Posts on Tom Fucoloro

Your old Kindle is not turning to firewood. Jailbreak it (or just download Calibre)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, I received an email from Amazon that the Kindle I bought used from RE-PC a few years ago would no longer be able to download books from Amazon starting May 20, 2026. They graciously offered me a discount code to buy a brand new one, however.

I understand that tech gets old and at some point it no longer makes sense to support older devices. Newer models of phones have different hardware, and app programmers can only test their code on so many different devices before it becomes a huge headache for diminishing returns. So at some point, you just stop testing on older versions. This is currently happening to my iPhone X from 2017. It’s annoying because my phone is otherwise still plenty fast and capable, but I sort of get it. Apps are complicated, and my phone is missing 8 years of new hardware and is running a version of iOS from 2022.

But books have not gotten any more complicated or difficult to run since my 1st generation paperwhite Kindle was made in 2012. They are books! An e-book is just a somewhat fancy text file. The screen only needs to refresh itself at a rate of once per however-long-it-takes-me-to-read-a-page. The one I have still goes weeks without needing to charge. Text is crisp and easy on the eyes, and the thing is light and comfortable to hold. There is absolutely no reason why I would want to buy a replacement for it. It does 100% of the things I need an e-book reader to do. Like, I actively do not want it to do more than this because my Kindle is an escape from everything else in the world, and I love it for that.

Be sure all the books in your Amazon account are downloaded on your Kindle before May 20, 2026! They will still be readable using the regular kindle reader after support ends so long as they are downloaded to the device.

In part because I’m cheap and in part on principle, I decided to look for ways to keep this old Kindle working without Amazon’s help. I have already cut Amazon out of my life in pretty much every other way that is within my control. I do not pay for Prime, I actively tell people to smash their Ring spy cam doorbells, and I never buy stuff from Amazon unless I absolutely cannot find it anywhere else, which is rare. The next obvious step is to figure out how to use this old Kindle without going through it’s delinquent parent Amazon.

The good news is that there are a lot of smart people out there who have already figured all this out. If you only want to a way to get books on your device without Amazon, you may not even need to jailbreak it. You can use an open-source program called Calibre on your computer to transfer e-book files to your Kindle over the charging cable that will appear in your device library like normal. (Note that Calibre cannot handle e-book files with DRM protection, keep reading for more about this).

After a little web searching, though, I decided to jailbreak my Kindle so that I could unlock more customization options and install a different e-book reader called KOreader. I followed this guide and was able to make it work with relatively little confusion.

With KOreader, I still use Calibre to manage my e-books and upload them either via the Kindle’s charging cable or wirelessly over my home network. I was also able to get rid of the lock screen ads so now when the device is sleeping it shows the cover of the book I’m reading instead of an Amazon sales pitch (this took a little tinkering). If Amazon won’t support the device, then I won’t support their ads. Fair is fair!

KOreader can read epub files, a standard file format for e-books, and Calibre can convert most e-book files to epub if needed. KOreader also has a bunch of extra handy features like a progress bar at the bottom of the page that tells me how many pages until the end of the current chapter. I LOVE this little feature because when reading a print book I always put my bookmark at the start of the next chapter so I know how far it is to a good stopping point. KOreader also gives you a ton of options for customizing the font and spacing and margins that are missing in the default Kindle reader.

There is a catch, though. KOreader cannot read epub files that have DRM protection, including many epub files from libraries and e-book stores. There are ways around this (such as a third party DeDRM plugin for Calibre), but the line between that and piracy gets a little fuzzy. If you already paid for the books and just want to be able to read them with KOreader, then I don’t see any problem at all with removing the DRM. But you can see how this tool could be used for less legitimate purposes. ebooks.com lets users filter their search to show only DRM-free books, which is useful. Calibre also has a cool DRM-free book search feature built in. However, many books are not available this way.

I wonder if all the Kindle owners like me who go out seeking ways to keep their perfectly fine e-book readers working will cause something of a crisis for the e-book publishing market. Until now, Amazon has had such a strong hold on the industry that publishers have been able to distribute their books with laregely successful DRM restrictions. Sure, there are always some people seeking out ways around DRM, but most people were happy just using their Kindle to read books without ever giving any thought to the software restrictions attached to them. Now there will be a mainstream interest in circumventing e-book DRM for perhaps the first time. The secondary market will probably be flooded with cheap e-book readers that are perfectly capable with a little software tinkering. It’s $180 for a new Kindle Paperwhite without ads. Even a month before Amazon drops support, my model of Paperwhite is selling for $25-30 on ebay. Wait a month and the price may go way down, assuming Amazon actually follows through. If I were a publisher, I’d be pressuring them hard to continue support to prevent a rush of web searches for e-book DRM-removal tools.

It would be very cool if Libby, libraries or some other third party somehow works out a legit way for folks to read library books on Kindles without going through Amazon. Calibre is an amazing tool, and there must be an open way to support e-book borrowing. Now that there are going to be a huge number of free agent e-book readers floating around, this could be the time.

I created a new fiction blog

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m giving it a try. In the previous post I was working through some thoughts on serial fiction, and I guess I talked myself into it.

I’m calling it “til you make it.” Expect short scenes, character sketches and other random character and world-building work. It’s less like a finished piece of fiction and more like a chance to watch my form of fiction development happen in real time. I will try to make each episode at least somewhat entertaining, though.

At least for now the character is named Jake. I’m vaguely imagining someone in his late 20s or early 30s who is passionate about art, is great at listening and giving advice to others, and also is a prolific liar. I’m trying not to prescribe too many strict character details at the moment because I want things to emerge through writing these episodes.

In the first episode, he is entertaining Chloe in his living room and tries to impress her by telling a story about how his great aunt was the inspiration for the song My Little Red Book by Love, but then is forced to quickly change the subject when Chloe knows more about the song than he expected. The most intriguing moment for me as the writer was when Jake got physically excited when Chloe mentioned that each of the charms on the bracelet she got from her great aunt has a story. He desperately wants to hear these stories, and it’s crushing when she says she doesn’t know them. This is a person who is drawn to stories to an almost irrational degree. I have hope that this dynamic will evolve into moments that could be funny, beautiful, or tragic.

I am a little worried about writing about a liar. I briefly considered writing in first person, but I didn’t love the idea of constantly toying with the unreliable narrator thing where readers don’t know if they are being lied to at any point. I may try a first person episode at some point if I get a good idea, but I feel like there’s more potential to see the beauty behind the flaws in a lying character with a close third person. It felt good in episode 1.

There’s also the problem that people do not generally like liars. However, I accept this challenge. I am fascinated by regular people who are compelled to fabricate stories. I hesitate to use the term “pathological liar” because I don’t want to phychoanalyze my character in that way (at least not at this time), but I have known a couple people who constantly lied, often about mundane things. They hurt people and had trouble maintaining relationships, but could also be wonderful. I will probably need to write more about them in a future post.

Should I write serial fiction?

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thinking about writing some form of serial fiction. It’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction, and partly that’s because my available time to write typically comes in short segments here and there rather than the long focus sessions that I would want. So maybe I need to shake that up, and maybe writing even shorter pieces than a typical short story could be at least a way to get something going.

What is serial fiction?

Once upon a time, serial fiction was very popular. It was another reason to get the newspaper every day, and novels were often published at least in part as serials before they became books. At least for the sake of this post, serial fiction is written-word-only.

Serial fiction is also clearly a work of written fiction, not fiction disguised as something real. So making up AITA posts on Reddit do not count. The people reading serial fiction know they are reading serial fiction.

Writers have been posting serial fiction online since the beginning of the internet. I just need to figure out what I want to get from it, and why.

Why serial fiction?

For many reasons, it’s difficult to imagine today reading a novel a little bit every day in the newspaper. But in 2026, there’s something romantic about the idea of being forced to wait for updates. Binging content had its moment, and it turns out I hate when they release an entire season of a show all at once. It’s nice to be able to talk about a story with others and have everyone at the same point. It’s almost like high school, when only one kid in class read ahead of the assigned chapters.

Comics still work very well online just as they did in newspapers. And just like in newspapers, self-contained episodic comics are generally going to be more popular than serial comics just because each release can be a person’s first point of entry into the artist’s work. I remember that as a kid flipping through the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the coveted color pages were reserved for the kinds of comics someone might cut out and hang on the fridge or work cubicle. But on the inside, there were some black-and-white comic strips that were part of an ongoing serial. I never understood them because I didn’t read the paper every day and so had no idea what was happening in the story.

What do I want from writing serial fiction?

I am not looking to write a novel in serial. I’m not even looking to write a short story I don’t think. But perhaps it’s a way to do character work. In the early days of creative writing school, we were learning about the concept that you don’t just sit down to a blank page and start writing a story. Before you can write, you need to put in the work to create your characters and get to know them. We would quiz each other with random questions, and the goal would be to know your character so well than you could answer any question on behalf of that character wihout hesitation. It should just flow out as easy as if you were answering yourself.

There is no “correct” way to do this pre-writing work, or rather all ways of doing this work are correct if they help you better understand your character. So we had this assignment to do some pre-work on a character in an unusual way and bring it to the next class. I remember I filled out a bunch of those teen magazine quizes in character to learn things like which Backstreet Boy he would be. I was writing a character who was a teenager (as I was at the time), and it turned out to be a very helpful exercize. Not only did it force me to make a bunch of snap decisions on random questions, but it also helped me shape what became a scene of his girlfriend forcing him to take this quiz even though he had no interest in it. I never used that scene in a story, either, but the result of it all was that I had fleshed out both him and his strained relationship that was nearing the end, putting him in a vulnerable spot where he was terrified of leaving his first girlfriend but also miserable about pretending he cares about things like teen quizes. He had been identifying himself so strongly in terms of their relationship, so he didn’t know how to carry himself in the world as just himself. All of that work was important to me, but it wasn’t a great read. The next thing I wrote was the first work of fiction I ever wrote that I was really proud of. It featured my character fresh off a break-up traveling alone to the zoo where he experiences a profound connection with a penguin.

So my vision for this serial fiction project is to regularly publish snapshots of a new character’s life. I hope they are entertaining to read on their own, but they are also a chance to watch a character develop over time. If the character never goes beyond some serial posts online, that’s fine. But if I enjoy writing about them, then I’ll let them take me through a proper short story some day. I have no expectations.

I’ll create a different blog to house this project and will link it here when it is ready.

Writing with light

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to teach a child about how photography works, I cannot think of a better method than light writing. I’ve done this now with my first-grader as well as my niece and nephew, and they all loved it.

Light writing is easier than it looks. All you need is a camera capable of manual settings — most importantly shutter speed — and a tripod or other method for propping it up perfectly still. Then set the shutter speed to something like 5 seconds or longer depending on what you’re trying to write or draw. Then face the camera and once the shutter opens, use some kind of flashlight (doesn’t need to be super bright) to “write” in the air. If you want yourself to be clearly visible, briefly shine the light on your own face. Otherwise, your body will be like a ghost, which is also cool.

What I love about doing this with kids is that the photos look really cool, but they also learn a lot about how cameras expose an image. Digital cameras are so prevalent and high-quality these days, yet we really don’t teach kids how they work. Point the phone, push the button, and whatever was on the screen freezes into a photo. Simple!

This is why light writing will absolutely blow their minds. You can see their little brains churning hard when the first images appear on the view screen and they try to comprehend what is happening. It’s not a video, and it’s not a still from a video. So what is it?

Be prepared to take a ton of light writing photos. They will do it over and over trying to draw the perfect heart, and in the process they have to problem solve. “Oh, the light trailed all over when I was done drawing because I didn’t cover the light.” Or “Oh, I need to write backwards if I want it to look forwards in the photo.”

Then if you really want to blow their minds, they can shine the light on themselves in one spot, cover the light, move a few feet, then illuminate themselves again. It will look like they have a twin!

These are fun photo games, but the kids are also getting a deeper understanding of what a camera actually does. I love the description of photography as “painting with light,” and light writing has kids doing very literally that. A camera captures whatever light is allowed through for each exposure, and we can set how long to allow light. Faster speeds let us hold the camera in our hands, but slower speeds let us take our time controlling the light. Pushing the shutter button is only one part of creating a photo.