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site/content/posts/kindle-scribe-monitor.md

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+title = "Kindle Scribe Sync"
+author = ["Valentin Boettcher"]
+date = 2024-11-17T12:13:00-05:00
+tags = ["org", "roam", "emacs", "python"]
+categories = ["Hacks"]
+draft = false
++++
+
+TL;DR check out <https://github.com/vale981/kindle_fetch>.
+
+I "recently" treated myself to a Kindle Scribe e-ink tablet which is
+somewhat like a ReMarkable[^fn:1] but on the cheap. There is no free
+lunch however, and price you pay is a somewhat sub-par software. One
+quite essential missing feature is convenient synchronization with
+other devices.  As I use the tablet mainly for calculations, I rely on
+having the previous pages available at a glance (just as they would be
+if I were using paper). Furthermore, I would like to integrate the
+handwritten notes into my [org-roam](https://www.orgroam.com/) note taking system.
+
+One solution would be to jailbreak the kindle, ssh into it and
+automatically download a notebook when it changes. The conversion to
+PDF could then be handled by the [Calibre KFX input plugin](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290). However,
+that ship has sailed for me as the firmware on my Kindle is too new.
+
+This led me to come up with the following [bodge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U). Amazon offers a
+service that converts a notebook to PDF and sends it to your email
+upon request and this we can exploit to our heart's content. I wrote a
+[script](https://github.com/vale981/kindle_fetch) which monitors your email inbox via IMAP[^fn:2] using [aioimaplib](https://github.com/bamthomas/aioimaplib)
+and detects incoming emails from Amazon containing download links for
+the exported notebooks. Once such an email is detected, the associated
+PDF is downloaded into a directory on the local file system
+(`~/kindle_dump` on my machine). The name is inferred from the contents
+of the email, although at the moment this doesn't include any hint
+about which folder in the directory structure on the Kindle it came
+from. The email is then conveniently deleted so as to not clutter your
+inbox[^fn:3].
+
+Additionally, the latest downloaded PDF is copied into to a file of
+your choice (`~/kindle_dump/.latest` in my case). I then run `zathura
+~/kindle_dump/.latest` which displays that PDF on my large 4K monitor
+and auto refreshes each time a new Kindle email comes in. I also
+configured Zathura to show four pages per row (`set pages-per-row 4`) so
+that I can see eight pages at a glance (see figure below).
+
+{{< figure src="/ox-hugo/screen:d22fec54-83c6-4cc6-a701-c29270868804.png" caption="<span class=\"figure-number\">Figure 1: </span>An example of what my ugly handwriting looks like :)," >}}
+
+Additionally, the following elisp snippet allows me to attach the
+latest note to an org-roam node with a couple of keystrokes.
+
+```elisp
+(defun attach-kindle-note (text)
+  "Attaches the latest kindle note to the current org buffer and links to it with TEXT."
+  (interactive "sText: ")
+  (let* ((name (org-id-new "kindle"))
+         (tmp (format "/tmp/%s.pdf" name))
+         (file "/home/hiro/kindle_dump/.latest.pdf")
+         (text (if (string-empty-p text)
+                   (format "handwritten note %s" (current-time-string)) text)))
+    (copy-file file tmp t)
+    (org-attach-attach tmp nil 'mv)
+    (insert (format "[[attachment:%s.pdf][%s]]" name text))))
+```
+
+The integration into my note-taking system is the most important part
+the whole bodge for me.
+
+Annoyingly, Amazon has already changed the email format twice since I
+initially hacked together this solution. However, each time I come up
+with a more robust way to get the PDF download link and one's free
+time has to be spent in some way or another anyways.
+
+And if you're reading this sentence, you've made it to the end of this
+rather redundant post. Thank you for reading. I hope that at least
+some people find this bodge useful. If there's sufficient interest, I
+might add OAuth2 support.
+
+On the road-map for future (think of years, not months) posts are my
+mu4e/mbsync setup with OAuth support on NixOS, my Xournal++ setup with
+vim-like keybindings and a patch to make the output files more
+compatible with version management and finally, my org-roam braindump.
+
+In other news, my fork of [julia-vterm](https://github.com/vale981/julia-vterm.el) is now called
+[py-vterm-interaction](https://github.com/vale981/py-vterm-interaction.el) and available on MELPA.
+
+[^fn:1]: Years ago, I sold my ReMarkable in to buy a cheap drum-set and used a
+    graphics tablet instead. I have a pretty neat set-up for that, too but
+    that's a tale for another time.
+[^fn:2]: Unfortunately, OAuth is not supported, so GMail/Outlook won't work out
+    of the box.
+[^fn:3]: I additionally have a Sieve filter running on my server that
+    automatically sorts the Kindle emails into a specific folder, although
+    that is not strictly necessary anymore. You might want to setup a
+    separate email account for this purpose altogether if you're not
+    comfortable with having a (potentially buggy) python script mucking
+    around in your emails.