«To sit alone in the lamplight
with a book spread out before you,
and hold intimate converse
with men of unseen generations —
such is a pleasure beyond compare.»
Kenko Yoshida
Even though the iPad comes with a nice backlight and can be used in the dark, I needed a rather strong reading light. I found a cheap reading light online. Given the screen over the bulb isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing, I combined four images, had them printed on rather thin paper, and put it over the screen. The result is okay for a first version. Transparency paper would have been better, but even so, yeah, it’s a nice night-light for reading.
For creating the new screen I just took the measurements of the four sides (16 cm, so 4*16 cm), it’s height (28 cm), and added a millimeter (had to fit over the screen). The images fit together on a DIN A1 sized paper which I exported to PDF. The copyshop printed it and when cutting I left a little space on top — folded in it keeps the lantern screen in place.
Unfortunately, the crappy screen did shine through (you could see the pattern), so I removed it and used only the printout as cover. Works fine, esp. when most of the image is dark.
You can see a before and after comparison below.
Some improvements are possible, e.g., having the fold-in paper on top in black would look nicer, but for a proof of concept it’s okay.