My old Kindle was gathering dust until I turned it into a neat Spotify dashboard

I set up my home server to send the Spotify "Now Playing" to my Kindle. This is how I did it.

My old Kindle was gathering dust until I turned it into a neat Spotify dashboard

[Kindle on a wooden surface, shows a dashboard displaying the Spotify _Now Playing_ screen.]

Credit: Faisal Rasool/How-to Geek/Nano Banana

Faisal Rasool

Mar 1, 2026, 2:00 PM EST

Faisal Rasool has been a feature writer at How-to Geek since early 2024. He brings five years of professional experience in simplifying technology for his readers on topics like mobile devices, PCs, and online privacy. He tries to help people get the most out of their gadgets and software with the least effort.

In his teenage years, he spent hours every day tinkering with Android phones and Linux builds. Faisal started his career at WhatMobile in 2019 (mostly out of his obsession with Android) where he published over 2,000 news stories. Currently, he contributes to the news section over at AndroidHeadlines.

He also authored more than 100 feature articles for SlashGear, covering Android, iOS, Web, Chromebooks, online privacy/security, and PC content.

Faisal is also pursuing a Bachelor's in English literature to build up his writing chops. He enjoys watercolors, classic video games, animated films, and conversations with strangers.

I've recently been on a little bit of a self-hosting and homelab kick, so I'm trying to get the most out of the hardware I have lying around. It recently hit me that Kindles make excellent dashboards because of their low power consumption and beautiful E-Ink displays. So I've been using mine as a Spotify remote control and dashboard.

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My first Kindle dashboard was a productivity timer

I had half a laptop lying around (halftop with no screen), which I turned into a little server and hosted a bunch of apps on it. One of those apps was Timetagger, which I use to track my work hours. It's great, but I have to switch tabs to see how long I've been working on a task. I wanted a way to have it easily visible at a glance. At first, I thought I could display the timer output from Timetagger on my phone, but it would drain too much battery to keep the screen on for hours. That's when it hit me that my Kindle is perfect for this job.

[This timer is running on Kindle based on my self-hosted instance of Timetagger.]

I used the API provided by Timetagger to get the timer info. Then I created a simple bash script running on the same server as the Timetagger container. The Bash script generates an HTML page that's refreshed every few seconds. The halftop serves that page over my local network on a specific port, which I can access on my Kindle using its built-in web browser. The page is automatically refreshed with the updated timer data every few seconds.

This simple dashboard setup was so perfect for my purposes that I started thinking of other things I could display on my Kindle. My first thought was to set up remote control for my Spotify client. That way, I wouldn't have to switch apps to look at the timer or to control music playback while working on my desk.

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I found a free app, but it only works with Spotify Premium

It turns out there is already an app for this exact job. It's a free web app called Kindlify. You open the Kindlify.co website in your Kindle browser, scan the QR code with your phone, log into your Spotify, and play something. Then come back to your Kindle, and it should show you a beautiful interface with an album cover, seekbar, track and artist names, and playback controls.

It's not going to play music through any Bluetooth devices connected to your Kindle. It's just a remote control. The music will still play through whichever client is actually running.

[Kindlify displays your Spotify dashboard but sadly requires Spotify premium.]

Credit: Kindlify.co

Unfortunately, you need a premium Spotify subscription to make this work because Spotify only shares web APIs with premium accounts. Spotify has also restricted its "Spotify Connect" feature, which lets other clients and daemons take over the playback. So I decided to do it myself.

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I used half a laptop and a lightweight script to build a Spotify dashboard

Since I couldn't get the API and I couldn't access Spotify using a headless daemon, I needed a third way to interact with the Spotify player.

Happily, Linux came to my rescue. It has an internal "D-Bus" system that lets apps talk to each other. So I could just install the regular Spotify client on the server and control it using the D-Bus interface. There's a lightweight tool called playerctl that simplifies this interaction with D-Bus. You don't have to code anything because it handles everything for you. For example, playerctl could pause Spotify playback with a command like this.

playerctl -p spotify pause

I could pass next, resume, metadata, or title as arguments too.

The halftop was already running Linux, so it didn't need any setup. Now that I had a simple CLI tool to talk to Spotify, the next step was using shell commands inside a script. This script would be a web server that does three things.

Serves the web page (where the remote control interface is displayed)

Listens for requests sent from the web page (for example, a request to play the next track)

Executes playerctl commands based on the requests received from the web page.

[A small CLI tool that can control media playback with shell commands.]

Since playerctl is abstracting all the complexity, the script is simple. I had Claude generate a basic Python script that could do all of that. Claude wrote a playerctl() function that runs relevant playerctl commands and prints their output.

Python has a built-in http.server library that can turn any folder into a simple web server that can handle HTTP requests. Claude included it in the script, which runs it as a web server. I am only ever going to access this Spotify remote over my local network, so this setup works for my purposes.

[This terminal shows two windows where the script and the Spotify client are being set up.]

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This is what it looks like in action

After I started the web server, I just needed a working Spotify client to click everything together. I installed Spotify on the same halftop and ran it. After logging in and playing a track, it was time to test my setup.

The first version was pretty basic. It was just 3 buttons for pausing, resuming, and skipping tracks. It was functional, but it didn't look that great. I wanted something that looked like an actual dashboard. So in version two, I asked Claude to create a minimalist, black and white interface with a progress bar, cover art, and track, artist, and album details.

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After tweaking it manually a little bit, this is what I have now. The page automatically refreshes every few seconds to show the current "Now Playing" screen.

The same remote works on my phone too, so now I have two ways to control my Spotify playback. However, the Kindle makes a perfect dashboard because of how little it drains the battery to keep the screen on for hours. It's also easier on the eyes.

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