XTEINK X4 e-reader
I'm a bit late to this party, a number of bloggers and social media people have been posting about the XTEINK x4 e-reader for some time. But mine has turned up so I'm now getting around to doing my version. I ordered mine direct from the manufacturer and it came from China in around a week. Apparently 3rd party sellers might be cheaper but lock the firmware (not entirely but its an added inconvenience).
Max Glenister of omgmog has a pretty good introductory blog about the Xteink X4 that also links to others.
First off, these fairly cheap little e-readers are seriously hackable. I've seen a number of firmwares you can add for various things from the obvious reading to using it as a easy to carry security auditing tool or even pair with a Bluetooth keyboard for distraction free writing (that might be good).
For me, I decided to use the Crosspoint firmware, a number of people now seem to prefer CrossInk but I decided to stick the the older and less flashy (lol) version for reading.
On my linux box, first thing was to ensure I had a Chromium based browser (flashing via the web doesn’t work on Firefox). I had Brave and that qualifies. Then ensuring my user had the correct group permissions to access the /dev/ttyACM device. In my case with Fedora this involved adding my user to the dialout group
https://crosspointreader.com/#flash-tools
Makes it super easy to flash with the latest version or you can upload other bin files for other projects and flash with those. Once the base Chinese firmware was removed, I wanted to improve the font situation. I decided to try both Bookerly and Literata which are designed for e-readers. Of the two, I prefer Bookerly. I even tried the Atkinson Hyperlegible font, which looks quite nice, but I prefer a serif font for reading. Whatever you choose (go on use Comic Sans) the process has also been made fairly easy with web tools.
E.g for Bookerly.
Download the font in the zip from https://font.download/dl/font/bookerly.zip
Then go to the crosspoint font tool https://crosspointreader.com/fonts
Font family name is of course Bookerly
Browse and select the folder extracted from the zip file you downloaded It will upload everything and automatically populate the Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic fields. You can also set backups but I didn’t bother and it doesn’t appear to have made a difference to my reading.
I've honestly not played with the additional Unicode support either although I'm tempted to get back to trying to read Russian with the Cyrillic.
I left the font sizes as 12,14,16 and 18 as have found that’s fine for me. Finally click Build .cpfont files and when complete download the zip file.
Download the generated .cpfont files (or the zip). The page describes two methods for loading the fonts, either via a web interface on WiFi or by loading the .cpfont files direct onto the memory card.
Oh yes, the memory card. It comes with a branded one which is a nice touch, but I've heard reports of unreliability so I've replaced with a sandisk one I had lying around.
For me, as for lots of the bloggers, the intention is to have this either attached to or next to my phone so I'll read instead of doom-scrolling X and Insta. Its sort of worked for this, I have certainly read when I wouldn’t have bothered to go get my kindle or a book. I still doom scroll more than I should. Like I said at the start, non of these are original observations, so I shall continue to repeat better writers than I and mention that for the money is really is a very nice device. Page changes are quick, the e-ink screen can refresh more or less than the default and always seems to be crisp and easy to read and its endless hack-ability means you can set it up how you like. I keep mine on the provided magnetic attachment to my phone and this works well enough to my purposes. Now all I need to do is stop using X to get angry about UK politics.