I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone
heyjonny.devI 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!
(n.b. haven't tried it, but I'm a happy user of KOReader for a couple of years now.)
It’s not that hard to disconnect if you really want to.
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.
"Going to the bank"? Banks around here began to close physical branches well over a decade ago now, and visiting one of the remaining branches often requires a multi-hour wait in the queue, if not an appointment made many days in advance.
The “I need my phone for banking” excuse is a vague reason to keep using it. They don’t need their phone for banking, they want their phone and banking is a convenient reason to placate that want.
It's not your country. It's the banks' country if they own it to the extent that they own your identity.
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.
(haha, 6 - 7 bucks for a printed mag on paper - seems somehow surreal these days? Esp since its "a one day useable product" mainly, while you can get some of these news app subscriptions for 10 bucks and you get every stuff tons of stuff)
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.
Ultimately, the company "did fine" but "doing fine" mostly meant that the older folks retired sooner than they had planned and were replaced with younger people who were more eager to cut their teeth doing design on a computer.
I couldn't imagine the stress to hit deadline. And the insanity of making a whole set of new metal rollers every single day. It all really drove home just how much work went into making the paper happen.
There are linotype machines in museums, and sometimes they fire them up for demonstrations. There are very few printers left who actually know how to use them, the operator I saw was 90 years old!
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.
Yeah, concepts like "latte" just differs so much based on the region/person that it's hard to establish "one true version" even though people will claim "one true version" actually exists, and people just have to follow the "rules" of the drink.
Latte for example will differ just based on what cafe/bar you are in Spain for example, just like a "Cafe Solo" will differ based on the cafe/bar you visit. Some will do 1/3 part espresso, others 1/8, and so on.
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
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.
For walls of text (long substack articles) I still prefer epub, and use https://codeberg.org/neo1/mkebook which I wrote, but if you love the terminal: w3m. Filters are done by your rss reader, newsboat has boat loads of options, but any decent one should.
There is another tool that on the surface appears similar to Defuddle called trafilatura: https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura It was OK, but I wasn't happy with it, as it kept stripping the comments sections.
But it's pretty much a bespoke handler for every site with some common bits (caching, feed fetching etc)
For example: the HN handler uses the Algolia API to grab "front page" articles, filters them by score and comment count, grabs the link and gets any opengraph data from the link. Then the feed item contains some context for the linked site + post score + comment count.
This way I can make the decision whether to open it or hit next right in my RSS reader.
I have similar handlers for lobsters, tildes, youtube etc. along with a "meh" attempt of a daily AI generated summary for noisy sites like Verge, Ars Technica etc. who publish a dozen or more articles per day. The system grabs all those, combines the ones about the same subject and summarises the content.
But yea, it's open source. 99% of the stuff I build is public on my Github with a permissive license.
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!
If you have a Kobo device can you try it please?
Maybe a "queuing" or something? It let me do other things until it was ready, like download the epub.
If you were not logged in, then the conversation happens on the Kindle itself so yeah it's gonna be slow.
If you were logged in and the "backend mode" was enabled, then the delay will most likely be fetching the article images, compressing them and converting them to jpeg on the backend, but there's a setting to choose if you want to embed images or not.
Downside: there is no backlight. Others claim that the screen updates are too slow to make typing practical, but I personally don't think that. I installed termux and I think it's fine. Screen updates are no worse than SSH over a cellphone connection. I have not really found a good RSS reader for it yet, though...
The firm's support is decidedly sub-par, however, should you encounter issues. I'd advise not splurging on their higher-end (larger) devices on the potential lost investment. Though a 13" screen is quite delish for reading technical articles.
There's also the GPL compliance question.
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?
Absolutely love the idea though. Just wish Crosspoint/X4 had the ability to schedule push/pull, but that would likely burn through the battery.
EDIT: Just checking on the crosspoint site they say such thing is not planned: https://crosspointreader.com/roadmap (section Out of roadmap: Active connectivity (RSS, news, browsers))
I'm unable to find a software or service that would to this for me, but it's the exact thing I want.
I'm doing all this (with no cost) using an AWS Lambda function written in Java which is scheduled to be called daily at 7 am. It basically parses some RSS feeds[1] (or parses html[2] when RSS is non-existent), extracts each article content using readability and packages them all in a daily epub[3] (with a TOC) which is stored in a S3 folder. Then a separate endpoint (the one I use in my X4) is taking most recent N S3 objects from that S3 folder and exposes the OPDS. The only downside of this is that the response time takes about 3 extra seconds since it uses a cold start, but response speed is not important to me.
Using 'OPDS as a news library' works incredibly well with my X4, it takes me under 10 seconds to download and open the epub and should work with any e-ink device that can install KOReader (or any other software with OPDS support). And I love that all articles are inside a single epub and I can easily go to another one from the TOC.
It's probably my most useful personal project and I like that by now it follows the 'set it and forget it' principle but in need, since it's written by hand, it's very easy to customize it: filter out AI/war/finance/local-gibberish/whatever articles, add new 'bridges' to websites without RSS, some articles don't respect html guidelines and need some tinkering, etc.
[1] https://github.com/rometools/rome
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.
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 only tried it on my Kindle, can you try it on your ReMarkable and give me feedback?
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.
it's a bash script front end for curl-cffi -> pandoc i.e. impersonate web-browser to download url, then convert to epub. There is also the option to use chromium for the scraper or ebook-convert for the converter. Some config and you have a (rss reader) newsboat -> calibre with a hotkey.
The website shows 15 words in the first line (10 in mobile). The eReader shows 6 words in the first line. In my own experience, I found that 6 word per line is the optimal number for comfort. (age thing? maybe)
> Find three diverse, substantive Hacker News articles submitted within the previous 24 hours. Prefer readable linked articles rather than discussion-only, video, paywalled, or repository pages. For each selection, extract a clean UTF-8 XHTML-compatible article fragment and use dotepub's API to create an EPUB under public/books/ with a descriptive `Title - Author.epub` filename. Fix any EPUB 2 packaging or markup problems, including an invalid `xml:lang` on the OPF package element, and require every file to pass `epubcheck` with no errors before upload. Avoid duplicates already present locally or in the production OPDS catalog. Upload only the three newly created EPUB files to `hetzner:/opt/opds/public/books/`; never sync or delete the whole directory. Then verify production `/up` returns 200, unauthenticated `/opds.xml` returns 401, authenticated `/opds.xml` returns 200 and includes all three titles, each download returns `Content-Type: application/epub+zip`, and deployed copies pass `epubcheck`. Report the selected article titles and URLs, filenames, and verification results. Follow the repository AGENTS.md instructions and keep production credentials secret.
I have also added an e-ink theme to https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/picoflux/ so I can use the browser on my Nomad instead of my iPad, for those trips where I want to read “live” news but not be suckered in by it (and picoflux is how I deal with title-only feeds as well)
No function to import or export OPML, unfortunately.
But adding a few high value feeds would be worth our time I guess.