how i gave a new life to my old iPad

17 Mar, 2024

i like reading books. i used to read a lot more especially during my middle school and high school years. i was one of those kids that really enjoyed percy jackson, hunger games, harry potter and other series alike. but there was always something that bothered me about reading books. well more like foreign books.

the translation

not being an english speaker meant that i could only experience books through the means of translation. and sure some of the translations were not bad but some? literal dogshit. that is if they even got translated.

as i improved my english i had an itch at the back of my mind that was like "you could probably read this in english, you know?" aside from it being intimidating there were two main reasons that have always kept me from giving it a try:

1. finding books in english is hard
2. they are significantly more expensive due to low demand

with my good friend anna and her archive plus library zed both of my problems were gone. there was one more problem though, what was i going to read my books on?

the iPad and it's resurrection

i had this old iPad 2 laying around and i recently started to mess around with it. i was thinking of ways to repurpose it because i hated the idea of it being e-waste. i even posted about it on mastodon.

i wasn't really sure what i could use it for back then. (the above idea is really terrible btw) but then i thought to myself, this would make a great kindle. it has a big screen, is dumb enough to do only one thing and it's battery life is suprisingly great. it just needed some adjustments.

the adjustments

first of all i needed to downgrade to the lowest ios version i could because the current one had some noticable stutters. it wasn't like iPhone 4 level of stutters but still, i wanted it as smooth as possible. apple does not allow for downgrades officially but luckily we have a wonderful tool at our disposal: legacy ios kit¹

i won't be going into that much detail about using this since they have a very comprehensive wiki but the general steps are:

1. jailbreak your device² and download openssh
2. plug that sucker into your pc and run the script
3. profit??

fine tuning

now that i was running ios 8.4.1 i just had to download some packages to make this tablet functional in 2024.

the first issue is expired SSL certificates. we can't connect to some websites or cydia repos due to how old this device is. original certificates can be found here but you can't load that on an iPad so your best bet is using invoxiplaygames's site.³

the second issue is cydia repos. some have been dead for a very long time and it's a good idea to remove them. the ones effected by this are modmyi and ultrasn0w.

jailbreaking and the tweaks, themes, apps it brings are endless and i could toy around with them forever but honestly just downloading ifile and/or filza has basic file transfers covered and it was enough for my use case.

it's also a good idea to add the invoxiplaygames repo(https://cydia.invoxiplaygames.uk) since it has the tweak called checkmate store. this will get rid of the "this app is not compatible with this iPad" error message for the apps you purchased before. if you have another modern ios device you can purchase them using that and if you don't you can download an old version of itunes which still has the app store and the ability to purchase apps.

wrapping up

well it still can't do much but it can at least send and receive files and let you read epub files. our starting point was e-waste so i'll take this win. oh and you can even run neofetch on it. i doubt it will impress your friends but you can still try.

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