DRM Round-up: IDAD 2022

Today is International Day Against DRM 2022, so let's check in on my ebook collection statistics. It seems that this is becoming a biennial endeavour rather than a quarterly one, but hey, better late than never!

I have a policy of refusing to purchase

DRM Round-up: Q4 2020

Wow! It's been a while! Today is International Day Against DRM 2020, which means it's time to check in with my e-book collection for the first time since Q2 2019.

I have a policy of refusing to purchase any e-books encumbered with DRM,

A survey of eBook lending at Victorian public libraries

Unlike the US, where OverDrive has a near-monopoly on eBook lending, eBook lending among Australian public libraries is fragmented among a number of platforms. While competition is most certainly good, Australian libraries' eBook offerings are often more limited than their American counterparts. As a consequence,… »

DRM Round-up: Q2 2019

Another day, another migraine.

—Squidward, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical

Let's see what's happened since March.

I have a policy of refusing to purchase any eBooks encumbered with DRM, which I observe strictly. My frustration has grown so immense that I have begun cataloguing

DRM Round-up: Q1 2019

Another 3 months of DRM. Time to see how the industry has done since Christmastime.

I have a policy of refusing to purchase any eBooks encumbered with DRM, which I observe strictly. My frustration has grown so immense that I have begun cataloguing all

DRM Round-up: Q4 2018

Merry Christmas! You know what's not merry? DRM. Let's see how the numbers have moved since last quarter.

I have a policy of refusing to purchase any eBooks encumbered with DRM, which I observe strictly. My frustration has grown so immense that I have

DRM Round-up: Q3 2018

Today is the International Day Against DRM, and it seems a fitting time for my first quarterly DRM round-up: In the spirit of IDAD, I have a policy of refusing to purchase any eBooks encumbered with DRM, which I observe strictly. My frustration has grown… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 5: Setting up SSH

Last time, we set up telnet on the Clara HD and set up the USB network interface. Now we will extend this to enable SSH on the device.

Unfortunately, unlike telnet, the Clara HD does not ship with any SSH binaries, so we will… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 4.3: Automatically switching between USB networking and file transfer

Last time, we set up the Clara HD to automatically start USB networking when connected. We will now set it up to automatically stop USB networking when file transfer mode is activated in the main interface.

Much like ac and plug, /usr/local/Kobo/udev/usb is… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 4.2: Automatically starting telnet over USB on connect

Last time, we set up networking over USB on the Clara HD, but this required us to manually start and stop the network. We will now configure the Clara HD to automatically start USB networking when connected over USB.

The Clara HD uses udev… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 4.1: Telnet over USB

Last time, we gained root telnet access to the Clara HD over WiFi; however, the connection can be quite temperamental. We will now use this to set up a network connection over USB, allowing for telnet access over a secure USB channel.

Set up

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 3: Gaining root telnet access

Last time, we dipped our toes into the waters of the Kobo Clara HD's USB interface. As it turns out, there is a lot more we can do with this simple interface. The Clara HD runs Linux, and we can easily gain root telnet… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 2: Bypassing registration/sign in

Last time, we imaged the internal storage of the Kobo Clara HD (and possibly expanded the internal storage capacity). Now we can begin setting up the device. We soon find, however, that the Clara HD requires us to log in with a Kobo account.… »

Hacking the Kobo Clara HD – 1: Hacking the internal microSD storage

Introduction

The Kobo Clara HD is the latest e-reader from Canadian ebook vendor Rakuten Kobo, sporting a 6-inch 300 ppi e-ink touchscreen, and 8 GB of internal memory.

The Clara HD, like its predecessors in the Kobo range, internally runs Linux, and is surprisingly amenable… »

GUIDE: Convert SWFs to PDFs, preserving text as text, with gfx2gfx-pdftext

Introducing gfx2gfx-pdftext, a fork of gfx2gfx designed to convert SWF files to PDF files, while preserving text! I am not aware of any other freely-available tools that can do this.

The original gfx2gfx from SWFTools unfortunately converts text to paths. An improvement on… »

GUIDE: Convert book-style SWFs to PDFs with gfx2gfx

Hold it right there!

It's been nearly three years since this post, and in those three years, I found the time to write 177 lines of code. Now, with my fork, gfx2gfx-pdftext, you can convert SWFs to PDFs, while preserving the text, resulting in… »