A Sight for Sore Eyes
A hacker repurposed an E Ink tablet as a computer monitor, cutting eye strain for reading and writing.
It’s not just people working in tech who spend most of their day sitting in front of a computer anymore. These days, the majority of people spend large portions of their day staring at a monitor for one reason or another. We may try to pick monitors with ultra-high resolution or super-fast refresh rates, but even so, after a while it is hard on our eyes.
Alireza Alavi had a great idea that could help us with this problem. The same E Ink displays that give our eyes a break when we read e-books could also come to our aid when we are using our computers. But E Ink monitors are not exactly something you can find at your local big-box electronics store. So to make this dream a reality, Alavi turned an old E Ink tablet into a computer monitor.
The motivation for the project came after an exhausting day of reading dense legal documents while researching software licenses. After nearly fourteen hours of staring at a conventional LCD screen, Alavi decided there had to be a better way. His solution was to repurpose an Android-based Onyx BOOX Air 2 E Ink tablet as a secondary display for his Linux desktop, dramatically reducing eye strain during long reading and writing sessions.
Rather than physically modifying the tablet or relying on specialized hardware, the setup works entirely over the network using VNC (Virtual Network Computing). On the computer side, Alavi runs Linux with the i3 window manager under X11. He uses TigerVNC to mirror a specific region of his desktop to the tablet. The tablet, meanwhile, runs a lightweight Android VNC client that receives the video stream and sends input back to the computer.
While VNC often gets a bad reputation for latency, Alavi found the performance more than acceptable for his intended use. The primary bottleneck is not the network connection but the refresh rate and rendering speed of the older E Ink hardware. For tasks like reading documentation, reviewing text, or writing simple prose, the experience is smooth and comfortable. More demanding activities such as web browsing or coding are less practical, but that was never the goal.
An added bonus is that VNC allows the tablet to act as an input device. Alavi can pick up the tablet, walk around the office, scroll through documents, make small edits, or even sketch diagrams directly into applications like GIMP. In presentations or discussions with coworkers, the tablet doubles as a wireless drawing surface.
While modern, high-refresh-rate E Ink monitors are on the horizon, Alavi’s approach shows that with a bit of configuration and open-source software, anyone can experiment with a more eye-friendly desktop today.