Stick It to Jeff Bezos by Turning Your Defunct Kindle Into the World’s Worst Typewriter

If you’re the proprietor of a Kindle, you might have seen the information that on May 20, Amazon is unilaterally ending help for a complete bunch of pre-2012 Kindle and Kindle Fire gadgets. If you personal one in all these gadgets, you’ll not be capable to buy new titles, obtain any new materials, or reset/restore them—making an attempt to do the latter will lock you out of the machine utterly. (If you’re uncertain whether or not your Kindle is on the chopping block, there’s a list of affected models you possibly can seek the advice of.)

Understandably, this information went over like a lead balloon on the web—many individuals personal affected fashions that also work simply superb, however will however be rendered fairly rattling ineffective by Amazon’s embrace of pressured obsolescence.

So, if you happen to’ve received a Kindle that’s on the checklist, you would possibly end up questioning what to do with an e-reader that was completely useful up till Amazon determined that it was excessive time so that you can purchase a brand new one. If you need to stick it to Jeff Bezos and preserve utilizing the machine you personal, you’ll in all probability need to take into account jailbreaking it. It ought to be stated that this dangers bricking the machine fully, however, properly, you don’t have a lot to lose at this level, do you? And a profitable jailbreak will will let you preserve utilizing it as an e-reader—one which’s maybe much less seamless in its operation than a vanilla Kindle, but in addition a complete lot more versatile.

But maybe that each one sounds far too smart. If so, by no means concern—there’s at all times the… typewriter possibility? Yep, if you happen to’ve dreamed of turning your Kindle right into a DIY typewriter—and look, with nearly 8.3 billion people on this planet, somebody has in all probability entertained this concept—then an Argentinian gentleman by the identify of Roni Bandini has your again. In his Hackster profile, Bandini describes himself as a maker of “machines of an absurd nature and seditious purposes,” and his newest project entails turning a Kindle right into a typewriter. It’s unclear whether or not this mission was meant to coincide with the Kindle demise wave, however both method, the timing is serendipitous.

Anyone critically pursuing this route can discover all the data they want on the mission’s Hackster page, however the tl;dr is that you simply jailbreak your Kindle to permit a few key items of software program—the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) and kterm (a easy GTK terminal)—to be sideloaded onto the machine. Once that is performed, you hook your Kindle as much as a Raspberry Pi that’s linked to a small thermal printer, identical to those you see on the grocery store. Everything you sort on the Kindle is buffered till you enter two line breaks, at which level the textual content is shipped to the printer and printed.

Bandini’s setup makes use of the Kindle’s software program keyboard, however anybody who’s truly suffered by means of that ordeal on older Kindles will in all probability additionally need to take a look at hooking up an exterior keyboard. The mission additionally comes with files for 3D printing a snazzy little enclosure for the Kindle, printer, and Raspberry Pi.

Is this significantly helpful? No. Is it enjoyable? Yes. And as Bandini says in his assertion on the mission’s Hackster web page, “Sometimes the value of a project is not in what it does, but in how far it pushes the boundaries of what a device was supposed to be.” This is true! And typically the worth can be in protecting a superbly usable machine from going into e-waste as a result of Jeff Bezos fancies one other journey to area.