David's Daily Bread
The tool shelf·The workflows·Past editions
Wednesday, July 29, 2026 Evening edition ≈ 3 min read
Start here tonight
worth an evening Trending tool

KOReader's July release turns a Kindle, Kobo, or Android tablet into a far better e-reader, for free

The open source reading app that people install when the software their device shipped with stops being enough.

KOReader 2026.07, nicknamed Sailing Walrus, went out on July 26 with support for Kobo v5 hardware, a new cloud storage plugin that replaces the old SyncService, basic OPDS 2.0 feed support, and background cleanup for PDFs that use Mask and SMask layers. It is free and open source, and the release ships builds for Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, Cervantes, Android, and desktop Linux, macOS, and Windows. The catch is the Kindle route: KOReader's own documentation says it installs only on jailbroken Kindles, through a launcher such as KUAL, and that newer models are progressively harder to jailbreak. On Android and on a desktop it is an ordinary download, which is the fastest way to try it tonight.
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The tool shelf new tonight

SoundGate Guitar

Free, no in-app purchasesiPhone, iPad, Mac appProduct Hunt No. 2, Jul 29

It listens through the microphone and draws what you are playing on a live fretboard, with an AI tutor that answers questions and builds practice routines, plus a tuner and metronome; it is an Apple-only app, so Android players are out of luck.

Yap, on-device dictation for macOS

Free, MIT licensedmacOS 26, Apple SiliconShow HN, 104 points

Press a shortcut, talk, press it again, and your words appear in whatever text field you were in, using Apple's built-in speech APIs with no model to download and no network calls; it needs macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon, and Intel Macs are deliberately not supported.

CheapFoodMap

FreeWeb map, US citiesShow HN, 273 points

A map of meals under $10 across a dozen featured cities including New York, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles, with a price-verified date shown on each spot; the entries are crowdsourced, so coverage thins out fast once you pan away from the big cities.

tale.fyi

FreeWeb, reads or plays aloudShow HN, 71 points

One link opens a whole book, keeps your place on the device, and lets you swap between reading and listening; an account is optional and only syncs progress, but the library is public domain material from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and LibriVox, so nothing modern is on the shelf.

TokenTown

FreeRuns in the browserHacker News, 72 points

Type a prompt and watch a single token travel through an isometric city where each district is one stage of a language model, from tokenizing to attention to sampling; the model is deliberately tiny and its weights are random and untrained, so the words it produces are noise and only the machinery is real.

Every shelf item is available today; no waitlists, no vaporware.

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The workflows follow along at home
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