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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41154410

用户讨论电子纸 (E-Ink) 与液晶显示器 (LCD) 相比的特性。他们指出，电子墨水的对比度较低，根据年份约为 12:1 或 15:1，而 LCD 通常提供卓越的对比度。然而，电子墨水在明亮的照明条件下表现更好，例如直射阳光，与传统印刷材料相比更容易阅读。用户指出，添加额外的层（例如触摸屏或背光）会降低电子墨水的对比度。他们提到，较新的型号可能会提高对比度，但具体细节尚不清楚。他们还将电子墨水与透射式液晶平板电脑进行了比较，表明它们可能具有相似的对比度水平，尽管这仍然不确定。用户发现电子墨水适合作为辅助设备，尽管由于高延迟而导致打字体验较差。有用的应用程序包括非打字任务，例如查看静态信息或聊天窗口。刷新率因显示模式而异，范围从高质量模式的 2-4Hz 到更快更新模式的 16-60Hz。通常有四种可用模式，每种模式提供不同程度的视觉清晰度和速度。最后，该用户提到了受媒体描述影响的公众认知的主观性，并引用了埃隆·马斯克和唐纳德·特朗普等人物。他们强调媒体支持或批评的变化如何显着影响公众舆论，从而导致强烈的情绪反应。尽管存在潜在的分歧，但用户主张在围绕有争议的个人的讨论中进行深思熟虑和客观性。

This would be far more interesting if you shared how, and did it on a platform that wasn't meant for short form content.

You said this much more constructively that I might - I really dislike when people post long form stuff on X/Twitter. For those who may not know you can reply to a tweet with “@threadreaderapp unroll” to have a reconstructed doc sent to you. The bot will reply directly to you and only you after the unrolling is complete. Hope that helps someone.

I know this one has been fixed, but I also find those an annoyance - more so because if you're not logged in on twitter, you only see the first tweet, not the thread. So rather than get irritated when I click through stories, I block the links on HN with ublock-origin rules like so:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=twitter.com"])+tr
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=x.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=x.com"])+tr
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=medium.com"])
    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href^="from?site=medium.com"])+tr

2 rules each because the replies and the story titles don't share a common parent element. eg right now I can tell from the numbers beside the stories that number 23 is missing; but otherwise HN looks the same. The same trick works for google search results; I have rules like the ones below to block less useful tutorial sites when I'm looking for python/js docs:

    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.w3schools"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.geeksforgeeks"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://realpython.com"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.programiz"])
    google.com##div:has(>div>div>span>a[href^="https://www.datacamp"])

Hope this helps folk too; I'm not going to fight a battle over links to these sites (and others I've blocked), I'm just trying to improve my own experience of the site.

> I am still unsure how I can tell it pointed to twitter originally.

You can usually find a comment by dang saying something like "we've changed the URL from ".

FYI: I'd pay to cover costs if there was a just-works off-the-shelf version of this.

I don't think there's a business model there (I suspect the sales would be in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars -- so no matter where you set your profit margin, you're not covering your time or much beyond costs), but I've sometimes seen things done like that on hobby projects just for impact.

I'd love to have a wireless eInk display for my computer, ideally from a USB-C dongle (so it gets video and power), but HDMI + USB power would be fine too.

That looks very nice.

The $1800 version is exactly what I'd love to have as an extra monitor on my main computer, if not for the price tag. 3200x1800. 25.3". It looks really good. Unfortunately, as is, it's a little outside of my wallet range.

There's a smaller $800 version too. 1650x2200. 13.3". That looks more usable.

To me, a major upside of the OkMonitor is the wireless connectivity. That's very, very nice. Especially if the computer dongle could be made small enough for use with my laptop while traveling, it would be a very nice solution.

Incidentally, in the past few days I have been testing Android + Kaleido3 as a general purpose device, and Termux-X11.

Kaleido3 is very usable; the recent waveforms and correct dithering algorithms allow video consumption with limited compromise (the framerate is high). And yes, coding is very doable (Termux provided the compilers/interpreters).

Termux-X11 adds the ability to have your desktop Linux natively on the Android device (so you may not need to use E-Ink displays as part of monitor devices, but already directly as embedded in a tablet used as active computer).

I was about to buy one of these until I saw it relies on a backend service that you provide.

Any thoughts/plans on allowing a customer to self-host the backend? Or would you publish specs so someone could build their own?

I love the idea of this, and we would love to have one of these in our house, I've just been burned too many times with fully functional physical products bricking because the company behind it goes away.

I know you say you plan to support it for a long time, but everyone says that. :-(

It’s on the roadmap, but to be frank, other items are before it. It’s complicated and while I had a few people ask for it, I don’t think it’s something that most people need.

I know everyone says they’ll support their hardware for a long time and then they don’t. And of course I cannot give a guarantee.

But I have no masters to report to. No VCs and no Directors or CFOs.

So if I want to keep the backend running, I can just keep paying 20 Euro a month to Hetzner and keep the server updated.

It's a nice sentiment, doesn't solve the bus factor though. I'd also be keen once there is an open source backend. I might still pay for you to host it, but I want the option to not turn it to ewaste if you don't look before crossing the road.

The patents have nothing to do with it. E-ink is expensive because it's a niche product with low scale - LCD screens are produced by the BILLIONS per quarter, and you probably have a dozen different devices with one. E-Ink does basically nothing that an LCD can't substitute for, and it's more expensive than LCD so nobody bothers.

"Patents" are a conspiracy cited without real evidence. It ignores that *E-INK HAS COMPETITION* (DES/Display Electronic Slurry screens). If E-ink corp were price-gouging then GoodDisplay would have eaten their lunch by now.

To be specific here, the conspiracy isn't that E-Ink patents exist - E-Ink patents do exist (some expired, but E-Ink corp are registering new patents as they innovate), but there are tons of LCD patents also. The conspiracy is the claim that patents are causing price-gouging and high prices that hold up adoption of the tech.

The good news, maybe, is that "E-Paper" (transflective LCD displays), capable of much higher refresh rates (60 -- 180 Hz), though with greater power draw and lacking E-Ink (electrophoretic) display's persistence, but otherwise sharing bright-light / daylit visibility, are starting to appear.

What I've seen of E-Paper displays isn't especially encouraging on the cost front, as similarly-sized displays seem to have roughly comparable costs (~US$800 for a 13.3" display). But at least there should be a technologically-independent option, with the prospect for price competition.

I’ve been using Daylight Computer’s new Android tablet for a while now, which has a 60fps reflective grayscale LCD screen.

During the day it looks and behaves like E-paper, but with a much faster display rate. It’s also got a warm backlight for use at night.

When the backlight is off the contrast is lower than the E-ink Carta panel used in the Remarkable and Boox tablets, but the backlight and fast refresh really help make up for it.

https://daylightcomputer.com/

How's battery life?

Have you compared sessions where you're principally, say, reading books with a bookreader app vs. Web browsing, or using other apps?

My experience on the BOOX, an E-ink device, is that web browsing (Einkbro) consumes battery at ~10x the hourly rate that reading books (Neoreader) does. How much of that is active display, and how much is other CPU usage, I don't know.

My experience on the reMarkable 2 is that leaving it "off", showing the screen it displays when it detects that you haven't done anything for a while, will drain the battery in a matter of days, whereas leaving it "off", showing the screen it displays when you manually navigate into the shutdown menu and tell it to turn off, drains the battery in a matter of months.

I assume that none of the difference is in active display; the display is static in either case.

The Remarkable2 is an E-Ink device. I'd asked mattkevan as they are using a transflective LCD-based "E-Paper" device.

The technologies have a similar appearance, but utilise different technologies (electrophoretic vs. liquid crystal). Principle differences are the responsiveness of the display (LCD is far faster) and power consumption (LCD draws constant power, the display clears when voltage potential is removed, electrophoretic displays persist indefinitely when power is off).

As I'd noted in the comment you're replying to, I've used an E-Ink device for years, and am familiar with its power consumption characteristics.

Watching videos/ interviews of the founder, it sounds like he’s very vey focussed on scaling this up to build affordable and durable wall sized versions of the display tech.

I’m certainly rooting for them. I hope they have more devices available soon

I'm aware of LCD's inherent contrast handicap due to polarising filters. That said, E-ink also has a relatively low contrast ratio. Interestingly, that turns into a benefit under direct sunlight, where ink-on-paper is often too bright.

Finding current specs is challenging, but E-Ink Carta, as of 2013 (over a decade ago) was citing a 15:1 contrast ratio:

<https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E_Ink_Carta>

Edit/Update: A more recent HN comment gives 12:1 as applying to most E-Ink displays as of 2020, with 8:1 being more common: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22832452>

I suspect current displays are somewhat better, and I'm seeing a "50% improvement" comment bandied about but without a corresponding contrast ratio. Earlier displays had an 8:1 ratio.

In practice, displays will have worse contrast with additional layers on top of the display, such as a Wacom tablet, capacitive touch, frontlight, and any surface "tooth" treatment.

E-Paper cites a 30:1 ratio, which would be far greater contrast:

<https://www.newvisiondisplay.com/transflective-lcds/>

I've had direct personal experience with E-Ink, but not with transflective LCD tablet displays.

I suspect that in practice the displays are reasonably comparable in terms of contrast.

> and the modern desire for [back|front]light support.

I had a keyboard kindle that came with a case that included a dim orange pull-out booklight.

I wish we could still get that. It was much more relaxing to read by than the modern uniform white glow from the page itself.

Every light in your link advertises (!) its multiple brightness and color settings. That makes for absolutely awful usability. I purchased a light like that, and it's terrible.

Give me an actual booklight where the settings are "on" and "off".

(Bizarrely, the light settings on a Kindle Oasis are barely better - since the light is controlled by an internal menu, as opposed to a hardware control, it can't be operated unless you can see the menu. This means that it isn't possible to have the light off during the day and turn it on when it becomes dark - if it's dark, and the light isn't already on, it can't be turned on. My conclusion is that there are no device manufacturers who understand how or why someone might want to use a lamp.)

He calls it the broken nature of the patent system, but I'm sitting here wondering why the creators of that technology shouldn't be handsomely rewarded for it, for a period of time? It's not like they're sitting on it (Creative Labs comes to mind), but rather releasing displays that just make devices cost more than they otherwise will.

A similar thing happened the tech behind Wacom devices--they enjoyed market dominance, the patent ran out, and now we have super cheap high-precision digital art devices.

From further down the thread, it seems it has been well beyond two decades and the original patents are already long expired. They are not playing fair - they are evergreening their patents with marginal changes which is illegal in countries where IP laws aren't a joke unlike the US.

That would indeed be much simpler! I'm skeptical that the browser is powerful enough to handle a usable frame rate since every frame would have to go from the network -> DOM -> browser app memory -> frame buffer. The browser can barely keep up with the Kindle store / Goodreads, but it'd be nice to be proven otherwise since it'd make it much easier to get this working ootb on brand new Kindles.

Too early to tell. It's not useful as a primary monitor, but it's great as a secondary. In its current form, the frame rate is good but the latency is awful. This makes for a bad typing experience, but there are plenty of usecases where I don't need to type. And even in situations like a chat window, where low latency typing feedback is critical, I can just have the input text box on my LCD monitor and have the chat history on the Kindle since it's mostly static. It needs some work to get there tho, but for now, this is a good start.

updated the gist: I'm getting close to 3-4 frames per second! this is only possible because of the partial screen refreshes since most pixels don't change between consecutive frames

Here's my old Kindle Touch 2 running a hacky Android 4 port attempt and a Game Boy emulator: https://i.imgur.com/m7ZZ1Xm.mp4 I'd say more like 2 - 3 fps. Not sure why there are random black lines. Display driver doesn't handle the demand of constant update very well. I normally use it as an e-ink picture frame.

Independent of the methods indicated here (screen capture + imagemagick conversion), there's the underlying question of E-innk hardware capabilities. I can speak to the latter.

E-Ink screens are usually capable of a number of different refresh / display modes, which trade higher-quality visual appearance (crispness, greyscale, ghosting) for slower refresh.

Refresh rates typically range from ~2-4 Hz at highest quality to 16--60 Hz at lower quality, but faster-updating modes. For most E-ink devices I've seen there are typically four modes, "Normal/Regal" (highest quality), "Speed", "A2", and "X-Mode" (fastest refresh).

"Normal" is best for reading static text. "Speed" is sufficient for terminal-based sessions (I have Termux installed on my Onyx BOOX tablet), and most interactive apps (e.g., Web browsers, Podcast apps). I find little practical distinction between "Speed" and "A2". X-Mode does show considerale ghosting, but is indeed capable of video playback.

Typically it's also possible to set the full-refresh interval (now many repaints are premitted between full refreshes which clear ghosting but give a distinct "flash" update.

E-ink has a number of compromises, but is quite usable. Apps which are designed with its capabilities and limitations in mind are much better suited. Mostly that involves full-screen pagination of content rather than scrolling. Given the ubiquitous use of touch-based scrolling in most Mobile applications, this can be somewhat frustrating. I tend to use dedicated e-ink apps (such as Onyx's own NeoReader book reader), apps tuned for E-ink such as Einkbro, a Web browser, or terminal-based apps which work well in a text-based context.

"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain" - Pierre De Fermat

I should stop writing code in files like /tmp/x.go no matter how throwaway I think the code might be. I still have the linux/armv7 binary if anyone wants it lol.

That's fantastic, thanks! I always used to do this by hand. Though one downside is that the name is random, and it's hard to go back if you CD out. I might use diceware to make a memorable random name.

I agree that sometimes that is a problem, so I find out the latest tmp directory with ls -tr /tmp | tail. But using nicer names would help with that.

So I took your tip and now I have

    cdtmp() {
        local name
        name=/tmp/$(diceware --no-caps -d - -n 2)
        mkdir $name && cd $name
    }

I decided not to worry about the directory existing already, or of the other checks mktemp -d would do for me in my single-user system.. I suppose mktemp -d -t cdtmpXXX would work almost as well. Thanks for the idea!

i suppose this would be far more intresting if you should what various ways you ca use a kindle and also maybe provide an 1-click way to jail break kindle and upload a YT video. dont forget to add 'for educational purpose' in the title so that amazon doesnt comes after you.

Calibre is a very ugly tool for converting formats, fixing metadata, and all the other worst parts of managing an ebook library. The single author's eccentricities are apparent but it was first and it does complete those jobs. If you slog through the setup and quirks, you at best get an iTunes experience from 10 years ago, and I just don't like using it to actually manage my library.

Kavita is more like Plex, where when you have your library in something of a decent form it makes using your library a much better experience.

Its also the only tool I know of that handles both manga and ebook libraries well.

I hadn't heard of Kavita either, but it looks like it's a lot prettier than Calibre, and (perhaps) has better a better reader. It looks like it doesn't manage format conversion and syncing though, which I guess is why you'd use both it and Calibre together.

There is pbchess for Chess. It supports multiple ereaders. If I recall correctly, it includes a few other games and applications. For IF, QtFrotz was ported to Kobo devices. (For what it's worth, the main drawback with IF is the lack of a hardware keyboard on most e-Ink devices.)

Maybe it's not called jailbreaking on Android phones because it's more or less a supported feature, not something the phone tries to prevent you from doing. On other devices like a Kindle you're actively circumventing security measures.

This article completely glosses over what is presumably the first step of making this work, which is getting a shell on the Kindle. The only resource is some random forum bulletin board post? Huh?

Posts in forums don’t age well, change URLs, become outdated, and so on. If you want a durable thing, you should add that to the project description.

I don't think phpBB threads ever change URL these days. It's only unreliable if the forum is managed by a video game company, because they delete the whole forum every now and then to renew their website. But MobileRead is well-known and enduring.

I suspect it's less that the forum will change URLs as that the URLs listed within some arbitrary forum post will become outdated as the referenced source moves or is deleted.

Linkrot, in other words.

Documentation in Wiki-based formats is more resilient against this as posts can be subsequently edited.

Why is the source-of-truth record for a set of complex technical instructions in a bulletin board board of all places? Instead of, you know, checked in as code in a version-controlled repository, like basically all other software?

Be the change you want to see in the world. In the time you spent complaining about it here you could have made such a resource. Don't ask the Internet in general to do it for you.

No, I could not have, because I don't own a Kindle nor do I have any way of exercising the instructions. I'm just calling out that this is an asinine delivery format.

Jailbreaks are highly firmware and hardware specific. I've only seen one specific combination (5.13.5, PW3), but the LanguageBreak authors have seen hundreds -- including mine -- so I have no additional insight or instructions that the extremely thorough LanguageBreak thread doesn't have.

> random forum bulletin board post

As opposed to a random gist? :)

It's one of those things where if someone does the work, they're allowed to show off how they like.

Next time you do an interesting display mod or port, you can choose whatever video you like.

I meant it's a bit like the Lena image in digital image processing.

I get that the original author of the series is above board, but the fandom around touhou is full of enough toxic people that it's often the first thing one encounters or associates with the brand. Kind of like the tug of war with Pepe, but much worse.

I just now did a Google image search for "touhou" (just that term, no quotes) with safe search enabled and you might guess what came back. And these characters are supposed to be children.

I don't want to be a nanny or intrude on people who most likely mean no harm, but if video demos are to have a "standard" test video, should it really be Bad Apple? If you've got something really cool to show off, don't spoil it by associating it with that.

The fact that we still call it "jail breaking" is kind of insane. We bought this hardware, "using it however we like" is literally how ownership works.

It's a type of mainstream-media induced psychosis commonly referred to as "rocket-man bad" (related to the similar "orange-man bad").

Essentially, almost entirely one-sided coverage of two highly-influential people of contemporary times have warped some people's opinions of them into an irrational and often incoherent rage, leading to boycotts/"cancelling", etc.

In both cases, these were people who were widely-admired - in Musk's case among the same demographic now hates him - when the MSM supported them prior, which then 180°'d when the MSM machine turned against them, for whatever reason.

It's an interesting phenomenon to observe, but is also rather sad as it divides people quite nastily. My response here will likely be downvoted, flagged and receive endless repeats of the media misrepresentstions against both characters.

Criticism will likely be almost entirely devoid of balance, and especially absent of rational acknowledgement that eg, in the orange mans case, hundreds of millions of people love him enough to believe he will lead their country to prosperity.

Unfortunately, such division leads only to a bleak future for all involved, which is why I try here - humbly - to bring some light, and rationality to it, no doubt failing due to the nature of the problem and its effect on people.

X seems like a pretty much the same platform before and since Musk, only since Musk there is noticably-less "curation", and so discussion is more organic, so, some may find it more raw. I like it better, but it's not particularly different really.

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