{"id":87834,"date":"2026-05-01T02:56:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T02:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/stick-it-to-jeff-bezos-by-turning-your-defunct-kindle-into-the-worlds-worst-typewriter\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T02:56:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T02:56:06","slug":"stick-it-to-jeff-bezos-by-turning-your-defunct-kindle-into-the-worlds-worst-typewriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/stick-it-to-jeff-bezos-by-turning-your-defunct-kindle-into-the-worlds-worst-typewriter\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick It to Jeff Bezos by Turning Your Defunct Kindle Into the World&#8217;s Worst Typewriter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/app\/uploads\/2026\/04\/kindle-typewriter-1280x853.png\" \/><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>If you\u2019re the owner of a Kindle, you may have seen the news\u00a0that on May 20, Amazon is unilaterally ending support for a whole bunch of pre-2012 Kindle and Kindle Fire devices. If you own one of these devices, you\u2019ll no longer be able to purchase new titles, download any new material, or reset\/restore them\u2014attempting to do the latter will lock you out of the device completely. (If you\u2019re unsure whether your Kindle is on the chopping block, there\u2019s a list of affected models you can consult.)<\/p>\n<p>Understandably, this news went over like a lead balloon on the internet\u2014many people own affected models that still work just fine, but will nevertheless be rendered pretty damn useless by Amazon\u2019s embrace of forced obsolescence.<\/p>\n<p>So, if you\u2019ve got a Kindle that\u2019s on the list, you might find yourself wondering what to do with an e-reader that was perfectly functional up until Amazon decided that it was high time for you to buy a new one. If you want to stick it to Jeff Bezos and keep using the device you own, you\u2019ll probably want to consider jailbreaking it. It should be said that this risks bricking the device entirely, but, well, you don\u2019t have much to lose at this point, do you? And a successful jailbreak will allow you to keep using it as an e-reader\u2014one that\u2019s perhaps less seamless in its operation than a vanilla Kindle, but also a whole lot more versatile.<\/p>\n<p>But perhaps that all sounds far too sensible. If so, never fear\u2014there\u2019s always the\u2026 typewriter option? Yep, if you\u2019ve dreamed of turning your Kindle into a DIY typewriter\u2014and look, with nearly 8.3 billion people on this planet, <em>someone<\/em> has probably entertained this idea\u2014then an Argentinian gentleman by the name of Roni Bandini has your back. In his Hackster profile, Bandini describes himself as a maker of \u201cmachines of an absurd nature and seditious purposes,\u201d and his latest project involves turning a Kindle into a typewriter. It\u2019s unclear whether this project was intended to coincide with the Kindle death wave, but either way, the timing is serendipitous.<\/p>\n<div class=\"not-prose video-container\"><noscript><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Convert\u00ed el Kindle Paperwhite en una m\u00e1quina de escribir\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/zqP4vBvvqx0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/noscript><\/div>\n<p>Anyone seriously looking at pursuing this route can find all the information they need on the project\u2019s Hackster page, but the tl;dr is that you jailbreak your Kindle to allow a couple of key pieces of software\u2014the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) and kterm (a simple GTK terminal)\u2014to be sideloaded onto the device. Once this is done, you hook your Kindle up to a Raspberry Pi that is connected to a small thermal printer, just like the ones you see at the supermarket. Everything you type on the Kindle is buffered until you enter two line breaks, at which point the text is sent to the printer and printed.<\/p>\n<p>Bandini\u2019s setup uses the Kindle\u2019s software keyboard, but anyone who\u2019s actually suffered through that ordeal on older Kindles will probably also want to look at hooking up an external keyboard. The project also comes with files for 3D printing a snazzy little enclosure for the Kindle, printer, and Raspberry Pi.<\/p>\n<p>Is this particularly useful? No. Is it fun? Yes. And as Bandini says in his statement on the project\u2019s Hackster page, \u201cSometimes the value of a project is not in what it does, but in how far it pushes the boundaries of what a device was supposed to be.\u201d This is true! And sometimes the value is also in keeping a perfectly usable device from going into e-waste because Jeff Bezos fancies another trip to space.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re the owner of a Kindle, you may have seen the news\u00a0that on May 20, Amazon is unilaterally ending support for a whole bunch of pre-2012 Kindle and Kindle Fire devices. If you own one of these devices, you\u2019ll no longer be able to purchase new titles, download any new material, or reset\/restore them\u2014attempting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/kindle-typewriter-1200x675.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}