Reabble – RSS Reader for E-ink Amazon Kindle | Hacker News Reader

Reabble – RSS Reader for E-ink Amazon Kindle

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69 pointsweijarz37 comments

I wish RSS was more popular. It is so useful. I think the general public doesn't think they have a need for it.

I still lament the loss of Google Reader, and haven't found a replacement that I'm happy with yet.

What if, there was a repo that contained tons of scrapers similar to Homebrew. Each scraper makes an ATOM feed for sites without one. Anyone can run their own feed repository on their own server. Community contributions help keep scrapers up-to-date.

What's Homebrew?

The good old reader is a copy of an earlier Google reader - I've settled on it for my replacement

I like https://feedbin.com/ for all my RSS. That coupled with "Reeder" on iOS and OS X is how I consume most of my news feeds.

Feedbin costs money but I personally think it's fine to toss a little cash at a service like this to make sure it stays working.

digg reader is good, simple and reliable if not as pretty as google. Take a look if you haven't already.

The problem is, there's not as many feeds around these days.

There are a couple of e-ink readers that run Android eg Onyx BOOX, MIDIA, Icarus. However they're all tiny vendors, often no play store by default, and old versions of android.

I'd love a good quality eink tablet that runs recent stock versions of Android with play store. Ideally I wouldn't have to jailbreak. Surely there is a big market for this - there are hundreds of color screen tablets like - surely a few eink ones are possible? Any suggestions?

The kobo readers run linux and seem to be pretty hackable. You can put Android on them (I only saw Android v2.3 with a quick google though, not sure if they'll run something more recent).

I bought a Kobo Glo (which I'm very happy with, incidentally), intending to hack in a hardware page-turn key (or even a cordless wifi one using an ESP8266 if possible), but I could never work out how I would be able to do it.

The ebook reader companies, like most corporations, want the consumer to be locked into their ecosystem. I assume some of the cost of the reader is offset by the profit from ebook sales. So it would be against their business model to sell one where you could just easily install any software you want.

I currently use a Kobo Aura HD (same display as the Onyx Lynx T68 but no Android). Replaced the Kobo firmware with Kobo Start Menu and KOReader [1] and I now have about as perfect of a barebones reader that I have been able to find in my quest so far. I was very unhappy with the stock Kobo firmware: the scanning on startup to build a sql-lite DB of my books was insane when there are 15+ GB of books to scan. The alternative firmware provides a file manager and an excellent e-reader application and that's all I have ever wanted in a basic e-reader. I have yet to see an "indexing" solution work well and I dread seeing them in action now given how absolute time sinks they have been for me over the years.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/3h83ls/how_much_does_...

Can you think of any way to get KOReader to respond to a hardware page turn button? I'd like to hack one into my kobo, I'm good with hardware but not sure where to start with getting the software to respond.

I know that there's a serial port inside most kobos, I wonder if there's a way to get it to turn pages with a command through serial. If that was possible I could use an attiny, and that would probably fit inside the case.

Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas there. It seems to me that emulating the IR sensor trigger for a mid-right or mid-left touch is the first approach I would try. My next attempt would comprise of adding a cheap device to the USB port and look into writing a driver to interact with it. Mobileread.com/forums has an active Kobo forum and I suspect they might be able to help better.

There are quite a few eink readers these days that have Google play preinstalled. Most are at android 4.2 though. With eink the oem's only update to the latest version of Android when new eink tech comes out. Nook latest eink reader is on 4.4 but need to root it to install Google play.

I had a Boox Lynx T68, which ran Android 4.0.3 (and now 4.4.x? beta supported by ereader-store.de). It had Google Play, which was generally convenient. However, there were two issues: the processor was so weak that the apps that I wanted to use (Google Play Magazines and Zinio) didn't run very well. However, the ability to run most of the Play apps was a good bonus.

I am looking at the Onyx Boox Max as well - it also has the same OS version support but perhaps a better processor. The price has kept me away but I window shop it often :).

$0.90/month? That's an odd price point. Is it tacked on to another subscription?

Inoreader is free too, with upgrades you can pay for. Looks like this only works with Inoreader.

What I mean, is that $0.90/month is not a price point that works well with a credit card processing fee. Unless it's billed yearly or something.

If you deal with a lot of small transactions you get a special agreement with your payment processor which basically removes the flat transaction fees.

Yeah it seems odd to pay for what is essentially an RSS reader reskinned with custom CSS.

You think they would do better as an affiliate model for subscriptions (e.g. NYT gives 15 free articles per month to some readers), but maybe inoreader already does that.

I wonder if it's an algorithmic price based on # of users like what Pinboard used to have.

I wish somebody did a similar service for Pocket. I guess having a native client for reading files will never happen (been waiting for years..!). But I could also use an interface for reading articles while I'm online..

I use p2k.co, which works ok enough for me in the free tier that I haven't bothered implementing my own...

I wonder if Pinboard - the regular website - would work for this. I've never tried it, but since it's such a plain no-frills HTML page, there's a change it would look good on a Kindle. (And probably have good perf too - no oodles of JavaScript to execute)

Instapaper for Kindle might be better.

https://www.instapaper.com/apps

https://david-smith.org/blog/2012/10/11/instapaper-on-the-ki...

You can do this very well without paying anything though? I just have my rss subscription email my kindle email and it worked perfectly?

Wait, so this is just a website, not an app?

Kindle doesn't have apps. The only other option would be a service that automatically adds PDFs for you by emailing them to your kindle address.

e-ink Kindles do have (limited) apps. I have a weather app and can play chess, mahjong, and soduku on my 3rd gen e-ink Kindle at home.

This has been removed from the more recent Kindles, since the Kindle Voyage at least.

Can confirm, java inside. Outdated, 1.4 or something like that last time i touched it.

Instapaper actually does this. You can have it e-mail everything you've added to Instapaper to your Kindle as a kind of personally curated newspaper. It's not well publicized but is relatively easy to configure in your Instapaper account.

Wouldn't you be able to do this with the daily email digest on IFTTT too?

I've found the Instapaper Kindle export to not include article images. Very frustrating and devs don't seem to care (and probably care even less now with being bought up).

Yes, when it occurs it totally breaks the experience of reading long reads on the kindle. This, and the fact that multi-pages articles are sometimes not properly fetched.

I'm working on generating perfect (all images, all pages) .mobi periodical files from rss feeds, send me a mail (in my profile) if you want to test a MVP when it is ready.

It seems to run on the Kindle browser.

Wow, the icon sure looks like Instapaper’s

At least they didn't use lowercase.

“Lowercase letters?” Erlich says, “Every fucking company in the Valley has lowercase letters. Why? Because it’s safe. But we aren’t going to do that.”

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