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2026-05-20

Week 280: Six days’ notice

Amazon sent me an email on 14 May to tell me that my old Kindle would be completely unsupported “Starting May 20, 2026” – i.e. six days later.

I knew that some Kindles were going to be no longer supported, but I didn’t know mine was one of them, because their generation-based naming scheme is hard to keep up with, especially when it isn’t marked on the device itself.

It’s not just that you can’t download new books, it’s a complete cessation of service. If you reset the device, it will never work again.

You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

That’s bearable.

If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

What the hell, man?

I have decrypted and backed up every Kindle book L— and I ever bought, and I don’t think I’ll be inclined to pay them for any more ebooks, even though I also have a newer model that is still supported, and I don’t think I’d buy another Kindle reader after this, not least because you can borrow books from the library and read them on a Kobo, but not on a Kindle.

I prefer reading paper books, but an ereader is useful on holiday when I want to minimise weight. For that, there’s the catalogue of Standard Ebooks to work through.

I’ve had enough of typing passwords and I was finally irritated enough to find the solution. I can now unlock my computers with a PIN and a hardware token and every day is slightly less inconvenient.

I stayed away from central London on Saturday out of caution after seeing the aggression around last year’s racist jamboree, but it seems like it was much smaller than last time. A rare example of a positive change in the current political climate.

Quite a few links this week:

• French researcher cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran. The key that unlocked it was a repeated name.
• The Irish language is having a moment — and running out of time.
• Train Your Own LLM From Scratch: “A hands-on workshop where you write every piece of a GPT training pipeline yourself, understanding what each component does and why.”
• Height hunt is “a quest to find and visit every possible height restriction sign in the UK.” They’re more complicated than you might think. This kind of proper nerdy stuff is the internet at its best.
• Welsh names and places deserve basic respect. Dw i’n cytuno’n llwyr.
• [Unofficial] UK Government Mirror: “An unofficial mirror of every UK Government Github repository, to preserve repositories that are removed or made private. Updated at least weekly.”
• The Virtual OS Museum. “This is a virtual museum of [over 570] operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.”
• Paterson Listings: “Tim Paterson’s DOS listings, containing source code of 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library.”
• Snack giant Calbee switches to black and white packaging as Iran war hits ink supplies. And gets a lot of free publicity, which might be the real goal.
• Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
• Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts. “Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly ‘fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings.’”
• Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? PHP is the asbestos of web development.