What I’ve been working on recently

Strictly speaking, this blog has gone nearly six months without any new posts, aside from a few translated older articles. During this time, I’ve been almost entirely focused on developing Eink Mode. Since releasing the prototype, the idea I proposed sparked a lot of discussion and attention on Hacker News, and I received plenty of support and encouragement.

At first, I intended to make this project open source, hoping that people could collaborate on its development and maintenance. However, after some time, I realized that the audience for web reading on E Ink devices is still quite niche. Relying solely on a community of this size would lead to very slow progress, and it would be difficult to achieve the level of quality I ultimately aim for.

Because of that, I began rethinking the direction of the project and eventually decided to move toward a commercial approach. If I truly want to do this well and push it to a high level, it requires strong talent and stable resources. Scattered open-source contributions alone are not enough to sustain such an effort in the long term. If a project cannot sustain itself, it will eventually rely purely on passion, and once that passion fades, the project is likely to stall or disappear.

With these considerations in mind, I founded a company to continue advancing this idea and refining it step by step. My goal is not only to serve E Ink users, but to provide a better web reading experience across all mobile devices in the future, regardless of whether they use E Ink or not.

That said, entrepreneurship is completely new territory for me. I had no prior experience in business or company operations, so I had to learn everything from scratch, including how to run a company, organizational structures, fundraising, and tax-related matters. At the same time, I needed to find people willing to join and build this together. All of this has been both challenging and time-consuming.

On the technical side, the challenges are just as significant. I’m not a professional software engineer. Although I was once interested in frontend development and learned some basics back in college, the software ecosystem has changed dramatically over the past decade. On top of that, the rapid rise of AI has fundamentally reshaped how software is built. I’ve had to learn new frameworks, tools, and workflows to develop this product efficiently.

Originally, my idea was quite simple: to create a web module that developers could integrate into their sites, allowing content to be presented in a paginated format that’s easier to read on E Ink displays. However, after sharing this idea, many users suggested turning it into a browser extension so it could work across any website.

This seemingly simple requirement introduced a series of complex technical challenges. First, I had never built a browser extension before, so I had to learn the entire development environment and available APIs from scratch. Second, converting “any webpage” into a paginated reading experience means the program must automatically identify which elements are core content and which are noise to be removed. Finally, and most difficult of all, web structures vary widely, and with heavy use of JavaScript for dynamic behavior, ensuring stable pagination across all sites without breaking layouts is extremely challenging.

For these reasons, I had very little time or energy to update this blog over the past few months. Recently, as the company and product have gradually become more stable, I plan to resume sharing thoughts, tips, and observations about using E Ink devices. However, since the company now has its own official website and blog, most content related to E Ink applications, reading, and our product will be published there. If you’re interested, feel free to follow along at https://bacink.com/.

As for this blog, I plan to make it more open in scope. I’ll be sharing more of my personal thoughts and perspectives here, rather than focusing exclusively on E Ink, making it more aligned with the theme “I think, therefore I am.”

That’s a brief update on what I’ve been working on recently. If you’re interested in browsing the web on E Ink devices, I encourage you to try Eink Mode. It can significantly improve the reading experience on E Ink displays. While it’s not perfect yet, I believe it’s already good enough to make reading much more comfortable.

You can download and start using it here:

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/addon/eink-mode/

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eink-mode/edmdmmimldgcnicfpgdcegdnnmiomafm

Seeing the results of more than a year of effort gradually take shape feels incredibly grounding, and I’m genuinely happy to share this journey with you.