💾 Archived View for gemini.panda-roux.dev › log › entry › 49 captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:45:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on Monday February 14, 2022
There's a shop in a nearby major city that sells surplus electronics. They offer a lot of old testing equipment, defunct office workstations, piecemeal obscure circuit boards, etc. I like to check out their stock every few months and see if I find anything interesting. That's where I found my first-gen Palm Pilot at.
I went down there on Friday and picked up a couple of 3rd-gen Kindles (the WiFi+3G models) that were manufactured in 2010. Judging by the labels attached to their boxes, they are the former property of a local high school. I spent $20 apiece on them because they're in great condition aside from their batteries being toast (which is to be expected). I briefly entertained the idea of attempting to modify them to accept AA-batteries, but decided to order a couple of replacement batteries instead. My plan is to get them both up and running and to give one of them to my partner and keep the other for myself. They're nifty little devices, and their miniaturized QWERTY keyboards are a rare sight these days. I'm very fond of the experience that e-ink displays offer.
I have been doing a bit of research on what I can do with them in terms of software, and it looks like my best bet is going to be to use some 3rd-party tools in order to obtain shell access (over SSH) and write my own scripts to run on them. There's a project online centered around running Alpine Linux on these Kindle devices, but the experience on such an old device would be unusably slow according to one user. I think it would be an interesting challenge to try and compile a Gemini browser to run on one.
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