FOSSPicks
KOReader
We've looked at quite a few ebook readers in these pages. We like them because they always have a focus on beautiful text rendering, removing distractions, and simple design. They're a great solution if you ever need to read a substantial ePub or MOBI document on your desktop, but the desktop experience is always inferior to the experience offered by an E Ink reader. E Ink displays, such as those found on Amazon's Kindle or Kobo's Nia, are a lot kinder on your eyes, look much more like a paper book, and remain mostly distraction-free by being terrible Internet devices. But most E Ink readers, especially the Kindle, are deeply proprietary and offer little in the way of customization. Which leads us back to the Linux desktop. Or does it?
KOReader is an ebook reading client that runs on the Linux desktop and even Android, but far more importantly, it can also run on E Ink devices such as the Kobo Nia, the PocketBook, the reMarkable, and older Amazon Kindle devices, although you will need to jailbreak the latter. It's worth the effort because it totally transforms the reader application from little more than a shell for words into something you can endlessly customize and modify.
KOReader features a user interface designed for the user, rather than for the financial betterment of the corporate behind the device, such as Amazon adding advertising to sleep screens. It's also open source and entirely respectful of your privacy, which means page turns, reading speed, reading preferences, and library content won't be shared with anyone except yourself, and that's if you choose to use the optional statistics functionality.
The first challenge is getting the app on your device. Desktop Linux installation is easy, as is app installation on Android, but these are both missing the advantages of an E Ink display. Fortunately, Kobo devices are supported from the Touch onwards, and the BQ Cervantes is another strong option. The app itself replaces the default reader on those devices, with many more options than the original. In particular, you have more control over text kerning, text flow, the fonts and DPI being used, the line spacing and margins, plus the contrast of the display. These options are available from touch-friendly tabbed panels that appear at the bottom of the screen. But this is just the beginning. KOReader is capable of reflowing PDF documents and can sync with Evernote, Dropbox, and FTP servers. There are plugins to sync progress across devices, which the Kindle won't do if you're reading your own ePubs, and wireless sync with the wonderful Calibre application. Thanks to the Lua scripting engine, there are plenty of smaller utilities too, including a handy script to sync documents from the bookmark caching tool, wallabag. KOReader isn't just a better reader, it's a better reading ecosystem for E Ink devices, and one that can also rekindle that old Amazon device you've had hidden away in a drawer for too long.
Project Website
Shoot `em up
Antsy Alien Attack Pico
Despite the scale of many modern games, with budgets in the hundreds of millions, and hundreds of people working on them for years, there's nothing quite like a lone coder's simple adrenaline-fueled shooter. Antsy Alien Attack Pico is a great example of one of these, having been developed by Martin Wimpress for the Linux Game Jam 2023 using PICO-8. We've covered PICO-8 before, a brilliant platform for game development that enforces strict limitations, just as a simple fictitious early 1980s games console might. Those limitations include a display of only 128x128 pixels with 16 colors, simple 4 channel audio, and just 32KB of storage. The hope is that it allows game developers to put their focus and efforts into pure gameplay, and – as with Antsy Alien Attack Pico – it succeeds.
Antsy Alien Attack Pico takes full advantage of these limitations, with large chunky pixelated sprites for your ship, its weapons, the aliens, and anything else that might come along. The 4-channel soundtrack is reminiscent of Nemesis running on an MSX, but the game itself is a vertical scroller rather than a horizontal one, and you can move your ship up and down across the star field, and left and right with a range that extends a little past the screen edges. Your job is to shoot the aliens or smash into them, shield permitting, catch power-ups, and get through each of five successive waves and their unique minigames. Minigames include speeding through an asteroid belt, grabbing power-ups, and protecting a cargo ship. You can do all of this with either a joystick or with the keyboard, but most importantly, you can choose to do this with a friend for side-by-side cooperative shooter fun, especially from the same keyboard. It's brilliantly executed, and perfectly suited to PICO-8's form factor, and if you have a device handy, particularly brilliant on a PICO-8 supported handheld.
Project Website
https://github.com/wimpysworld/antsy-alien-attack-pico
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