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I love this kind of observation:

> like most truly useful things we need to build it ourselves

but I was surprised that the author insists on displaying an image on the Kindle. The last third of the post is dedicated to building that PNG file. Is it possible to send text? It would be easier but maybe it's not possible...?

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It's the easiest way to display complex graphics on the Kindle which take over the entire screen. Yes, I could use HTML and the browser, but there's a header and footer that I don't want to see (plus I'm not convinced the Kindle would stay awake). I could have sent text, but the renderer available at the CLI is extremely limited. I'm not sure if I could have tapped into a mobi/pdf renderer to make it show up similarly to an e-book, but I'm doubtful if I could have made a mobi file show up in landscape like this. I was also building on several other tutorials that use PNG files, so it just made sense to do this.

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