Hi everyone,

After months of searching, i never found a beautiful - Calibre connected, feature packed reader with a nice UI/UX design. They either looked dated, had subscriptions, or didn't really work with calibre. So I made one for myself, and I want to share it with you all for free and no in app purchases. Am i crazy for this? maybe lol.

Here are a few features:

- Calibre Integration with both desktop and web version (can also import EPUBs & PDF's from files)

- Highlights and reading progress sync back to calibre

- Annotate/Draw notes with apple pencil

- Share/export highlights and notes

- Listen to your book with natural voices

- Customize paper color and add any font

- iCloud sync

- No subscription and no data collected

- and much more

-only IOS now - working on an android port.

Let me know if you face any bugs/issues, and curious to hear your thoughts. Thank you!

Try out Athene Reader:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/athene-reader/id6811711454

iPad 4 on 6.1.3, jailbroken. I've been putting this device back to work and Plex was the one I assumed was impossible. It isn't. Two separate problems, two fixes.

Part 1: getting Plex from Veteris

Veteris fetches the last version of an App Store app that still supports IOS6, so you can pull the old Plex client straight onto the device instead of hunting for a decrypted IPA on some dead forum. I think youll also need app sync to make veteris work

Install Veteris, search Plex, grab it. It installs like a normal app.

Part 2: the login wall

Here's where it stops. The old client launches fine, but it wants you to sign in to plex.tv first — and that sign-in never completes on iOS 6.

As far as I can tell it's a TLS problem, not a Plex problem. No amount of retrying fixes it, because the handshake is the thing failing.

So don't fight the login. Skip it.

Part 3: the fix — let the server trust the iPad

Plex Media Server can be told to allow specific addresses without any authentication at all. That's the whole trick.

On your plex server: Settings → Network

1. Find "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth"
2. Put your iPad's LAN IP in it — e.g. 192.168.1.42 (or the whole subnet, 192.168.1.0/24, if you don't want to care about DHCP moving it — read the warning below before you do)
3. Make sure "Strict TLS configuration" is UNCHECKED. Plex's own description under that box literally says "May prevent older clients from connecting." Tick it and nothing here will work.
4. "Enable local network discovery (GDM)" checked — this is how the old client finds the server without an account
5. Save Changes

Now open Plex on the iPad. The server shows up under Your Servers on its own and you're straight into your library. No sign-in, no account, no plex.tv.

I run calibre-web at home, and I had an iPad 4 sitting in a drawer that can't sign into the App Store anymore — so nothing that speaks OPDS can be installed on it. Rather than let a perfectly good screen rot, I wrote my own ereader for it. It's called Book Owl, it's for iOS 6, and it's been out since August.

Fair warning before you read any further: almost none of you can actually use this. It needs a jailbroken iPad running iOS 6, and essentially nobody is still on iOS 6 in 2026. I'm posting it as the backstory, not as something for you to go install — the thing I actually want from this sub is at the bottom. btw, reach out to me if you have an old device, from 2012 or before and I can show you how to downgrade it to IOS6.

Features of Book Owl on IOS6

- Browse the catalog the way calibre organises it: All Books, Authors, Series, Tags, Formats — the navigation feeds you drill into, not one flat list

- Covers, search across the catalog, and a checkmark on anything already downloaded to the device

- HTTP Basic auth against a password-protected instance

- Downloads EPUB and PDF straight to the iPad over wifi. No iTunes, no cable, no "send to device"

The reason I'm posting now: I'm mid-way through writing the successor for iOS 26/27 with a liquid glass UI, iPhone and iPad, aimed at the App Store. Same Calibre integration, rebuilt properly — No timeline for now for release as of now but am making progress.

I self-host my music on Navidrome, and I wanted it on the jailbroken iPad 4 and a new iPod touch 5 I just bought from eBay. Nothing modern installs on iOS 6, so I wrote a client. Then I wanted the part iOS really doesn't want you to have: a song from my own server sitting in the **stock Music app**, playing on the lock screen with my app closed. That works now, and it's the reason for this post.

What it is: a client for Navidrome (or anything speaking the Subsonic API). Give it an address, a username and a password once and your whole library is on the device — albums, artists, songs, playlists, search, cover art. It streams over plain HTTP, which is what these devices can actually do, transcodes on the server for anything iOS 6 can't decode (FLAC, mostly), and answers the lock-screen and headphone controls. The iPad build also scrobbles plays back to the server.

Two versions, both free:

- iPad — built as a stereo turntable rather than a list of songs. Albums are pressed onto records; pick one and it drops onto the platter, the tonearm swings in, and an amber LCD wakes with the track. A side runs about half an hour and the deck flips to side B by itself. Scrubbing is dragging the tonearm.

- iPhone / iPod touch — a straightforward library browser, drawn to suit the device it runs on.

The part I'm actually pleased about — downloads that land in the real Music app. On the iPad, hold an album cover or a track and choose “Download to Music”; on the iPod, tap the download ring beside it. Either way it's filed into the device's own Music library, cover art included. It plays there like anything else, on the lock screen, in a playlist, with Lyrebird closed.

One known quirk: filing a song this way leaves a second, empty copy in Music — a ghost with no duration that says "connect to a Wi-Fi network" if you tap it. itunesstored creates a placeholder row when the download starts, then writes a *second* finished row instead of finalising the first. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to prevent it (no metadata key does), so the only work on your end will be to delete the empty placeholder duplicate.

Install: add http://repo.theadipost.com as a source in Cydia, then install *Lyrebird iOS 6 for iPad* or *Lyrebird iOS 6 for iPhone/iPod touch*. Free, no ads, nothing phones home — it talks only to the server you name.

**Bugs and requests** (thanks to the person who suggested this last time instead of me posting my email):

- iPad — https://github.com/adityasreedhar/lyrebird-ipad/issues

- iPhone / iPod touch — https://github.com/adityasreedhar/lyrebird-iphone/issues

Needs a jailbreak — and not only for installation. The Music-app filing works because the app installs to `/Applications` and can ask the store service directly, which only a jailbroken device permits.

Built and tested on an iPad 4 and an iPod touch 5, both on 6.1.3. Deployment target is 6.0, so anything that ran iOS 6 should work; being armv7 it may install as far as 10.3.4. If you run it on something I don't have, I'd love to know what breaks.

Cool-Booter on iPad 4 on IOS 6 keeps crashing iBooks. So I built Book Owl — an ereader for iOS 6 that takes its cues from iBooks 3.1.3 (wooden shelf, the real interactive page curl, the Aa popover), but is written new, and does a few things iBooks never did.

What it does:

- EPUB and PDF, with a page curl you can catch mid-turn

- Aa popover: seven fonts, twelve sizes, White/Sepia/Night — and it keeps your place on the page when you change any of them

- Highlights in five colours, notes, bookmarks, in-book search

- Two-page spreads in landscape, position remembered per book

- Downloads straight from a Calibre server: it speaks OPDS, so if you run calibre-web your whole library is on the iPad — no iTunes, no cable

- After 8:30pm the shelf lights its lamps (it follows the clock, not a setting)

- Ask the Owl: point it at an Ollama server on your own network and a wooden panel slides out beside the page. Ask who a character is or what just happened and it answers from the pages you're reading, streamed word by word. Nothing is sent anywhere until you name a server yourself, and cloud models are refused outright.

- No server needed for your own files — "Open in…" from Safari/Mail works, or drop epub/pdf into /var/mobile/Documents over SSH or Filza. Books live in /var/mobile/Library/Books and survive uninstalls.

**Install: add `http://repo.theadipost.com\` as a source in Cydia → Book Owl. There's a sideload IPA on the same page if you're on AppSync instead. Free, no ads, nothing phones home.

Tested on an iPad 4 on 6.1.3. It's iPad-only, deployment target 6.0, so the iPad 2, 3, 4 and first mini should all work on 6.0–6.1.6. Being armv7 it may install up to 10.3.4, but the design is drawn for iOS 6 metrics and I haven't tried it there. If you run it on anything, I'd love to hear what breaks.

4 servers plus an offsite box, and interfaced by an 80's era Macintosh. My homelab journey started about an year ago, when I ordered the UGREEN NAS, and ive built it up to what it is now.

The lab

1. PINEAPPLE - UGREEN NAS, the heart of everything and I set it up with two RAID 1 configs. Volume 1 had two HDD's, and Voume 2 has 4TB and 2TB HDD ( i know 2 TB is wasted, will worry about when it starts getting filled up) Jellyfin + the arr suite, Immich (got my whole family off icloud), Navidrome, Vaultwarden, n8n. ~22 containers
2. FLUXCAPACITOR - Optiplex 7070, i7-9700, 30gb ram, RTX A2000 12gb, 256gb and 1tb NVME SSD. The AI box: Ollama + Open WebUI, Qdrant, ComfyUI, SearXNG, Frigate NVR for the driveway cameras. The n8n flows on the NAS do their inference over here, so stuff like my concert alert bot runs on local models instead of an api bill
3. THINKSTATION - Lenovo P520, Xeon W, 64gb ECC ram, 1TB SATA and 1 TB NVME SSD. Creative machine + proxmox dev/test for a business im building (Temporal + postgres, github actions runner, nextcloud)
4. SPACESTATION - optiplex 3020 - under my bed. Monitoring (prometheus/grafana/wazuh) and home assistant, which pulls in my mach-e and my solar.
5. MICHIGAN- optiplex 7010 in actual Michigan, 700 miles away, powered off all week. 8TB HDD, BIOS wakes it sunday night, pineapple pushes a restic backup and shuts it back down over ssh. Offsite backups for basically zero power money

Everything on tailscale, one cloudflare tunnel, nothing else exposed. Whole house behind a LiFePO4 UPS with NUT

Ok now the Macintosh

Real Classic II - 16mhz 68030, 4mb ram, the little 9 inch black and white CRT. It boots System 7.1 off a BlueSCSI v2 and ZTerm talks out the modem port into a USB serial dongle on fluxcapacitor:

Flow:

Classic II (ZTerm, vt100) -> modem port -> usb-serial -> getty -> tmux -> claude

Yesterday, i told claude to go get me Oregon Trail. It found a copy online, unstuffed the ancient .sit archive, and beamed it down the serial line with zmodem straight onto the macs disk. The mac never touched the internet, it just asked something that could.

Then it escalated. I asked claude to write a native System 7 app in C (Retro68 that draws the whole labs vitals on the 1 bit screen - per machine

**And it plays my jellyfin movies**

Theres a 1 bit video player for classic macs called MacFlim, and flux encodes .flim files straight from my jellyfin library. Watching Akira like this on a 9 inch CRT, streamed out of my NAS, is one of the coolest things ive ever made.