Weeknotes: 2026-W29

13th July - 19th July #SilentSunday Back in September last year, my faithful Kobo Nia died on me. I started a firmware update, fell asleep, and woke up to a boot-looping brick. I picked up my wife's ancient Kindle and have been limping through the last 11 months on that. I even wrote about e-ink being incredible technology off the back of that (and it really is) but what I've been missing is the backlight, which is an odd thing to miss but I do a lot of reading in bed and would rather do it with the light off, so as not to disturb anyone else. So I've been trying, on and off, to restore the Nia, with basically zero progress in those 11 months. Eventually I decided to just contact Kobo support and ask them for a clean ISO disc image I could flash onto it, to get it working completely from scratch with a factory reset. They said they don't do that and wouldn't be able to provide it — however, even though my device is seven years old and long out of warranty, because it happened while I…