A Year of Mornings

Boox is taking on Xteink with its own tiny e-reader by Stevie Bonifield

Boox’s new Tile lineup will take on Xteink’s popular e-readers that are small enough to stick on the back of an iPhone with MagSafe. As spotted by Good E-Reader, the first one is the Picco, which will feature a 3.97-inch front-lit, black-and-white e-paper display and expandable storage with an SD card slot. Boox confirmed to The Verge that the Picco is in the works, noting that it’s part of a new Tile lineup and will have an “accessible price point,” but without any other details about its plans, like specs, the specific price, or a release date.

I linked to a X3 review recently. After reading the review, I looked at and asked Claude if it would work for my use-cases. Spoiler: it won’t. So this news does not really concern me.

But I love e-readers though. I love the idea of using a e-reader to read.

I have smartened up a little now though, thanks to the two Kindles I have somewhere around the house.

Boox of course is the company that makes the Palma. It is costlier than what I’m willing to pay for a device such as this though. I was interested in Xteink because of its price.

Nobody is making the device of my dreams, for the price I want.

Review: Xteink X3 is the little e-reader the world’s not quite ready for

If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap5 and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.

What I want, is to be able to run NetNewsWire on this. Or something similar that pulls new articles from RSS feeds to it. That’s my use case, in addition to reading books.

But it’s cheap, I’m tempted to just buy it.

There are no good odyssey tickets available this week for the IMAX shows in Helsinki. Maybe next week.

Online shopping and rising living costs driving young Finns into debt

"People have the need or desire to consume, but their purchasing power is no longer enough to match their spending habits," Nors said.

He said the biggest underlying factor was the decline in purchasing power.

"If wages are low and living costs continue to rise, it puts young people's finances in a vulnerable situation," he explained.

The average debt recorded in enforcement proceedings now stands at 2,168 euros.

I had a similar thought when I read that Apple was starting an upgrade program with Klarna. People don’t have purchasing power but they want to buy more stuff.

Apple’s rumored ‘Upgrade’ program brings lease-to-own pricing for iPhones, Macs, and iPads by Stevie Bonifield

As component and RAM shortages drive prices higher, Apple is reportedly launching an “Apple Upgrade” program for leasing new devices. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it will work similar to a car lease, with options to upgrade to a new device early, or keep or return the device at the end of the lease. Gurman says Klarna will be Apple’s financial backer for the new program, which will require a soft credit check to sign up.

You have to wonder about the state of the world we live in, when people have to take on debt to buy phones. Of course, back in India this is the standard practice. I bought my first iPhone on a no cost emi.

OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system by Emma Roth

As part of efforts to complete the evaluation, the AI models gained access to the internet by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the sandboxed environment. From there, OpenAI says its models “inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym,” and then “searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation:”

This is scary. We seem to be on a knife’s edge here. What if the test was something sinister. All our IT systems are not designed keeping in mind agents, they are designed to keep out hackers.