Adhityaa Chandrasekar broke his laptop's monitor, somehow, but came up with a cunning plan: jailbreak his Kindle Paperwhite 3 and use it as a USB monitor. The monochromatic e-ink device offers about 3-4 frames per second, all of them delightfully easy on the eyes. Watching Rickroll on it (embedded below) is a psychedelic experience.
I wrote a script to use
screencaptureon macOS to repeatedly capture the screen into a png file, which is then converted into a shape, size and color the Kindle likes using imagemagick, and then transferred over usbnet using netcat/usr/sbin/screencapture -C -x /tmp/orig.png convert /tmp/orig.png -rotate 270 -resize '810x1448!' -type GrayScale -depth 8 -colors 256 /tmp/gray.jpg cat /tmp/gray.jpg | nc -w 0 192.168.15.244 8000
change the resolution to match your device and port to match the listener server
Chandrasekar thinks the frame rate can be optimized further—"I think 10-ish is pretty easy'—and considers options for further brutalizing the Marvell SoC within. The poor availability (and stiff prices) of e-ink displays and gadgets remains a tragedy of the commode.
