automating this. If such a project gets some traction, then it could migrate to a physical router that prospective self-hosters could buy. With domain registration, DNS management, and port forwarding all in the router's software, then the remaining hard parts can be sufficiently automated to make self hosting accessible to the average gaming console owner.

Has anyone built a dedicated OPDS client for the Kobo?

I've experimented some with the Kobo ecosystem since I got my Clara BW, I've played with NickleMenu, Plato, and KOReader. KOReader has a built-in OPDS client, but KOReader is a bit heavyweight and it would be really nice to have a dedicated stand-alone client (especially one that supports credentialed OPDS feeds like calibre-web exposes)

Sharing my experience as a tinkerer, sideloader, and recent Kobo owner.

I used a Kindle for ages, always in airplane mode and only sideloading content. Honestly, it was a pretty good setup.[1] But it seemed like it would be harder to setup this way on newer devices, so when mine finally failed, I got a Kobo Clara BW. I was thrilled I could boot it up in "sideloader mode" and not even register it or enable wifi.

I noticed poor typography on my epubs, learned about converting to kepub so I did that (which helped). It was a familiar flow to what I was used to converting to azw3 for the Kindle. My remaining typography gripe with kepubs is that it treats a word+em-dash as a word for inserting space in full justification. Em-dashes generally don't have spaces on either side, this often looks like a space has been inserted only to the right of the em-dash.

I went down the rabbit hole of NickelMenu and other readers including KOReader and Plato, and even tried (and mostly failed) to vibecode my own opds client app. (because KOReader which has one built-in felt overwhelming)

My current sense is the device feels so much more like it is mine. I have much more flexibility to tinker with it. It is not as polished as the Kindle and the Adobe rendering feels stupid, but that's also a sharp edge that only the side-loading community will hit, most of whom use Calibre which can auto convert to kepub for them. Everyone else is buying books from the Kobo store and getting them delivered as kepubs.

So in the end, I'm a big fan of the Kobo devices.

[1]: Except you cannot remove a wifi password if you aren't in range of that wifi signal. I had a rude experience when my two-year-old was fiddling with my Kindle at my in-laws' house and turned on the wifi where there was still a saved credential. An update triggered immediately and I was frustrated for days that everything in the UI changed.

Referenced but not detailed in the article: under android settings -> Apps -> AI Core, you can disable the app and clear the stored data.

I consider myself pretty pro-privacy, but there is so much dragnet surveillance and legitimate breaches of the fourth amendment that I have a hard time getting up in arms over a company complying with a valid search warrant that is scoped to three hard drives (and which required law enforcement to have physical possession of the drives to begin with).

This is so much more reasonable than (for example) all the EU chat control efforts that would let law enforcement ctrl+f on any so-called private message in the EU.