Twice is a pattern, so it’s time to write this up. I have that drawer, apparently every guy does, full of cables and old devices you’re convinced you’ll use again someday. Two devices in there were an old Kobo Glo (ca. 2012) and a Garmin Edge 1000 bike computer (ca. 2014).
Bottom Line Up front: an excellent pattern is hanging that old device off a USB and asking your AI to resurrect it.
Here’s why for the Kobo, specifically – I wanted a quiet place to absorb the Pope’s encyclical on AI, properly, away from glowing screens. One part of it speaks directly to the people building with AI, which is to say me, and I wanted to sit with that rather than skim it on a phone. So naturally I used AI to get the thing ready to read. The ironies are stacked floor to ceiling and I have made my peace with all of them.
Claude hooked me up with Kobo community modifications I never would have known existed (KOReader, sideloaded by drag and drop, nothing flashed, the whole thing allegedly reversible by deleting two folders), converted the encyclical into the ideal format so its 224 footnotes actually pop up inline where you are reading, and set up an offline dictionary so I could look up a word without leaving the page. Absolute perfection.
For the Garmin Edge 1000 (an essentially deprecated piece of hardware), I got it working despite no longer being supported in the mobile and desktop apps. When the custom field I wanted didn’t exist, Claude offered to BAKE MY OWN, helping me download and set up the ConnectIQ SDK to create custom fields to visualize Power, Cadence, Heart Rate exactly the way I want to see them.
The whole repo is on GitHub if you want to bake your own.
Perfect example of feeling like a wizard: the kind of wizard that has feature requests in mind, and refuses sending “perfectly fine tech” to the landfill.