Caoimhe’s bog

One Year On

2026-05-15T13:20:00+01:00

This time one year ago Ellie’s body was growing cold in her bed. It was only three weeks after our first anniversary of going on a date together and only two weeks after she had told me she was plural. The only other person she had told outside of some online spaces that she alluded to was her therapist. It was also just a few weeks after a local annual lesbian event that I had brought her to for the first time. At the opening ceremony I had mentioned going for the first time in 2022 with my friend Hellen, who had then died suddenly in 2024. I did not expect to be repeating the same thing again this year, bringing Caoimhe³ along with me and talking about Ellie. If anything happens to Caoimhe I am never going again.

I had a lovely time with Ellie the evening before she died. I had been texting her during the day about trashy manga scanlations that I was reading and other silly things. In the evening after work I attended a local queer event discussing the then-recent anti-trans rulings by the UK supreme court and then called to Ellie’s flat to see her for a bit. It was a really love time. We talked a little bit about her plurality and some serious things but it was mostly just an hour or two chilling and cuddling on her sofa. We watched an episode of Wolf’s Rain, an anime she was showing me that was important to her as as teenager. She was really excited for Blue to show up as a character in the next episode.

I headed home just before ten. I would have liked to spend the night but I have sleep apnea and wouldn’t have had my CPAP machine and we both had work in the morning. The last message she sent me was at half ten. The next day she wasn’t responding to messages and I got increasingly worried the more the day went on. We were meant to see Rūrangi in the cinema together and I called to her flat after work before the movie to knock on her door but there was no answer. When I tried to call her I could hear her phone inside. I really, really hoped that she had just accidentally left her phone at home and hadn’t gotten back from work yet, but by the time the movie was over I was utterly sick with worry. A few friends went with me back to her flat and we called the Gardaí to do a wellness check. Eventually they got the key from the building manager and found her inside. There was a lot of waiting around. They needed someone to identify her and I asked to. A body that has been dead for a day is not a pretty sight but I wanted to be able to see her that last time.

Ellie had a lot of trouble sleeping and had prescription sleeping pills and sometimes also took the type of cough syrup that makes you drowsy for the same effect. The pathologist who examined her reckoned that she took something to help her sleep and then passed out face down, suffocating while the drugs stopped her from waking up. Hellen had a sudden stroke while bedridden after breaking a leg. Both took at least a day to be found. I don’t like sleeping by myself or living alone any more.

Thankfully I am planning on moving in with Caoimhe very soon. She has been wonderful for helping me get through this last year and I very much look forward to living with her and her boys. There will be some effort and friction bringing my stuff to Sandy Lane and figuring out the shape of our lives together, but I have already been enjoying planning through all the little things with her as we prepare for the move. We have been looking after each other and we have both sorely needed it.

I’m going for dinner tonight with her and some other friends who where there with me when Ellie was found. We are going to keep going.

🐘 There was a notice in the university toilets saying to leave them clean in English and Irish but seeing it was in the languages building the grammar for the Irish on many of them had been corrected.

2026-05-14T11:15:23+01:00

There was a notice in the university toilets saying to leave them clean in English and Irish but seeing it was in the languages building the grammar for the Irish on many of them had been corrected.

It said “fágtar” instead of “fág” - The passive voice rather than imperative. In effect saying “The toilets are left clean, please,” instead of “Leave the toilets clean, please.”

🐘 going to a Japanese class with my girlfriend tonight 💙

2026-05-13T12:21:35+01:00

going to a Japanese class with my girlfriend tonight 💙

🐘 fondly remembering the time The Guardian quoted Pixelated Boat’s tiny train world post as an actual excerpt from 1984

2026-05-12T20:54:33+01:00

fondly remembering the time The Guardian quoted Pixelated Boat’s tiny train world post as an actual excerpt from 1984

https://web.archive.org/web/20170125201854/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/26/i-tried-moving-to-the-country-now-i-spend-the-savings-travelling-to-sydney

🐘 I am in my weakened state (we have been undermining government infrastructure for some time)

2026-05-12T20:28:28+01:00

I am in my weakened state (we have been undermining government infrastructure for some time)

🐘 a friend was watching me play Baldur’s Gate 3 and got sad because I was being evil 🥺

2026-05-10T21:11:35+01:00

a friend was watching me play Baldur’s Gate 3 and got sad because I was being evil 🥺

♻️ How Old is the Name Fiona?

2026-05-09T17:30:00+01:00

🐘 What if there was a Japanese detective who was a very stealthy donkey

2026-05-09T16:43:23+01:00

What if there was a Japanese detective who was a very stealthy donkey

Furuhata Ninjaburro

Sign my guestbook!

2026-05-08T19:00:00+01:00

I have a guestbook page now! This is something I kept meaning to set up for a while but kept forgetting to. Seeing as I already have a comments system with Comentario I have set it up just as a mostly blank page with a comments section and some extra styling. The homepage is also displaying the latest guestbook message and a link to the page. You don’t need to make an account.

I generally do be tinkering with the site a lot without posting about most of the changes. Recently I’ve added more tags, including adding new tags to existing posts, and making custom icons for some old tags that were using emoji as icons.

🐘 The “archeologists will identify your skeleton as male” thing is funny and almost telling? Of course transphobes see the human body in terms of its Ruinenwert. Fascist deathcult mentality.

2026-05-08T11:23:30+01:00

The “archeologists will identify your skeleton as male” thing is funny and almost telling? Of course transphobes see the human body in terms of its Ruinenwert. Fascist deathcult mentality.

🐘 I think this George A. Romero dude might be a pretty good director. Anyone know about this guy?

2026-05-07T22:07:09+01:00

I think this George A. Romero dude might be a pretty good director. Anyone know about this guy?

🐘 this man is doing video alchemy

2026-05-02T17:33:41+01:00

this man is doing video alchemy

🐘 Robot Alchemic Drive but protagonist has Jet Set Radio/Bomb Rush Cyberfunk movement

2026-04-29T12:52:03+01:00

Robot Alchemic Drive but protagonist has Jet Set Radio/Bomb Rush Cyberfunk movement

♻️ Gender Neutral Pronouns

2026-04-28T18:00:00+01:00

Saw a few posts about gender neutral pronouns in Irish so I thought I'd talk about it a bit.

So like others have said, there's no native gender neutral pronoun, traditionally in Irish if you don't know someone's gender you'd call them duine (person) which is grammatically masculine, and then use masculine pronouns to refer to that.

But of course there's lots of non-binary people who wouldn't really want to use masculine pronouns so let's talk about alternatives a bit.

Siad

Siad is originally a plural pronoun in Irish meaning "they" (pl.), but is the most commonly used option nowadays for non-binary people. It is a direct calque from English, but as far as calques go it's a pretty useful one.

Neopronouns

Neopronouns are pretty tough in Irish, harder even than in English where still they have pretty low adoption rates. This is because pronouns in Irish come with a lot of grammatical baggage. It's not enough to say "subject / object / possessive"

A pronoun in Irish needs to have subject, object, possessive, and a prepositional form for every preposition.

Like for brevity we often write pronouns as like sí/í. But in reality what we have is:

Subject: sí, object: í, possessive: a (h-prefixes, no lenition), ag: aici, ar: uirthi, as: aisti, le: léi…

So to create a neopronoun you have to both document all of these forms, and then get people to adopt them (which is hard, because there's more to adopt).

Also for the possessive form it's hard because the third person possessive is always a, it's just that masculine lenites, feminine h-prefixes and plural eclipses. If you try to add a different a, it will have to have the same mutation pattern as one of them, at least in many situations.

One possible solution to this is to use a neo pronoun but use the grammatical forms of siad., so like tá siú ag obair ag labhairt leo féin. (they are talking to themself). But at that point we are still calquing from the english.

ea

ea. exists in the language in certain situations as a neuter reference, historically it existed more, but if you tried to use it now you would have similar difficulties to the neo pronouns, you'd need prepositional forms.

Also, é. gets reduced a lot in speech especially in Conamara, to the point where it would sound very similar to ea. if you were trying to say things like Is dochtúir ea. for "They're a doctor" it would sound a lot like Is dochtúir é. "He is a doctor".

Conclusion

Because of all that, I think generally the most flexible option is to use siad, even though it is a calque of English. But for those who would like neopronouns, now you're prepared for the large table that comes with it!

If you want something that's a little bit neo a little bit traditional you could consider adapting dar, the ending of the 3rd person plural past in words like bhíodar (they were). This ending has become a pronoun in some limited contexts (still for the plural, but stuff like tá dar - they are) but if you wanted to use it as a singular pronoun with the grammatical forms of siad, that could also be an interesting option.

🐘 Resident Evil 10 should be called REX: Dino Crisis

2026-04-28T16:54:21+01:00

Resident Evil 10 should be called REX: Dino Crisis

🐘 weebiest thing I’ve ever done

2026-04-28T12:41:35+01:00

weebiest thing I’ve ever done: Playing around with a nonsense katakana version of my name that doesn’t actually work as a real transliteration but I think is cute in various ways
キバノアオイメ

🐘 on the early train today which means I am going to read more Otherside Picnic

2026-04-24T05:38:22+01:00

on the early train today which means I am going to read more Otherside Picnic

🐘 looking up obscure letters on Wiktionary and doodling a logo based on them

2026-04-23T09:08:22+01:00

looking up obscure letters on Wiktionary and doodling a logo based on them

And a less comprehensible compliment to this.

List of film adaptations of video games that are longer than the games they are based on

2026-04-22T18:00:00+01:00

When I watched Iron Lung I remarked to some friends that it might be the first film adaptation of a computer game that is longer than the original game, but when I saw Exit 8 on the programme for the annual Japanese Film Festival I realised that it got beaten to the punch by at least a year.

This inspired me to make a Letterboxd list of movies that are longer than the game they’re based on. The criterion that I’m using is the official runtime of the film version versus what How Long to Beat gives as the median clear time for the main story mode of the game. How Long to Beat uses times self-sampled from the kinds of people who log game times on How Long to Beat which will skew those times down a bit from what a typical person might experience, but it’s the best metric available for this kind of thing.

The current list isn’t terribly long but the games represented in it fall into three categories. The first is recent indie horror titles. The two games that inspired this list fall in here. Five Nights at Freddy’s, another obvious contender that a few people have already suggest to me, doesn’t make the cut. How Long to Beat has the first Five Nights at Freddy’s down as two hours, just ten minutes longer than the 2023 movie’s runtime.

The second block is fighting games. I had thought about excluding fighting games from the list both because I thought that they would probably dominate everything else and because clearing the arcade mode of the likes of Street Fighter II doesn’t really feel like a reasonable judge of the “length” of a game that is intended to be primarily multiplayer. Even so, I eventually decided to stick to the rule I set and added them.

The third category is Super Mario Bros., which I think is a bit of an arguable case as the film is not really based on the game of same name so much as a taking ideas from the broad strokes of the series as a whole¹, but I decided to include it anyway because I love that movie and I think it’s a funny addition to the list.

Also the How Long to Beat time for Super Mario Bros. (one hour and forty minutes) feels like it’s skewed very low and probably accounts primarily for successful attempts more than the experience of playing it from the start and having to start over many times as you learn it. ↩

🐘 I am fascinated by this shot in Columbo where I think they might have edited these panels sliding shut in in order to cover up a continuity error.

2026-04-21T13:24:24+01:00

I am fascinated by this shot in Columbo where I think they might have edited these panels sliding shut in in order to cover up a continuity error.

🐘 Easóg is going ballistic because there is a bug on the ceiling that she wants to kill but cannot reach

2026-04-20T21:53:47+01:00

Easóg is going ballistic because there is a bug on the ceiling that she wants to kill but cannot reach

Some old kitbashes

2026-04-17T16:45:00+01:00

I used to collect Warhammer years ago. Some Fantasy and particularly Skaven as a teenager and then 40,000 Tau in my twenties. I didn’t play very often and I don’t think I ever won a single game. I did really enjoy kitbashing stuff though, even if undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD made it very difficult for me to actually paint things.

I got rid of most of it years ago but I still kept a few bits and pieces and in particular my more unique conversions and seeing as I wanted to practise with my Canon EOS 5D a bit more I thought they’d make good subjects. I was surprised at how narrow the depth of field was at such close range; the a model an inch in front of or behind the ones in focus are blurry enough to lose all detail, but it is a cool effect.

My fireblade, an old metal XV15 stealth battlesuit model with the right arm sawed off and replaced with one from a fire warrior, giving him a plasma rifle instead of a burst canon. The back has a magnet in it so that the backback can be swapped out.

My command TX7 Hammerhead is intended as a proxy for Longstrike. It has the cockpit of a KV128 Stormsurge fitted on top and the sensor array from an old vehicle upgrade kit sprue on the front.

My Nimh, a bunch of Skaven models kitbashed with parts mostly from Kroot and Adeptus Mechanicus to act as Kroot proxies. The more recent Kroot killteams didn’t exist when I made these so all the clan rats were intend to stand in for a general Kroot carnivore unit rather than some of the more specialised ones that exist now.

I had some idea of backstory for the Nimh, though I couldn’t tell you much if it any more. Not just Skaven in space and not just rat Kroot but very much a group of scavengers, cobbling together tools, weapons and cybernetics from any source they could get. Cannibalising the technology of what they kill rather than the DNA.

Not very in focus here but I have one chaos hound here that’s intended as proxy for Kroot hounds. I think I have a few more in box somewhere. I could have used Skaven wolf rats but I wanted to lean away from everything being mutated rats and the Chaos hounds remind me of tiberium fiends from Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun, which I have a large amount of nostalgia for. I’ve always associated some aspects of the Tau, with their hover tanks, walkers and rail guns, with the GDI from that game.

At the back some converted rat ogres as krootox proxies. The middle one with the gorilla pose holding the autocannon is one my favourite kibashes. I broke its shins and lengthened them a bit with wires and greenstuff and modelled some more fur on to make him look less stitched-together.

The other rat ogre did not get as much as a spruce-up, but maybe if I come back to these and paint them some time he might get some more love.

And on the much more fucked-up side of things is a dark eldar grotesque with a rat tail stuck on. Doesn’t really fit with the others.

My assembled (but unpainted) horde (hrud?)

I quite like the rat using the Tau shield generator as an actual shield. A distinctly un-Tau-like use of Tau technology.

And here are some much older kitbashes that I made with a childhood friend just sticking some clan rat parts on some Space Marines. The paint jobs might be crude but at least we actually painted them.

I am not sure where that hang glider wing is from. It might not be a Warhammer piece at all.

I am better at Magic: The Gathering when I don’t know what I’m doing

2026-04-16T13:30:00+01:00

Or maybe just luckier.

I mentioned winning the first game of Magic: The Gathering I ever played (against someone else who also had never played) and also winning game of Dandân immediately having it explained to me. On Saturday I won with a deck that I didn’t even look at before playing. I was meant to be playing a game of Lancer with Caoimhe and Tigris, DMed by the zombie enthusiast and when that fell through due to some technical difficulties we played a game of Magic instead. I did not have a deck with me but the zombie enthusiast had brought several. She started to explain each one and I asked her to stop and just hand me one and I’d figure it out. I think if I am going to lean into my bit of being a Yu-Gi-Oh! character I should approach card games like one: Knowing as little as possible, rolling with whatever surprises happen and relying on ~~dumb luck~~ the heart of the cards.

The deck, as it turned out was a proxy deck themed after Pokémon cards that she found online, with Pokémon Breeder as the commander. The zombie enthusiast was using a Chainsaw Man proxy deck she made herself with Denji as her commander. Caoimhe was using Tigris’ walls deck with Arcades the Strategist and Tigris was using another deck that I do not remember the commander of but had a lot of dragons.

For much of the game zombies dominated what was happening, with Denji on the field eventually equipped with a Chainsaw¹ and Tigris having cloned her own Denji using Will of the Temur, resulting in six zombie tokens being generated every round which constantly got wiped out and flooded cards into their hands. I was holding on to a Heat Wave for much of the game and kept looking for chances to use it to wipe out a zombie horde to multiply my own tokens but they would keep being blown away before it got back to my own turn every time.

I never actually got to generate any eggs with my commander and her ability to play creatures from the deck activated only once, when a Tauros died that counted as an egg due to being a ditto. That resulted in me getting a Zacian on the board, but without a 10/10 Zamazenta to back it up because it wasn’t cast, and which was killed before my next turn anyway. My game consisted of getting out strong pokémon (and my commander, twice) which my enemies promptly bapped away, but also without ever taking much damage myself and only occasionally getting to deal it out. My life never went below 40 and nearly reached 60 at one point due to a Venosaur.

In the end everyone targetted Chainsaw Man for getting too powerful and killed knocked her out, then Caoimhe used Slaughter the Strong to wipe out Tigris’ amassed dragons and all of my creatures other than a 4/4 Turtwig generated by Grotle, and soon I finally unleashed the Heat Wave to destroy Caoimhe’s Arcades, Floriferous Vinewall and my own Bulbasaur to multiply my Turtwig into a small army to wipe Caoimhe out.

The best starter.

I did quite enjoy just rolling with the punches and seeing where the deck took me. Learning the game is very fun to me and if I had a perfect idea of how everything should work and a huge knowledge of cards and builds and the metagame it would probably not really be that interesting to me any more. I have been struggling with the motivation to actually build my own decks following the Seto Kaiba one.

The one card in the deck that was not a proxy. ↩

🐘 you can’t live in your peach and eat it too

2026-04-15T11:29:16+01:00

you can’t live in your peach and eat it too

Fairphone repair

2026-04-15T08:45:00+01:00

I’ve posted about having a Fairphone before and I also have a set of headphones from them. They are honestly not that great for how much they cost. The noise cancelling cannot handle any wind or much movement, you cannot change the default mode that they start in, and most importantly a piece of the headband snapped in two on me a couple of weeks ago. Now, I was straining it with a bad habit of pulling one ear off widely to hear sometimes, but I had expected them to be able to take that force. There is a newer revision of these headphones available now and perhaps those solve some of the problems, but I am somewhat annoyed by the fact that, like with each generation of their phones, the parts for the old and new models are not compatible. Each iteration is a total replacement, not an upgrade path.

That said, they still sell replacement parts for older models and I am very glad that I can replace one piece and not have to throw an entire set of headphones and all the electronics in the bin just because some plastic snapped.

They are also now fashionably asymmetric as I go the replacement part in black instead of green.

My phone screen had not been in perfect shape either; scratched and cracked from being dropped too many times and with some dead zones, but mostly still usable. I wasn’t bothered to get a replacement for it on its own but with the headphones needing repair anyway I decided to pick up a new display for the phone at the same time and keep the old one as a spare. The only special tool I needed to do the swaps was a Philips #00 screwdriver and it’s all fairly straightforward. Like I said I don’t think that these are the best electronics out there, especially for the cost, but I appreciate being able to keep them going for a long time rather than having to send them to landfill.

🐘 murderers in Columbo are always conspicuously announcing what time it is to people in order to establish an alibi with witnesses but this wouldn’t work on me because my memory is shite

2026-04-14T18:04:22+01:00

murderers in Columbo are always conspicuously announcing what time it is to people in order to establish an alibi with witnesses but this wouldn’t work on me because my memory is shite

Jailbreaking my 2012 Kindle Paperwhite

2026-04-14T13:11:00+01:00

I usually prefer to read paper books and get them from my local library when I can, but I have an old Kindle Paperwhite that I generally load up with books to read while travelling. It saves a lot of hassle, bulk and weight compared to carrying around several paperbacks.

I had previously looked into custom Kindle firmware and found people saying that such things don’t exist, but with Amazon pulling support for old Kindles I had another look and realised that I’d missed something: There may not be fully custom firmware for Kindles, but there is jailbreaks and custom software. I took me a while to get it working, navigating various Mobile Read forum threads to piece together steps that worked and now that I have KOReader up and running (and can therefore finally read EPUB files on my Kindle) I decided to write up the exact, reproducible steps that I took to get there.

Getting device information

The first thing you need is the serial number of your Kindle to determine the exact model type and compare it to the Mobile Read wiki page on Kindle serial numbers. You can get this on Amazon’s website while logged into the account that the Kindle is registered to or from the device itself.

Confusingly, on my Kindle you must access this by ☰Menu button, selecting Settings, then pressing the ☰Menu button again (which pops up a different menu when pressed from inside the settings screen) and then selecting Device Info. The wiki page does mention this too, but I missed it at first. The device info popup also has the firmware version, which for me was 5.6.1.1, which will also be important.

In my case the serial number starts with B024. Amazon’s site describes it as “Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation)” and the Mobile Read wiki calls it “Kindle PaperWhite WiFi”, but more importantly the nickname that is used in Mobile Read’s guides is PW (or PW1), which was needed for figuring out which jailbreak I needed.

Grabbing the software

The jailbreak method I used for my PW1 only works for firmware version 5.0→5.4.4.2, while mine was 5.6.1.1. The jailbreak can’t be installed in version 5.6, but if it was previously installed it can be patched to work again. This meant that I had to downgrade the firmware, install the jailbreak, upgrade the firmware again, and then apply the upgrade patch to fix the jailbreak. And then I also needed the software I want to actually run on the Kindle afterwards, which in my case was KOReader, a Stardict dictionary for KOReader, and Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) to allow me to launch the reader in the first place.

These can all be grabbed here:

Kindle firmware version 5.4.4.2
Kindle firmware version 5.6.1.1
K5 Jailbreak - Latest version at time of writing is kindle-jailbreak-1.16.N-r19426.tar.xz
KUAL - Same link as the one above. Latest version at time of writing is KUAL-v2.7.37-gfcb45b5-20250419.tar.xz
Jailbreak fix - Update_hotfix_universal.bin
KOReader - For the PW1, the file labelled koreader-kindle-v####.##.zip
Stardict English dictionary - dict-en-en.zip (not the one labelled Kindle)

Factory reset (do not actually do this)

To ensure that these steps worked from a blank slate I repeated them after doing a factory reset on my Kindle. As Amazon are ending support for older Kindles if you do a factory reset after the 20th of May 2026 you will not be able to re-register your old Kindle and it will be effectively bricked. I intend to keep mine on permanent aeroplane mode from now on to ensure Amazon don’t do anything else funny to mess it up.

If Amazon haven’t turned off the servers yet and you are logging into an old Kindle and you have two-factor authentication enabled then login will fail if you try to log in with just your username and password, but you can append your six-digit authentication token to the end of your password and it should work.

Installation

Getting ready
1. If Amazon haven’t already turned off the servers then now is the time to download any books that you want to keep from your Amazon account onto the Kindle.
2. Once that’s done enable aeroplane mode by navigating to ☰Menu→Settings→Aeroplane Mode.
Downgrade the firmware to 5.4.4
1. Connect the Kindle to your computer with a Micro-USB cable, it should mount the same as an external drive or memory stick. If it doesn’t and only starts charging try using different Micro-USB cables until you have one that does data transfer.
2. Copy update_kindle_5.4.4.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.
3. Without ejecting the Kindle or unplugging the USB cable hold down the power button of the Kindle until the charging light goes out and it unmounts from the PC. This took about twelve seconds for me.
4. When you release the power button the Kindle should restart and begin installing the new firmware after a few seconds.
Install the jailbreak
1. Once the firmware downgrade is finished and Kindle has restarted check that the downgrade was successful by going to ☰Menu→Settings→☰Menu→Device Info and ensuring the firmware version is now 5.4.4.2.
2. Reconnect the Kindle to your PC.
3. Extract the contents of kindle-jailbreak-1.16.N-r19426.tar.xz and from that extract the contents of kindle-5.4-jailbreak.zip into the root directory of the Kindle.
4. Eject the Kindle from your PC and unplug the USB cable.
5. Install the jailbreak from your Kindle by navigating ☰Menu→Settings→☰Menu→Update Your Kindle. If the option is greyed out make sure that aeroplane mode is on, reconnect your Kindle to your PC and double check that all the contents of kindle-5.4-jailbreak.zip (including Update_jb_$(cd mnt && cd us && sh jb.sh).bin) are still in the root directory of your Kindle (copy them over again if not) and try again.
6. If the jailbreak was successful then some text saying JAILBREAK should appear at the bottom of the screen.
Install KOReader and KUAL
1. Reconnect the Kindle to your PC.
2. Extract the contents of koreader-kindle-v####.##.zip to the root directory of the Kindle.
3. Extract the contents of dict-en-en.zip to /koreader/data/dict/
4. From KUAL-v2.7.37-gfcb45b5-20250419.tar.xz extract KUAL-KDK-2.0.azw2 and copy it to /documents/
Upgrade back to 5.6.1.1
1. Copy update_kindle_5.6.1.1.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.
2. Eject the Kindle from your PC and unplug the USB cable.
3. Navigate to ☰Menu→Settings→☰Menu→Update Your Kindle and wait for the upgrade to install.
Install the jailbreak hotfix
1. Reconnect the Kindle to your PC.
2. Copy Update_hotfix_universal.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.
3. Eject the Kindle from your PC and unplug the USB cable.
4. Navigate to ☰Menu→Settings→☰Menu→Update Your Kindle one last time.

All going well there should now be a Kindle Launcher/KUAL entry on your Kindle homescreen amongst the books and when pressed should take you to a screen that will let you launch KOReader (or any other homebrew software that you install). KOReader itself should give you a file browser that you can use to read EPUBs, PDFs and other formats that your Kindle couldn’t natively. You can transfer books over just by copying them over with a USB cable the same way as any other file.

These are all EPUBs.

I use Calibre to organise my e-books and it can handle transferring them over to the Kindle too, though by default it only sends books in formats the Kindle can natively read. You can change what formats it will transfer over as well as the folder structure it uses from the settings for the Kindle plugin under Preferences→Plugins.

🐘 Spent almost the entire day just chilling and reading. I need to let myself have days like this more.

2026-04-12T21:16:16+01:00

Spent almost the entire day just chilling and reading. I need to let myself have days like this more.

🐘 Idea for a murder mystery (that’s probably been done before): The murderer fakes an older, superseded version of a will in order to make it look like someone had been recently cut out of the real will when they hadn’t been.

2026-04-11T08:34:25+01:00

Idea for a murder mystery (that’s probably been done before): The murderer fakes an older, superseded version of a will in order to make it look like someone had been recently cut out of the real will when they hadn’t been.

🐘 Trying and failing to jailbreak my Kindle paperwhite gen 5 (serial number starting with B024, firmware 5.6.1.1) and get Kual and Koreader up and running. Following these instructions and trying it twice, doing a factory reset after the first time failed and trying again, but just get an error reading “This item is not signed by an authorised developer. Please contact the developer.” when trying to launch Kual after I’m done.

2026-04-10T15:44:11+01:00

Trying and failing to jailbreak my Kindle paperwhite gen 5 (serial number starting with B024, firmware 5.6.1.1) and get Kual and Koreader up and running. Following these instructions and trying it twice, doing a factory reset after the first time failed and trying again, but just get an error reading “This item is not signed by an authorised developer. Please contact the developer.” when trying to launch Kual after I’m done.

Posted on the forums looking for help
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4578869#post4578869