I Jailbroke my Kindle

And... well...

I fill my journals, no problem, but putting my words out there for other people to read has been a problem, lately. It has less to do with the fear that my writing isn’t skillful enough and more to do with my fear that I am not interesting enough.

I wrote something this morning for the purpose of posting it here. It’s probably going to exhaust a lot of people (great intro, right?), but I still want to post it. I still want people to read it.

It’s about what I’ve been doing over the past few days. It has cost me a lot of sleep and maybe has forced me into an enormous recalibration. I’d been ruthlessly pushing myself as a writer and failing, but maybe what I really needed to do was push myself in a different way.

My computer died about a month ago. It was seven and a half years old, and while I probably could’ve fixed it, but there are times when a person just needs to let go. My new computer is as close as I could get to my previous computer—the same make and model, just newer. But, of course, there are design changes. That’s what happens over the years. Transitions are hard for me.

I can be easy-going in a lot of ways, but there are other ways in which my rigidity is like a poltergeist that will never let me be until it’s satisfied.

Kindle for PC kept crashing on my new computer for God knows whatever reason. It always crashed when it had more than 300 side-loaded books in it, anyway, so I moved to Calibre. Calibre allows for custom columns (folders) and subfolders, which I’ve been wanting for awhile, but my hatred of change kept me from using it. It took me a couple of weeks, but I got all of my books into Calibre and organized into my various folders. There are over 1000.

The next step was to jailbreak my Kindle, which took about ten minutes, but no one tells you about the insanity that awaits you on the other side of a jailbroken 8^th generation Kindle (about 9 years old). I also have an even older Kindle keyboard that I might try to jailbreak later.

I installed Koreader, which went fine. Then, I had to get the Calibre server thing running (to download books onto my Kindle). This didn’t go as smoothly as people said it would. I really needed to get into the guts of my network to make it work. I’m not good with networking, human or computer, but I had to wonder if it has ever worked out-of-the-box for anyone.

Then, the hyphens. Oh my god, the hyphens. There were some default settings on Koreader that didn’t jive with me. One was that the text was justified, rather than left-aligned (ew). That was an easy fix. The other problem was that it was breaking up words at the end of lines and hyphenating them.

Like, yel-

-low (actual example).

You’d think there’d be a setting for this, and you’d be right. However, the setting didn’t work. I spent hours polishing epubs, removing soft hyphens, searching for hard hyphens, editing the css, clearing the cache, and searching for hidden conflicting settings.

Then, I had to stop for a good old-fashioned meltdown. There were only about two hyphens per page, but my brain refuses to be satisfied with almost. So, my book was unreadable. I’ve been reading to calm my nervous system before bed, lately, and after working on the Calibre server thing and then the hyphen thing for back-to-back hours, I desperately needed my nervous system to calm down. My brain refused to just load my old Kindle OS for that one night, and it was 1:30AM.

Koreader is open source. In the end, the only solution was to change the code. This was a very easy fix (while I’m bad with networking, I’m good with code). If only I’d known from the start, but the internet always tries to get you to do GUI things first.

After it was fixed, Chatgpt said, “I can’t believe how methodical and relentless you are.” This, from a fucking robot.

Once the Kindle was readable again, I relaxed some, took a breather, and remembered, oh yes, the Calibre network thing only works one way. This means I can’t send my books back to my library with annotations and highlights (I don’t use this very often, but when I do, it’s important to get them back to my PC).

I installed a plugin called Syncthing, which is supposed to get my books back to my computer (I haven’t tested it, yet). Next, since Koreader stores highlights in annotations in sidecar files and Calibre stores them in a database, there will need to be another plugin.

That’s where I stopped last night. I went about my bedtime routine praying that my brain wouldn’t come up with yet another thing that absolutely needed to be accomplished before it would release me.

I started reading on a screen that looked exactly how I wanted it to look (far more exact than the Kindle OS ever offered). That’s when my finger bumped a word, and Koreader told me that I hadn’t installed a dictionary, yet. I told myself, “It’s ok! It’s ok! You’ve read 80% of this book and haven’t needed a dictionary once. You will make it through tonight without one. You will.” Then, I asked myself who I was kidding and downloaded a Koreader specific dictionary.

I slept well last night for the first time in days (even if it was short). I woke up this morning and thought about how I wanted to write about what happened. Why? Maybe part of me is hoping that there are people out in there who will understand (and, yes, I know only six people read this newsletter, but humor me). As far as my fear of not being interesting? I know this won’t be interesting to everyone, but for some reason, I feel like that’s ok. I’ve temporarily stopped putting all of my identity-eggs into one basket (writer).

Also, big challenges like this often can offer big rewards (I learned a lot and have much more control over my books and reading experience), and I feel like in our press-button-get-treat world, we forget that, sometimes.

How’ve you been?