The build log

Built in the open

The development log for the everething tablet. Work, testing, field checks, and opinions from friends throughout.

July 2026

  • Home screen themesThree selectable themes. Classic is the original tile grid. First Light is a dawn-to-night gradient that darkens as you scroll, with translucent tiles and a firefly animation baked to sprites (about 25 fps, roughly 0.15 W). Index renders the home screen as a typographic table of contents.
  • Maps: world coverage and address searchThe offline basemap grew from North America to the whole planet, in a single vector-tile file read directly from the SD card. US street addresses now resolve offline too, from Census address data processed county by county.
  • Maps: offline place searchPlace-name search backed by a 405 MB full-text database built from GeoNames: 3.25 million places plus 41,000 US ZIP codes. Results rank by name match, feature type, population, and distance from the current viewport. Tapping a result moves the camera and drops a pin.
  • Search spell correctionA "did you mean" layer across every search field. Suggestions are gated by a quality check on result counts so the corrector only offers alternatives when the original query returns little and the correction returns more. Handles split and merged words as well as misspellings.
  • Library expandedSeven new sources added. The set now stands at 65 offline archives, roughly 395 GB.
  • Design systemOne shared token layer for colors, spacing, and shapes, and one shared screen header replacing seventeen hand-built variants. Each content collection gets one accent color. Content pages receive the same tokens through injected CSS variables so native UI and article pages match. Also added: a native Khan Academy browser that renders the course tree as tile grids instead of web pages and filters out exercises that cannot work offline, plus a countdown Timer app.
  • Update policy setTwo tiers. Mail-back service: the tablet comes back with a tested app and content set installed, sometimes with device-specific fixes, for $99 (US only, first update free for Batch 1). Self-serve: download the content set and swap the SD card yourself, free.
  • GPS power behaviorA GPS session shows a live satellite count while searching, chimes on first fix, and powers the radio down 60 seconds after the fix. An info pane explains that the receiver is listen-only and that a cold start in a new location can take minutes.
  • Settings reorganizedSections reordered by frequency of use. A swipe down from the top-right corner opens Settings from the home screen and from immersive reading. A running timer appears as a live row. Custom timer durations use hour/minute/second wheels.
  • Read Aloud restoredText-to-speech had been silently broken since March. It now works again, maps each spoken sentence to its exact element on the page so the highlight tracks correctly, and uses a highlight color that stays readable in every theme.
  • Surprise Me audited to 99%The random-article feature was tested against a 480-article sample built to match real shuffle behavior. Sources that could not render cleanly were fixed or removed from the shuffle pool (they remain browsable and searchable). Final measured result: 99% of picks render clean.
  • Cross-book links hardenedA link from one book into another is checked for existence before opening, and opens under the destination collection's own header and accent. Links to missing or external targets reroute to a pre-filled search instead of an error page. A return pill remembers the originating article and scroll position across any number of hops.
  • Website restructuredThree landing pages, one per use case: The Backup, The Calm Library, The Study Tool. Added a feedback page. Deploys now run automatically from the repository.
  • Boot and screen-sleep fixesFixed a bug where the screen turned itself intermittently during typing. Cause: the boot receiver launched a second copy of the main activity on top of the one Android had already started, and the buried copy ran a duplicate idle watchdog that never saw any touch input. The screen manager is now a single process-wide instance and the app can no longer stack duplicate activities. The startup loader also holds the screen awake until loading finishes, the stock Android lock screen no longer appears during boot on shipped units, and the "belongs to your organization" boot page now shows everething's name over an ember wallpaper instead of the Samsung default.
  • Reader rendering fixesThe device is now portrait-locked except fullscreen video, which follows the sensor in landscape. Five rendering bugs fixed by inspecting the live pages over a debug connection: videos rendering at zero height, MathJax load errors printed into article text, and interactive simulations that booted blank because the archive format encodes URL query strings into the file path. A script now restores the query string before page scripts run.
  • On-device test roundsSeveral days of structured walkthroughs, with friends' fresh eyes and deliberate button-hammering. Fixed as a result: crashes from rapid back presses, a kiosk crash on an empty navigation stack, stale search results, over-eager spell correction, and map result ranking.

June 2026

  • The kit takes physical shapeThe full Batch 1 kit came together as objects on a table: a folding solar panel, two backup batteries, three Faraday bags, charging accessories, and the tablet itself. The charge chain was tested end to end, sun to panel to battery to tablet, and the whole spread photographed for the site.
  • Pricing lockedBatch 1: $599 for the full kit, founder price. From Batch 2: $599 base tablet, $899 full kit.
  • OS compatibility programeverOS is now tested and approved against specific Android and One UI versions rather than assumed to work. Currently approved: One UI 8.0 and 8.5. A friend's tablet in Canada became the second test device and confirmed a full setup works away from the original workbench.
  • Launch production stockedVideo scripts written, launch and onboarding emails drafted, and a small local tool built that detects silences in filmed takes and produces a pre-cut timeline for editing.

May 2026

  • Pre-orders liveStripe checkout on everething.com, and a full site redesign: one continuous dawn-to-night gradient page. The site moved to new hosting the same week.
  • My FilesA home tile and folder browser for personal PDFs. Files dropped on the SD card read in the same viewer as everything else.
  • Survival Manual illustrationsTen medical illustrations added: severe bleeding, CPR, choking, burns, wound care, fractures and splinting, hypothermia, heat illness, anaphylaxis, and heart attack or stroke. All public domain or Creative Commons, each credited to its source.
  • Readability systemFont scaling across the whole OS from a single slider, per-collection overrides, and a Sunny mode that pins maximum brightness and keeps the screen awake for outdoor reading.
  • Dictionary rankingLookups rank by real-world word frequency so common words surface first, and result snippets show the actual part of speech.
  • Batch 1 hardware completeAll eleven tablets and their 512 GB SD cards in hand and inventoried.
  • Content server self-repairIf an archive on the SD card is replaced while the server holds a stale handle, the server now detects the mismatch and reloads instead of serving broken pages.
  • TED Talks removedThe video archive kept crashing the reader and rendered inconsistently. Cut from V1.0 rather than shipped broken.

April 2026

  • Offline maps shippedVector maps rendered from a single tile file on the SD card, no extraction and no per-tile files. Paired with Ephemeral GPS: satellite positioning only while a session is active, a 15-minute automatic timeout, and location permission pre-granted so no system dialog ever appears.
  • Survival Manual written43 topics across fire, water, shelter, food, medical, and navigation, written in-house and revised through separate correctness and completeness passes. Bundled into the app as HTML with its own hub, search, and reader. Replaced a generic scraped survival archive.
  • Khan Academy archive built in-houseNo usable offline archive of Khan Academy existed, so one was built with the kolibri2zim pipeline plus custom patches. A complete K-through-college course library, packaged and tested by hand.
  • Kiosk modeThe tablet boots directly into everething and runs nothing else, using Android's device-owner mechanism rather than a paid MDM service. Custom lock screen, custom fonts, and a staggered entrance animation for the home screen. A hidden admin path exists for maintenance.
  • Thousand-Year Calendar art verifiedEvery artwork in Year 1 checked for copyright status; non-free works swapped for verified public-domain pieces, enforced by a validator script. Added a pinch-to-zoom viewer and long-press to open the artwork's Wikipedia article.
  • Wikipedia hub and snapshot upgradeWikipedia upgraded to the February 2026 snapshot and given a hub screen: On This Day, a daily featured discovery, and a random-article entry.
  • Dictionary screenA dedicated screen with ranked search and definition previews, for looking up a word mid-article without losing your place.
  • Startup: 60 seconds to 3The full library of archives now loads in parallel at boot. Startup time dropped from about a minute to about three seconds.
  • Content LabAn admin-only tool inside the app for auditing every archive: per-book notes, rendering-fix toggles, and a checklist that decides what earns a home-screen tile.
  • Hardening for long offline lifeTen popup-prone system packages hidden (app stores, OTA agents, analytics), system updates frozen, installs and account changes blocked, and the keyboard, speech engine, and rendering engine protected against accidental force-stop. Goal: the tablet can sit in a closet for two years and still work the day it comes out. Verified across repeated reboots. One documented tradeoff: Samsung's management layer mutes the microphone on any managed device, so voice input is unavailable by design.

March 2026

  • Thousand-Year CalendarA daily book, article, and artwork on the home screen, drawn from the offline library. Survival and Medical hub screens landed the same week, each pulling from multiple archives.
  • Feature weekSix additions in one pass: Surprise Me (random article), Read Aloud, Find in Page, a Resume Reading card, an adjustable blue light filter, and video playback speed control.
  • Search improvementsQueries now run against every archive in parallel, results rank by relevance instead of arrival order, and each result shows an estimated reading time.
  • Hardware architecture decidedA budget tablet plus a large SD card beats an expensive tablet: search indexes live on fast internal storage, the 300+ GB library lives on a 512 GB card. The Samsung Tab A11 (4 GB RAM, 64 GB internal) was chosen as the platform. The $599 price was set the same month.

February 2026

  • The library landsFull-text search across every archive, a video player with working fullscreen, a native PDF viewer with memory-bounded rendering, persistent bottom navigation, and the complete English Wikipedia, about 115 GB, on the device.
  • Offline translationOn-device translation in 20 languages using local models. Select any text or translate a whole passage, no network involved.
  • The final rewriteThe app rebuilt from scratch in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on libkiwix, under the Ember Whispers palette. Two earlier prototype stacks were retired. This is the codebase that ships.
  • Dark modeDark reading across both the native UI and article pages. Harder than it sounds: Samsung's rendering engine blanked entire pages over a single scrollbar styling rule, and math notation, image captions, and diagrams each needed their own fixes.

May 2025 to January 2026

  • January 2026: everething.com and the last prototypeThe site went live with a waitlist, and the domain (registered June 2025) finally had something on it. On the software side, a second-generation home screen was built and run side by side against the previous one. The comparison settled the question: the prototype stack had reached its ceiling, and the next version would be a ground-up rewrite.
  • Late 2025: the Flutter era, two full appsTwo complete app generations built and retired. "FreshStart" was the first serious build: a two-tile home screen (Wikipedia and Crash Course), a working bridge to the libkiwix archive engine, and a local HTTP server to make video playback work. "Aurora" followed with a real design system (cosmos-dark backgrounds, mint and violet accents), bookmarks, history, a search overlay, and multi-archive support. Both are archived with build instructions and still compile today. Aurora's design language survived into the current OS, reinterpreted; its code did not.
  • October 2025: direct archive readingFirst successful direct reading of ZIM archives on device, the format Wikipedia and most offline libraries are distributed in. Before this, content went through a browser pointed at a separate server; after it, the app owned the whole pipeline. The core mechanism of everything that followed proved out here.
  • Summer 2025: the Raspberry Pi tabletThe first physical everething: a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM, a bare LCD touch panel wired straight to the board, and a bright green 3D-printed case holding the sandwich together, printed at home from templates first drawn by hand on paper. It ran Kiwix on Linux, serving the full offline Wikipedia to a browser in kiosk mode, and its boot screen read "Welcome to Wikipedia. Over 6 million articles with images, no internet connection required." Crude and cabled, but it was the whole product thesis working in one hand: years of knowledge, no internet, one device. More than fifteen display options were researched along the way, including e-paper, before conventional touch panels won out.
  • May 2025: device work beginsThe idea had been cooking for years: a complete offline library on a device that needs nothing from the outside world to work. In May 2025 it became a project on a desk, starting with an e-reader concept, a folder of hardware research, and the first parts orders.

The process: use the tablet daily, note what fails, fix it, repeat. This page records the results. None of it happened alone.