the rightful order has been restored

This is Housemate Paul’s old first generation Nook e-reader. It's been dead for a while. The battery was bad, it still wouldn't boot with a new battery (though with the new battery, it would try again), and it still had Paul's old account data, and B&N dropped support for this device like a year and a half ago. That matters because it won’t factory reset if it can’t deregister itself, and it can’t deregister itself if it can’t talk to the servers, which aren’t up anymore.

BUT it turns out the internal SD card is NOT soldered down and (with an adaptor) mounts under linux so a few fscks and a lot of searching directories (and grep) and a bunch of hexedit and some SQLite later... ready for sideloads!

Also, it’s probably the only eInk web browsing device ever. Because WHY WOULD YOU? Because Barnes & Noble is why.

Anyway, it works again. VICTORY FOR GAZ! （⌒▽⌒）