Hacker News: hemant6488

New comment by hemant6488 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

hemant6488 — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:45:07 +0000

Working on SoundLeaf on ios, an AudiobookShelf client for listening to your selfhosted audiobooks and podcasts.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundleaf/id6738635634

New comment by hemant6488 in "Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May"

hemant6488 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:50:15 +0000

Did something similar with my 7th gen paperwhite, turned it into a little weather and calendar display. Wrote up the process if anyone wants to try it, also the battery life on these things as a dashboard is insane, barely need to charge it.

https://terminalbytes.com/reviving-kindle-paperwhite-7th-gen...

New comment by hemant6488 in "Kindle users in uproar over update rendering oldest devices virtually unusable"

hemant6488 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:48:06 +0000

For what its worth, if you have one of the older paperwhites that's basically bricked now, you can jailbreak it and turn it into a pretty neat e-ink dashboard. I did this with my 7th gen a while back, wrote up the whole process. Its been running as a little weather/calendar display for months now on basically zero power. Better use than letting amazon decide when your device stops working

https://terminalbytes.com/reviving-kindle-paperwhite-7th-gen...

New comment by hemant6488 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

hemant6488 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:41:28 +0000

Oh nice, shelfdroid looks great! The admin functionality is a big gap - being able to manage users and backups from your phone is something I've wanted but never got around to building. I'm working on SoundLeaf (https://soundleafapp.com), the iOS side of things for Audiobookshelf, so it's cool to see the Android ecosystem getting some love too. Starred the repo.

New comment by hemant6488 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

hemant6488 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:40:39 +0000

Building SoundLeaf (https://soundleafapp.com) - a native iOS client for Audiobookshelf, the self-hosted audiobook server.

The whole thing started because my wife couldn't get into the official Audiobookshelf iOS TestFlight beta. Her exact words were "I cannot live without audiobooks." I'm a backend dev, never touched iOS or Swift before, but how hard could it be? (It was quite hard.)

About a year in now. CarPlay, offline downloads with background sync, Cloudflare Access support for tunneled servers, sleep timers that create bookmarks so that you can remember where you were the next morning. Currently working on podcast support. Solo project - no tracking, no accounts, just talks directly to your server.

If you self-host your audiobooks and have an iPhone, give it a shot: https://apps.apple.com/app/soundleaf/id6738428638

New comment by hemant6488 in "Local-first software (2019)"

hemant6488 — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 19:02:29 +0000

I've been building exactly this with SoundLeaf [0] - an iOS client for the excellent open-source Audiobookshelf server. No data collection, no third-party servers, just your audiobooks syncing directly with your own instance.

The user-friendliness challenge is real though. Setting up Audiobookshelf [1] is more work than "just sign up," but once you have it running, the local-first client becomes much cleaner to build. No user accounts, no subscription billing, no scaling concerns. Simple pricing too: buy once, own forever. No monthly fees to access your own audiobooks.

[0] https://soundleafapp.com

[1] https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

hemant6488 — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 15:49:53 +0000

Article URL: https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-server/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310944

Points: 447

# Comments: 188

New comment by hemant6488 in "Libro: a command-line tool to track your books"

hemant6488 — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 04:09:45 +0000

I love Audiobookshelf so much that I made an app for it, just released it today, its called SoundLeaf, if you want you could check it out here:

https://soundleafapp.com

New comment by hemant6488 in "Show HN: SoundLeaf – iOS Client for Audiobookshelf Server"

hemant6488 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:52:16 +0000

My wife was frustrated waiting for Testflight access to the original Audiobookshelf app, so I built SoundLeaf as an alternative. Started as a weekend project but evolved into something we both genuinely love using. It respects the self hosted spirit and privacy with zero tracking. Happy to answer any questions about implementation details or challenges connecting to the Audiobookshelf server API.

Show HN: SoundLeaf – iOS Client for Audiobookshelf Server

hemant6488 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:49:18 +0000

Article URL: https://soundleafapp.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775404

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by hemant6488 in "All Kindles can now be jailbroken"

hemant6488 — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 05:02:27 +0000

I revived my old kindle pw7 using this a week or so ago. If you have an old kindle lying around, you can use it as an e-ink weather dashboard (or anything else for that matter, as long as you can convert it into a 8bit greyscale image).

https://terminalbytes.com/reviving-kindle-paperwhite-7th-gen...

New comment by hemant6488 in "Reviving an old kindle pw7 as an e-ink dashboard"

hemant6488 — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 22:55:35 +0000

That's an amazing idea, why didn't I think of that. It'll be just a couple of network calls to achieve that.

New comment by hemant6488 in "Reviving an old kindle pw7 as an e-ink dashboard"

hemant6488 — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:44:43 +0000

Yeah, it'll work plugged in. Since the dashboard mode locks everything down until restart, you can leave it connected. Though keeping it constantly charging might turn your battery into a spicy pillow eventually - maybe chuck it on a smart plug to charge for an hour every few days if you're worried about that.