Let's Put Tailscale on a Jailbroken Kindle
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The quest to repurpose an old e-reader as a Tailscale-enabled device sparked a lively discussion about the best budget-friendly options for rooted e-readers. Commenters swiftly shifted the focus from jailbroken Kindles to Kobo e-readers, praising their affordability, Calibre support, and ease of rooting. While some users raved about running alternative reader apps like KOReader and Plato on their Kobos, others noted potential drawbacks, such as locked bootloaders on newer models and conflicts with Mass Storage Mode when running Tailscale. As it turns out, Kobo e-readers are emerging as the top choice for DIY enthusiasts looking to breathe new life into their devices.
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Bought one from eBay to try it out. Silly me connected it to wifi and suddenly it’s up to date and no longer breakable
The way you install additional software is literally just moving files into folders whilst its plugged into your computer. I'm sure it could handle Tailscale.
[0] as of today, 12/8/25, the "base model" Kindle 11th Generation is priced at $109.99 USD, and the respective Kobo Clara BW is $139.99 USD.
[1] I say "likely always" to cover my bases. To my knowledge Calibre supports Kindle, just not as well as Kobo. That said I have found that the KOreader app is more than powerful enough for my use case (reading my own epubs, using dictionaries, etc.)
Kindle Colorsoft (7" 16GB) - $250
Kindle Colorsoft (7" 32GB) - $280
Kobo Clara Color (6" 16GB) - $160
Kobo Libra Color (7" 32GB) - $230
I’ve just acquired the latest gen Kindle and I’m absolutely blown away by how fast it is.
The real colour screens are used on the remarkable (eink gallery) and they are indeed slow for full page updates though remarkable seems to have done a lot of smarts for local updates while drawing.
But what I'd really like is an option not to hide the navigation bar while KOReader is open. I work with technical PDFs and need to jump between applications very often.
One of which is often Termux!
Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels. The kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either.
If you can do either of those, it should be trivial to get kexec working by just loading it as a module.
https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1289
Just beware to check what version of Android the Nook is using before you buy, and what your app needs.
I read mostly on my iPad; the Kindle is really just for reading outside, like at the beach/pool. But it was such a neat idea that I couldn't just pass it up.
I have calibre set up to just email books to my Kindle, but that's an extra layer of indirection that I really don't need. I'll have to check that out.
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/calibre
Although, I realize Android != Kindle's OS, so I'm not sure how much concern there should be.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46184730 "Syncthing-Android have had a change of owner/maintainer"
Is there a project other than the one I forked?
It's been a while, but I think I enabled SSH on my Kindle and set it up that way. I started Syncthing via KUAL, then used an SSH reverse proxy to configure Syncthing on my laptop.
It -was- kind of a pain, but once it was good, it was good!
I wanted to add an old paperwhite to a kubernetes cluster and the ancient kernel held me back.
It's taking a cloud-based product, de-clouding it, and then connecting it to your own private 'cloud'. Pretty cool all things told.
[0] https://kazlauskas.me/entries/tailscale-doesnt-quite-suck
[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-sucks
* - at least for me, as the bugs in the stock reader drive me nuts, and have been waiting for this opportunity for a while
Ma favourite e-reader setup still is the Kobo + Booklore combination. Editing a configuration file on the device I can have it connect to my Booklore library that adds my own ebooks seamlessly on top of the one I can get from the Kobo store.
I haven’t setup Tailscale on it yet but it’s possible.
install Tailscale on your Kobo
install Koreader
Install Tailscale on the machine that host your eBook collection app of choice
Add the OPDS URL from the collection app, replacing the local machine URL with the Tailscale URL
You can now browse and download your private collection from anywhere.
I went with Kavita since I wanted my eBooks treated as equals with my manga.
I haven’t personally setup Tailscale yet, but looking at this it seems possible and not too difficult https://github.com/videah/kobo-tailscale
Shameless plug: I wrote about my experience here
https://samkhawase.com/blog/hacking-kindle/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43822251
Also recently showed my dashboard here: https://franz.hamburg/writing/kindling-e-ink-dashboard.html
An old oled android phone is even easier to mod for that.
Eink is like the rust of displays for embedded projects. Everyone defaults to it even when it's not necessary.
I'm a hacker and I don't really prefer low-fi hacking experiences, or at least not that flavor. I prefer getting stuff done. Oh and I used to work with eink displays for a living, but none of my hobby projects use it because it's only good for very few niche use cases that most of the time are better served by the more practical available solutions, unless of course, your uses case is showing it off on the internet for clout because this time what makes it special is it uses eink even though it adds no benefit.
What do you mean by “Rust for displays”? Bikeshedding?
Everyone defaults to it because it's really nice actually.
Actual light? As opposed to producing fake light?
Back in the early 2010s you could have made the argument that maybe these scenes can win over the hardware vendors, but now we know with hindsight that cryptographically signed firmware and locked down bootloaders can make it impossible. Clearly, the hardware vendors won. You will always be playing a losing game by jailbreaking your devices. Even if you temporarily win, you will be operating within an inherently adversarial environment.
Your life will be much better and stress-free if you buy a Boox or a Daylight DC1, where your interests and the hardware vendor's interests are aligned.
On iOS its a completely different story of course, because, well.... Apple has a monopoly on iMessage and FaceTime. But for e-readers, where there are many alternatives, it makes no sense to subject yourself to this.
> If everything means something else, than so does technology