Dear friends,
The last time I published an update about my self-hosting adventures was back in December 2025. Why the silence? Well, it's not like I've been idle... but I have been spending a lot of time advocating for the Fediverse with decision makers and people not familiar with it... and writing self-hosting guides for newbies:
Elena Rossini
What am I up to now?
I have expanded my areas of interest: more decentralization experiments (freeing my e-reader from corporate clutches) and I'm about to do a deep dive into the world of off-grid radio communication via mesh networks.
Since my experiments have been expanding, I thought it would be apt to rename the title of these posts from "my adventures in self-hosting" to "my so-called sudo life."
Why "my so-called" you may wonder? Because I'm still very much a newbie, but an empowered one at that. Just last month I installed tmux and I've been executing YunoHost updates inside of it... and recently I created my first cron job. Back in December 2024 when I got started I had no idea what tmux, CLI or a cron job were. I've come a long way... and I still find great pleasure in sharing my journey, hopefully to inspire fellow newbies or to give ideas about new projects to experienced devs.
My KOreader experiments
On that note, after some truly Herculean efforts - many hours of trial and error, some cursing, despair, hope and finally joy – I managed to install KUAL, KOreader and SimpleUI on my 15-year-old Kindle, breathing new life into it and giving it superpowers, like a gorgeous UI that gamifies and energizes the reading experience with the number of pages read every day and streaks. Sorry for the GitHub link but this is the developer's page, to see SimpleUI in all its glory:
doctorhetfield-cmd
Oh and I also uploaded some custom wallpapers for the screensaver that do an overlay on the last page read:
I was SO EXCITED about this! Not only did I jailbreak my 15 year old Kindle but I also organized my entire library in Calibre, converting books and setting them free from Amazon's clutches... I installed custom fonts, screensavers... the whole nine yards. But I am back to square one now.
My Kindle 4 gen failed a pretty crucial test in KOreader: it is impossible to do highlights because it is not touchscreen. Using KOreader with buttons is already pretty clunky but I managed to get used to it. Not being able to do highlights in a simple way is a total dealbreaker. So now I'm faced with a choice: get a touchscreen e-reader (a Kobo maybe?) and install KOreader and SimpleUI on it... or revert to reading books on my Kindle via its official Amazon interface so I can do highlights.
I'm a little upset about this because I spent DAYS trying to install and operate KOreader and SimpleUI... and as amazing as they are, they are not really suited for ancient e-readers without touch screens. You live, you learn.
At any rate, I will keep experimenting with this. This sudo life is pretty exciting.
A question for you: are you interested in receiving new "sudo life" blog posts via email? Or would the RSS feed for "my so-called-sudo life" suffice? Here is its URL: https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/my-so-called-sudo-life/rss (just copy and paste it into your RSS reader of choice).
Onwards and upwards!
Elena
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