Category: Technology Page 1 of 3

I have had an online server I have used for a few years for all sorts of things. Cloud storage. Seedbox. And especially a media streaming server.

Outside of physical media — and, to a now much lesser degree, YouTube — that server was my media life. Fact is, with my music and its complicated curated playlists and metadata it was the heavy winner. I spent maybe a hundred hours working on it and that was ok because I spent a couple hours per day using it. Sometimes much more.

Only Kaz and I had noticed that it was starting to limp along here or there. Kicking connections. Having some trouble processing slightly larger files.

It was clearly having trouble. The people who run it were looking into it.

Last week it stuttered so hard it just stopped working except in random bursts. Then, yesterday I got the news that the drive(s) the server was on just crapped into dust.

In the arms of an angel…

I spent a few seconds just staring into space and then went: ok, let’s start rebuilding.

It was a bit later when I realized that it is nearly impossible to rebuild to its previous form. At least not without some long term struggle.

Let’s take the music: There were a few thousand songs on there. Artists were marked with their country of origin, moods, styles, and related artists. I had a few different tags that helped to build a few large, well-used, and ever-shifting playlists. I had manually gone through and added artist photos for every single artist in my collection. Some bios. I had rebuilt cover art to look better whether on the screen or on the phone. I had months and months of play data. I had hundreds and hundreds of songs with ratings out of five stars (including half stars) to help me sort through albums and getting just my favorites. I had stuff on there to analyze sound styles to bring up sonically similar songs. Different “radio” modes.

More than that. All that could played on my computer or TV or phone from the same database.

Even though I already have another such online drive in place and could relatively quickly upload the music I have on my computer, it would easily be August or September before I had reasonable chance to rebuild any major portion of that and stuff like the ratings and moods and seed playlists would never happen quite the same way again.

And it’s a good chunk my fault. I *should* have taken the time to set up a relatively simple script to back up the metadata. Just stored that off-site somewhere. The basic 1-2-3 rule: 1 place is very bad, 2 is better, 3 is best. I got sloppy and now I’m paying for it.

Even some self-recriminations don’t make up for those moments I remember stuff that I had built up like a digital packrat for years and sorted joyously.

As of right now, I have no plans to build up music on this iteration of the drive. I’m going to get some of the video content back in place and leave it there for a bit. I’ll make sure everything is marked and consistently backed up.

For music, I’ll just go with Musicolet on my phone and Foobar2000 on my computer. There will variations in playlists and content and that’s ok. I’m already figuring out how to do small hacks on both to just get some of the flow I like back.

I am going to miss PLEX Music, that’s for sure.

Sometime this summer I will start building up my own NAS and get it good and beefy and stable early on. At that point I will probably return to building up my music library.

And hey, by this time next year it might be back to as good!

It’s Helpful When They Tell How Much They Need You

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-06-06

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

Remember when Snopes would dig up “No, Facebook ain’t going to charge you, silly!” debunks every few years? Presumably to fish ad clicks from that elderly aunt scared she’s going to lose access to her favorite local knitting group.

What Snopes failed to disclose, there, is that the call was coming from inside the house.

The new proposal would offer European users two choices: continue using free versions of Instagram and Facebook with personalized ads, or pay for ad-free subscriptions. The changes would not affect Meta app users in other countries, including the U.S.

Now, you could argue — if you are a sycophant who thinks giving billionaires your personal data is a fair deal just so you can continue to doom-scroll instead of taking up useful hobbies and getting more sleep — that giving up personal data for “advertisements” is easy. And free.

And you might say even, “Sure, they will sell it to law enforcement to carry out mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, but the doom-scrolling, Doug. You want me to just like…live with myself?”

But in their desperate push to devour more data to justify eco-crashing data centers being fast-tracked around the world, Meta has starting telling the same content creators that justify the existence of their entire site that…well…

Got to love it when Meta tells its users that their data is worth €5.99 – €7.99 [I’ve seen two different values, quoted] per month. That much, huh?

Sounds like a great backbone for a really big lawsuit to recoup all the stolen value from content creator’s hard work currently being funneled into AI-training machines.

No would be my short answer…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-06-06

In Reading, Technology

from Do customers want AI on their e-readers? [LGT: GoodEReader]:

The use cases stated in the press release were AI features such as translation, transcription, and document summaries. However, this would just be the start; AI is coming for your e-readers whether you like it or not.

I think Michael Kozlowski’s line there at the end is perhaps the only truly pertinent one in the whole article, seeing how the AI space is growing so fast that a) hardware with AI “baked in” will be out of date on a much faster time-line that most e-ink/e-reader devices so these first sacrificial lambs will be in trash heaps within a year and b) the entire AI space is populated by a entire tessellation of pyramid schemes where certain people, once they achieve enough riches, might slow down enough to try and address the growing body of problems.

Since “when a rich asshole has enough money” is slightly less probable than “when pigs fly” or hell freezing over¹, my personal assumption that generative AI will largely be fixed post some world-rending crash.

For now, the absolutely non-sense trillion-dollar valuations and projected growth worth more than most countries basically only works if folks keep rapidly adopting it. In a similar vein to how little people like myself (and yourself) were pulled into the stock market by sheer shitloads of late-90s, early-00s propaganda and now that action has propelled a few people into the spheres of worth where no international law seems to actually apply and every attempt to rein in said wealth leads to the billionaire equivalent of hissy-fits.

We have to feed at the Trough™ and…oh, look, just got another email saying my monthly Trough™ fee has been increased to €49.95 unless I allow advertisements on my Trough™ device.

Fucking wank.

The thing is I actually like the potential of the services this could offer. Things like being able to compare the linguistic choices between books, to see references to other books in a series (without wading to middling fan-wikis full of malware ads), get multiple translations, to look up historical events being referenced, to do deeper searches about concepts being discussed, to analyze charts and numbers, to check the veracity of claims… These could be good things.

But for now the folks who want you to want AI are not your friends.

You are the customer and the product. At the same goddamned time.

And far more probable than the bullshit claims that “eye of a camel” was really a secret code that means rich people are actually very, very loved by God. ↩︎

Got to love it when they make it easy: Reddit’s App Push

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-05-15

In Internet, Technology

Over the past month or so, Reddit has been “trying out” a push for mobile users to pick up the app:

And like…sure. Fine. Whatever. You have to love it when they make it easy to leave.

It’s helpful for Reddit to be so accommodating. Since I got that alert a couple of weeks ago, it has been very easy to not spend time just chunking through bot-driven doomscrolling where most of the good content is just reposts from years ago. The amount of books and long-form media I’ve been able to consume with the freed up time is not inconsequential.

There’s a longer rant, here, but I’ll just give a short taste.

It is absolutely criminal that “new media” has actively colluded into a universal state where websites, apps, and other services assume that the wholesale relinquishing of our personal data is a ready expectation for which we should thank them. Even apps/sites/services for which we pay money, sometimes a lot of money. Doesn’t matter. “Add more friends to make it more fun!” “Make sure your location tracking is on and we’ll give you five free gems!”

All the behavioral scientists and marketers pushing this should be outright ashamed.

AND, it should be illegal for those profiting off this new cold war to not have to give at least 80% of all user-stolen revenue back to the users. Either its worth something or it isn’t. “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” bullshit has forgiven grave sins against privacy and helped pave the backbone of ecological collapse and city-sized datacenters paid for with our tax money.

Who gives a shit about Reddit’s claims that this is for the user experience? Of course it isn’t. At least not outside of addiction driven tribal-brain behavior and bright lights and stupid meme videos. The last time Reddit had a good user experience was back when it was a terrible website full of terrible people around whom you shouldn’t be. At least then it felt like a reflection of its actual target audience.

Hell, I’m not even blocking ads on the site so it’s not even about recouping lost ad revenue, at least not the direct ad revenue.

It’s so they can get more data from our phones and sell more information about their user. Because the entire economy is being entangled into datamining and AI training and selling user data to data brokerages who then sell it to dataminers, AI trainers, and law enforcement.

Up my butt, Reddit. Up. my. butt.

This One Thing about BookTube Drives Me Mad…Click for…blah blah blah…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-28

In Reading, The Algorithm

Ok, that’s a lie. A lot of things about “BookTube” drive me a bit mad. Most of it, really. There is good stuff, real good stuff, but I rarely care to watch enough to find the good stuff.

I’ll be in a mood to discuss more later, maybe, but here’s something from dozens of thumbnails that is now irritating me enough I’m going to start telling Youtube to not recommend me channels which use it:

Books {held | stacked | pointed to} spine back while a thoughtful face is front and center and there’s a title like…

Five Books I Will Never Read Again Because They Are TOO Good

Three Books You Have Never Read but Should Get Right Now

These Books Absolutely Wrecked My Summer

The last one probably with fake tears added to the thumbnail, or some such.

And it is so annoying to be so constantly baited into every video where even if you know the BookTuber or subscribe or whatever you still have to essentially pretend to be tricked into watching it.

The new The Algorithm demands sacrifice. Tricks for Clicks! If you know what are you getting into, you might not waste so much time forming addiction to screens, amirite?! It’s that or absolutely low-tier enragement farming.

Look, we’re adults, here. Just show the books. Let me know.

If I have not read the books, then good! New stuff!

If I have read the books and hate them, then good, I can avoid it (or join in to see a difference in opinion).

If I have read the books and love them, then I can either avoid or watch to have my sense of utter-correctness validated. Win win!

Mostly, I suspect, the middle-of-the-road absolutely un-timeless, un-classics which proliferate across BookTube’s for-all-tastes vibe will bear little interest for me and that’s ok. I’m not here to yuck your yum, not really. I love that you love to read.

Let me choose to click or not.

Otherwise, I’m no longer clicking a goddamned thing. Well, except the hide channel and such.

I’m sorry the soul-sucking, orphan-crushing machine to which your livelihood is attached requires you to screech like performing monkeys and trick your audience to make it happy.

OH, here are the books, by the way. Lest hypocritical be I:

There’s no real reason for those three. They were just near my desk and I didn’t feel like spending longer taking the photo than typing the rant.

All three: recommended, if you are into that sort of thing.

Am I being gaslamped by YouTube?

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-26

In Internet, Speculations, The Algorithm

I got the above prompt while scrolling YouTube on my phone — bit laid up in bed due heavily inflamed right leg — and it’s the first time I have seen such.

Does this video feel like low-quality AI? Then results from not-at-all to extremely-likely.

Which makes me wonder if I’m being manipulated.

I do often tell YouTube not to recommend videos and channels that are obvious AI. Not always. Just in principle. YouTube’s floodgate recommendation system requires that. Watch one AI fake trailer and you will never know which movies are actually being released ever again.

Alerting me to the concept of AIness while promoting a 35min video about boardgame rulebooks from a creator I’ve never watched before, though? It feels weirdly manipulative…

(a) …like a little seed of doubt about what is or isn’t AI.

(b) …like a prompt to get me to watch a boardgame video after generally ignoring them for the past couple of years.

I watch a lot of solo rpg stuff, and I think this convinces YouTube, incorrectly, that I want broader tabletop slop in as addictive a manner as possible. Way too much D&D drama whinging and far too much boardgame critical theory about edge cases.

Because of that prompt, I was tricked into watching 5 minutes of a video I would have outright skipped, otherwise.

Hmmmmm.

BTW, posted this from my phone to try it out.

The Oddities of Albert Campion Ebooks

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-22

In Reading, Technology

Tuesday night, I was watching through one of my absolutely all time favorite comfort watches: “Sweet Danger,” a double episode of BBC’s Campion.

*Amanda Fitton and Albert Campion’s flirting remains dear to my heart years after first watching. Dawwww.*¹ *Series needs a dang Blu-Ray.*

As I do, I got curious about seeing which of the Campion ebooks I have managed to accumulate — I have a complete run of the print books back when Felony & Mayhem had the license to print the print books — but…you know.

The First Oddity

What I found confused me, because while I wasn’t expecting to see the classic (to me) F&M covers, I was expecting to see the relatively profession covers of Open Road Media’s versions which have a certain panache. Instead, what I found was several variations of AI-generated content:

*NOTE: This particular version doesn’t claim a publisher, as far as I can tell.*

At least a solid handful of the books would still have the Open Road Media edition but would also have one of these newer versions priced lower so the “Albert Campion Series Page” is largely full of them. The general quality between the two covers is immediately obvious:

Now, AI book covers is not necessarily a truly-bad sign even if it is not necessarily ideal for hopes-getting-up, but I was also pretty confused (especially when care is not taken to capitalize “Albert” in the cover).

The Second Oddity

Allingham’s works are not, largely, in the public domain. Black Dudley² is, and Mystery Mile. At least in the US (which Amazon dot com should be following).

Asimis is out of the Ukraine.³ They mostly cover the first four books so it is possible there is a different pub-dom situation there, or even a different licensing. Again, not sure how that impacts the American version of Amazon.com, but there you go.

There are two other publishers, though: “Unabridged Books” and “Adhyaya Books House LLP.” The latter is from India. Absolutely no clue about the first since it is effectively an impossible term to search with definite confidence. They bounce around in later volumes, here or there. Sometimes leading to copies with the completely wrong cover:

*How does the “official” copy of a 200pp book get up to 5.2MB?*

I have no idea the licensing, and so will assume this is all above board, but it does show how “manipulation” of prices can break Amazon’s Kindle listings when multiple versions of an ebook are available. Which can have some surprises for the end-user. Especially in the light of Amazon’s somewhat infamous 1984 incident back in 2009. [To this day, an incident taken majorly out of context by people who use to try and prove that Amazon is deleting books on the reg.]

NOTE: The Asimis books seem to be sub-licensed through De Marque who have a philosophy of accessible ebooks. Let me tell you how I know.

The Third Oddity (a two-fer)

In what is a perfectly Doug whoopsie, I accidentally fat fingered the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button while trying to simply scroll over to find out more about why there were multiple editions. That’s how I ended up with a copy of this book:

*Goodbye $0.99, it’s like I barely knew you.*

Right after mis-clicking, I let out a long sigh and then decided to look deeper to figure out more about what was happening. Here are some things I learned.

The Asimis illustrations seem to be taken from disparate sources. I do not mean to say that they are taken from various editions of Campion stories, they just seem to be either old images from other books or AI-generated images in an older, Victorian style. They “fit” the general shape of the passages to which they are attached, but also lead to a strange cognitive dissonance.

The Asimis text is different (with some typos/glitches but better reflow). I first noticed the missing quotes in the text at the start. To do some comparisons, I got my copy of the Felony & Mayhem paperback and went to the same chapter and had a little bonus surprise. The text was very slightly different. “Although you’re a foreigner, Squoire…” had no “Squoire” in the paperback. To check, I got the Open Road Media version of the ebook and checked it (yes, Space Pilgrims, thanks my misclick I now have multiple versions of the ebook on my Kindle…for accidental science!).

Not only does the Asimis have slightly different text with some additional words, in 70% of the cases it has better reflow with clearer paragraphs. Though, there are places where it breaks in other ways.

For those curious, in the print version it looks more like this in the Felony & Mayhem print book:

Open Road Media wins that fight, even if it’s paragraph spacing outside of it is lacking.

Here’s another change in text, though, where I like Asimis’s version:

I just like the “The name was a local one, derived” more than “The name was derived.” The former doesn’t really add anything but rhythm, and rhythm is important.

My guess is there is some difference between the American vs British text or some such, and that is causing it (Asimis using double-quotes in the American English standard).

The Fourth Oddities

Wrapping up, because this was more to document the strangeness rather than say anything particular [besides maybe Amazon should let you filter publishers more easily/readily and needs to control its dang Authority files…FRBR FRBR FRBR, amirite, ‘brarians?]

Here are two things I cannot confirm because I am not going to accidentally buy more copies of these books [please, fat fingers, please], but I saw two complaints while checking reviews that might be of importance:

(1) One reviewer of Mystery Mile said they were frustrated that it was simply a repackaged Black Dudley. The narratives of both are fairly different so my guess is that there is at least one version that gave one of the books the wrong title. I glanced through all the previews I could, but did not see it, but it could have been a paperback version. Or the reviewer might have been talking about broader themes.

(2) A reviewer of another “illustrated edition” said the the images were risqué. I have no idea their tolerance and have learned from experience that it could be anywhere from “lingerie” to full nudity.

Doug’s Final Thoughts

The primary final thoughts I have are, in order of importance to myself:

You should read more Campion. Yes, you. Allingham was delightful.
Campion needs a dang Blu-Ray+ edition.
I would 100% adore a Sweet Danger movie as long as they accepted the weird mish-mash of gangsters, evil businessmen, satanism, English folklore, “Local shops for local people,” and twee flirtations.
Amazon needs to figure out a way to keep this in control before it gets even worse when a billion versions of book can be insta-plagiarized by AI.

While not a long list at the best of times, the only on-screen flirtation that makes me giggle more is from The Mummy and that one is practically cheating because damn, son. ↩︎
StandardEbooks has a copy if you want it. ↩︎
Another publisher is listed as Andrii Ponomarenko, also from the Ukraine and also from Kyiv, with very similar covers across the books and very similar by-lines, so I assume this is the same person/entity. ↩︎

Abusing PLEX Song Moods to Make Better | Different Playlists

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-22

In Music, Technology

PLEX playlists are missing some sorting features — perhaps for good reason — that can be solved by creative abuse of song moods.

The Issue

Some of the issue is downright linguistic | intentional.

What is a playlist? For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is a curated, in-order list of songs they want to play. For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is a subsection of their musical library to help sort from years of backlog. For some people {0-100%}, a playlist is simply a large glob of music to played on random shuffle for long periods of time.

These groups can overlap where sometimes someone wants a big hunking random glob of music and sometimes wants to drill down to a specific artist in that glob and focus on that.

PLEX, though, seems to almost exclusively lean to the first definition for their playlists with the third being included by the shuffle command.

Which leads to an issue for the second definition.

Let’s say you build up a list of some of your current favorite songs [see image above for a few random picks]. Then, you think “Oh wait, I forgot this song by a particular artist” and you add another one…

Now that new song is there at the bottom. As you mouse over it [evidenced back in the top screenshot] you can click and drag it or delete it, but once a playlist gets over, say, 50+ songs the amount of time you can spend adding new tracks by an artist and sorting can get lengthy.

On MOBILE, it does allow you to “see” a playlist by albums and artists, but it puts those items in the order they first show-up rather than alphabetically and clicking on that item doesn’t take you to the songs in the playlist that match the criteria but to the whole album or artist:

This means that a playlist as it stands serves only the first and third categories: Specific Play Order and Random Glob. However, I really prefer the second and third categories mostly: Musical Subset and Random Glob.

I set out to see if I could figure out a workaround, and I sort of did.

Collections and Smart Playlists

Playlists are not the only other sorting method in PLEX. There are actually several (including stuff like Folders) but for now I’ll look at two: Collections and Smart Playlists.

Collections are applied on the Artist and Album level (but not song). They can be whatever you need. I keep several albums sorted in various collections for soundtracks to various solo play campaigns and a broad pair called “Spark Joy” — for something akin to “current hits” — and “Core” — more for major albums of my life.

Smart Playlists are as they seem: playlists generated “on the fly” based on certain criteria which match. Album genre, release date, artist country of origin, whatever.

For reasons I do not understand, Smart Playlists support better sorting.

For instance, I can create a Smart Playlist that only shows music released in 2026 and then sorts it by most played albums so my top played stuff is near the top. It’s a fairly trivial sort.

The problem with this is that Smart Playlists are looking for certain standard criteria. That DEMO playlist above is lacking any obvious structure that would make a good Smart Playlist. There’s several j-pop pieces and then a single song from Belgium.

How do we bridge that gap? This is where I realized I could “abuse” Moods to create something new.

Song Moods

Songs do not have “Collections” as part of their tags for whatever reason. They only have “Moods” and “Genres.” This is, perhaps, an oversight. However, this is all about hacking around limitations.

Let’s go back to the idea of a “Spark Joy” list for current hits. I can add a “Mood” to a song I want to be in my Spark Joy list. I can call it what I want, but for now I’ll just call it Spark Joy (which I’ll apply to the recent “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo):

I can go through and add this Mood to every song I want to be on the playlist. Then generate a Smart Playlist based on the Spark Joy Mood, and get something like this:

A playlist that allows for types 2 and 3, which is good for me.

It also allows me to build “anti-moods” [I use zzzKEYWORD to make it easy to find] to exclude songs from being played from Smart Playlists generated from wider criteria (e.g., country of origin). Why? Think of things where you have a genre or decade or whatever but in the middle of that is a “Best Of” or “Live” album that you don’t want to have play. You can set up something complicated like this:

Essentially, if it matches any of those genres but does NOT have the track mood “zzzJapanese” then it will show up. It can also be useful I want to tag a bunch of albums has having something like “Epic” mood but there are a few songs that break immersion, that sort of thing.

Type 1 Playlists Require Actual PLEX Playlists

With that being said, if you want the type 1 playlist — Specific Play Order — this will not work. For those, you would use the actual PLEX playlists.

Far From Perfect

All this being said, this is far from perfect and it is not a slam-dunk solution. I like it, because it allows me to do metadata sorting. It fits my mindset as a librarian. Still, there are issues. Some might be killers for you.

(1) [SMART ]PLAYLISTS DO NOT HAVE QUICK SONG EDITS

If you are in the album view, etc, you have a little pencil icon you can click on to edit a song where you can adjust song mood and such. For some reason, this is hidden in the playlist view, including Smart Playlists. This means if you get to a song you no longer want to be in the playlist, you have to click on the song title, go to the album, and then click on the pencil icon there.

(2) NO SUPPORT ON MOBILE (?) YET (?)

I thought I read in release notes that PLEX was going to {soon | in beta | ???} support editing track/item metadata on mobile but right now it does not seem to exist, at least not on my build and app. This means if you use this system to build up sortable playlists, you have to use the Web interface while you can use the more traditional playlists just fine in mobile.

(3) UNSURE: MIGHT NOT WORK ON SHARED

This one I don’t know, but it possibly won’t allow folks whom you share your library with to build their own similar set-ups. I’ll have to test this one and get back to you (Kaz has been wanting access, so they can be the guinea pig).

(4) TIME CONSUMING

The biggest problem is that it takes a fair amount of time to start. After you get early parts in place, adding a few songs is relatively trivial but the initial building of the Mood, Anti-Mood, and Smart Playlist is potentially a longish investment.

Compared to the time it would it to take you to do something similar in Foobar2000 it is pretty extensive. I assume Spotify can do it pretty quickly.

STILL, something like PLEX gives you control over your own music in many ways, while retaining the ability to play it across multiple devices or on the go.

The Tale of Two Kindles

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-21

In Reading, Technology

On the left is my Kindle Colorsoft. On the right is my Kindle Voyage. I thought about cleaning them up for the shot but I think it drives home just how often the two devices are used.

A Brief History of My Kindle Usage

My first Kindle (Gen 2) was purchased in 2009. One of the older, “clunkier” models with the big side buttons and the built in keyboard. I used it a good bit. Kept it largely on airplane mode and “side-loaded” it from downloaded content.

When the storms hit Huntsville back in April 2011, that Kindle was used to keep track with the outside world and I used a mixture of it and a old flip phone to order equipment we needed to survive.

In 2012, I upgraded to the Kindle Paperwhite. Looking on Wikipedia (LGT: “Amazon Kindle Devices”), seems like I would have gotten one of the first ones.

For five or so years, the Paperwhite was my primary reading device though I honestly do not recall how often I read from it. Often, I would say. Around here, somewhere, I probably started to read Kindle books as often on app and website.

Voyage and Colorsoft

I got a Kindle Voyage in 2017. Oddly enough, it was the Oasis that caused this. I was interested in a new Kindle and Oasis was getting a lot of hype but for whatever reason, the Oasis simply did not gel with me and I ended up with the Voyage as “a replacement.”

For the next eight years, it was the center of my reading life. Now, this was also the time after Barbara’s birth and then COVID and then the accident so it was kind of a weird time for me to read. I read pretty frequently, but we’re talking about maybe thirty books per year compared to three times that a few years prior.

I really liked it. It was often in my bookbag to pull out when I wanted to read for a bit. It also has a bit of personal history for me:

Got to love the cat hairs just baked right on in, eh?

That sticker, I think, came from one of the last outings before the accident made it hard for me to go to such things [and roughly impossible to carry Barbara around on my shoulders]. We were going to see some test launch in May 2022 and I don’t recall what it is because of reasons [a couple of months before and after the accident are only skeletal in my thoughts, the trauma kind of melted most things away] but I snagged a sticker promoting the then upcoming Artemis mission.

I might be conflating two different events, but that’s ok.

Here’s one of my favorite pictures and B and me…

I was absolutely enjoying the heck out of the Voyage with possibly two complaints:

It had 3GB which seems like a lot of space for an e-reader but my ebook library [not including all the comics and definitely not including all the RPGs] is around 6-7 +gig. Tossing in comics and RPGs and it’s 60+ gigabytes [maybe 100+ gig]. I was already having to decide which books to keep and which ones to delete.
It was a bit sluggish, really. It was clearly meant to handle smaller amounts of books without a lot of on-screen manipulation.

Still, the inertia of having to reload 1000s of ebooks kept me uninterested for years, until finally Christmas 2024: Kaz bought me a Kindle Colorsoft as a gift.

Around here, we were already planning to move to Belgium so I held on to it. After the move, once I confirmed it would work and I would not just be bricking a device, I started using it. I cannot buy a new Kindle [if I wanted to, which I don’t] and have it shipped due to geography-lock but it seems like setting up one already bought with an already established account works ok. For now, at least.

For the past year, it has been an astounding e-reader. It works more or less like I expect an e-reader to act. Nearly every complaint I have about it is based on Amazon’s own stupid restrictions to handling non-Kindle content. The enforced ecosystem stuff is dumb.

Which has started to be a problem because there are some books here or there from other sources I’ve been trying to read and I end up having to use various work-arounds to avoid using the Send to Kindle feature which works ok but is awful in the metadata (and oopsie-boopsies the covers because, I assume, of entirely petty reasons and nothing else).

Then…something occurred to me.

The Return Voyage

You know things are bad when Youtube starts recommending videos about jailbreaking Kindles to you. Like, out of the blue. I didn’t go “how jailbreak kindle pls?!” or anything.

Seeing how much they are pushing AI to be pre-loaded on the newer Kindles, maybe soon. Not yet, though.

It did get me thinking. I like the e-ink display. I considering Amazon’s Ember to be my favorite e-reading font [fun fact, I just realized while writing this post that I could download Amazon’s Kindle fonts]. I have been using ReadEra for my phone but something about the interface was missing a little bit. I like it a lot but I missed the vibe of an e-ink book.

Sure, there are Kobo e-readers. Those are a pretty big deal here. Just…you know, more gristle for the pig-farm. Also, via BOL.com I have picked up a few Kobo ebooks and having them locked by third party DRM is not in any real way an improvement. At this point you can’t even say something like “But they are more customer supportive!” because no company likes customers anymore. They only time they pretend to like customers is when there is a bigger fish is in the pond and the pretense of customer service is baked into a business model. Everyone is just waiting to sell out to said bigger fish so the cycle can continue.

What I want is an e-ink reader that jumps straight to KOReader and 100%, absolutely, is not primarily a storefront masquerading as a device. Not necessarily a e-ink display tablet that can also do my taxes. Just like…locked the hell down to launching KOReader. That sort of thing. Let me pay €200 and get 64GB + e-ink + an app that can read pretty much all the “open” ebook formats.

Yesterday, I finally realized that thanks to Calibre, it is relatively trivial to convert any of my ebooks to a format that a 2017-era Kindle can read and a 2017-era Kindle is from the time when Amazon was still considering side-loading to be a primary access point. They may have started discouraging it by that point, but they were mostly fine with it. Books were stored on the device with names like

The Shadow King of Lancelot Book 17 (Light Novel The Shadow King of Lancelot Series)

As opposed to things like

BR1922298Q1521_azw

I got my Voyage out, got out an old charger, and then spent a fair amount of time recharging it. Let it get through all the stuff it needed to get through to wake back up after a year of not being used. Relatively updated. Relatively synched. All that.

Then I told to say goodbye to mama.

Turned on Airplane mode, hooked it up to computer, and viola. Spent last night reading the back half of a Reggie Oliver Book. Today will be finishing up The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (may I recommend StandardEbooks version if you would like a free copy?).

It made me very wistful for a time when companies like Valancourt and Tartarus Press would just sell you ebooks directly instead of having to go through Amazon. I assume a variety of reasons drove such a thing.

It is madness how much ebooks have been tainted in such a short period of time.

Over time, I’ll probably remove most of the Kindle books off of the Voyage and just it exclusively for other ebooks without going through send-to-Kindle [not least because I just assume Amazon is gobbling those up to support its AI].

It’s a terrible boorish workaround but it is nice to bring back my Voyage without it simply being “yet another Kindle” in my collection.

Once support officially ends for the pre-2013 Kindles, might be time to start properly hacking my old Paperwhite. Just to see.

At this time, not really planning on getting another Kindle unless something big changes in their ecosystem. Let’s see how long these two last.

Amazon Is Within Its Rights, But Eh…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-12

In Technology

tl;dr: Old technologies die and companies drive profits by pushing new ones, but at the same time, the warning of this is less about a specific company and more about a whole mindset. Kindles are fine, but you should have back-up plans.

Above screenshot is from the top of ArsTechnica’s article: For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store. Which seems…strange. Not that they are doing it, but I thought they had already done something like this for older Kindles. I’m getting Mandela Effect’d in real-time.

Anyhow, says AT references an article from Good-E-Reader: You can no longer buy e-books on Amazon Kindle made in 2012 or earlier.

Technically that’s [sic], as far as I know, since the purchasing seems to still be possible for the next month or so, but it’s a minor correction.

Another possible source if you just like to see various talk about the same tech news is not-shockingly the same way:

There are a variety of specific points brought up but it seems like consensus for the actual impact is:

You will not in any way lose your library, just the ability to connect said library to devices over 14-years-old.
The “bricking” they talk about seems to be more about books being associated with your account…
- …which in some context is the same as “losing” them but there are mitigations.
- …but in principle you could factory reset and still have a functional device by transferring books via cable.
A big impact seems to be people who use some variation of local public library collections and maybe [/maybe not] Kindle Unlimited type services, who might very well lose access to those.

My “first take” [for some definitions of first take, after spending an hour reading up on other takes and such] is that:

Amazon is 100% in their right to remove support for old technologies and hardware not up to date with current standards and future-plans, but at the same time PHHHHBBBTTTT.

Amazon is only going to lose (a relatively small amount of) face by this, no matter the reasons and this demonstrates the danger of the ownership-free future The Algorithm Class have been pushing.

[in 10 years you’ll still be hearing people talk about Amazon just stops supporting Kindles left and right much like how the 1984 incident back in…2010?…is still quoted as though it happens on a regular basis despite other bookshops being more prone to it]

Look, 2012 was a lot of time ago. Stuff that was brand-new in that era like Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Windows 8 have already been sunset at this point (the former in a way no doubt similar to the what the early-Kindles are going through, still functional just not connectable to a shop or receiving device specific content). Computers and TVs from that era are different. Phones are completely different. Stuff changes and tech stuff changes significantly across 1.5 decades.

If anything, it’s a testimony to how well the old Kindles were built that the devices are functional enough that people are still attached to them…¹

The fact that it is almost trivially easy to access your Kindle library through your phone or tablet or browser or through a computer app also factors into my somewhat lack of ire about this, though I still have ire.

Outside of the simple truism that old technology eventually gets forgotten [digital files last forever or five years, whichever comes first] my broad assumption that the DRM-wars are a big part of this decision. For whatever reason, we are in a world where ebooks are one of the most protected technologies and, in principle, harder to crack than music [often sold with zero DRM] and at least physical movies [which, if nothing else, can be played on a variety of players before you even get to ripping data from them].

Ebooks, especially Kindle-proprietary formats, and audiobooks [ditto, but Audible] undergo a constant push to innovate where a lot of the innovation is simply to stop people from breaking the DRM on the books they bought.

Piracy is real and has a real impact, but this confuses me to no end.

That is where absolutely any sympathy from me for any company, author, or anyone on the side of Amazon in this case ends. You should not have to rely on a third party to maintain your library and then be expected to buy upgrades to technology or sign away more rights just to re-read a book you bought [a lease to read] years ago. If you don’t want to maintain the library without snatching increasing amounts of personal data to build up into personas you sell to other entities, let us maintain our own. Books do not need DRM. If you are relying on anti-consumer tech to swim above piracy the sharks have already won.

All this being said, here are a few things that are semi-contradictory but I think are true enough to wrap up this kind of going-nowhere besides to take more pot-shots at the anti-ownership-driven future:

Promoting piracy in retaliation for this is a terrible argument. I’m old enough and been on the internet long enough to know that pirates are going to promote their auto-response to everything like it’s a…well, an auto-response. “Netflix increasing its prices? Pirate all the movies!” That kind of stuff. “Content creators barely get paid anyhow!” is the old workhorse that has been used in various forms for years and it remains as ignorant now as it was back then.

I 100% support anyone who uses technology to get around DRM to back-up their own library. Zero qualifiers. Don’t care about any contract or license or what have you. I don’t necessarily think they should have any rights to share it [but…] and especially not to make money off it but I should, and you should, have the right to make a copy of those files that does not require a specific device.

Promoting other ebook readers or even physical books is not precisely the answer. Books break. Folks who read 3-4 books a week will slam shelves full of books pretty quickly. Libraries and bookswap stuff is nice [I donate a lot of physical books] and I support that. Still, physical books are not necessarily going to have the advantages that some ebooks have even though they trump ebooks in other ways.

Other ebook readers are definitely an idea but if it involves simply buying into another ecosystem? Eh. I’d rather promote 100% open ebook readers or apps for common devices that can access all your libraries. See my second point.

I still like my Kindles. Though I am somewhat not in the target audience for this outrage since I tend to update my Kindles semi-often, every three-to-five years. I put them through a lot of wear and tear. Also, I’m the sort who would rather update my ebook reader than get a new gaming console or even a new phone.

Technologies will continue to die by design and a shift towards anti-ownership will continue to try and strip of your rights. Full-stop, the end.