Lily "Bliss" Lys's XTEINK x4 Guide for Beautiful Women and Others
The xteink x4 is a funky little cheap ereader. It has no backlight, no touch screen, the UI it starts with sucks ass and needs to be replaced, and it's *tiny*. It is also, crucially, 70$, and i get to feel like a character from a 90's cyberpunk anime when i'm reading it. You can read more about why this thing is cool in Chris Person's article on Aftermath here and you can actually buy the thing here.
This post is going to be a quick guide on setup, including the site for the custom firmware most people use for this thing. (This is essentially a summed up version of the user guide for the CrossPoint firmware, which I recommend digging into if you get one of these)
SETUP
When you get the thing it'll still be preloaded with the UI it comes with, and it might still be in the native chinese. (You will want to set the thing to your preferred language before doing the rest of this). To flash the custom firmware onto it, you'll want to plug it in to your computer with a USB-C cable (you can use a USB to USB-C adapter for your pc's end). Plug it in and turn it on before going to this website.
With the device turned on and plugged in, click "Flash CrossPoint firmware" on the above link. Let it do its thing (this will only take a few minutes) and then restart the device by pressing the tiny reset button on the bottom right (you may need a paperclip) and then immediately holding the power button (top right) down for 3~ seconds.
LOADING BOOKS
Once you turn the device back on, it'll look something like this (minus the bit with the book at the start-also shoutout to Cameron Reed who wrote The Fortunate Fall in the 90's and has since transitioned!). Before you get further into this, I recommend having a bunch of epub files you want to put onto the device already on hand. To convert ebook files you already own to epub you should check out Calibre. (You can also just use anna's archive)
To load books onto the device, go to "File Transfer". You have three options: "Join a Network", "Calibre Wireless", and "Create Hotspot". For this post I'll cover doing this by joining a network, but I recommend poking at the user guide linked at the start of this post for more info on the other two options.
Hit Join a Network and log in to whatever wifi network your PC (or phone) is also logged into (this will be a pain in the ass with the little keyboard, so I again recommend making sure you have a whole bunch of books to upload each time you do this). Once you're logged in, your device will display a QR code and an IP address. Using Chrome or Edge, type that IP address into the address bar to get to the file management site. (Depending on your internet connection, this may take some fiddling around with/some waiting).
Once you're on the file management site, you can upload any epub files you have on hand. You can also use the site to set up folders, if you like having your books neatly organized by genre/author/etc.
And that's it! You now have a funky little cyberpunk datapad to read on. I might also recommend messing around in the settings (I personally set the font size to small so it could load more text to page, which improved my experience). If you check out the CrossPoint user guide above, you can see more information on things like setting a sleep screen/general function advice.
after playing with this for a bit, I'm finding that using the wifi hotspot option is WAY easier to upload files with than connecting to wifi!
