Kindle Kevin » Hacks

Kindle 2 Hack Roundup

kevin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:50:15 +0000

Hacking the Kindle to get it to do more than it was intended is certainly not a new thing, but lately it seems to be much more possible. The Director of the Kindle at Amazon is even publicly open to people hacking and reverse engineering the Kindle to extend its functionality. Here is a round up of the current hacks available for the Kindle 2:

Unicode Fonts Hack – Change the font to another one of your liking, or to another language or script altogether! Blog Kindle came up with this hack and has kindly provided a solution. It is completely reversable.

Kindle 2 Screensaver Hack – The Kindle and Kindle 2 come with some very nice imagery used as a screensaver that is displayed when the Kindle goes to sleep. The screensaver isn’t to protect the screen because there is no harm to the pixels to have content displayed at all times. The main purpose is to show off some art when you’re not using the Kindle (which of course doesn’t use any extra battery since it’s eInk). However, this hack lets you customize which images show up. Blog Kindle has also written about this hack.
Savoury – Automatically convert PDFs and ePub documents to Kindle/Mobi format. It will not convert DRMed files! Jesse Vincent created this hack (along with hacks for lots of other devices as he exposes himself to them thanks to wicked curiosity). He can be found on Twitter as @obra.
~~Network Tethering to your Kindle 2~~ – This easter egg was disabled by Amazon in Kindle firmware 2.0.3.

Kindle OS 2.0.3 (327610024) Update Pushed Out

kevin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Reported by blog kindle last week, Amazon released a small update to the Kindle operating system as version 2.0.3, which by now your Kindles should have automatically upgraded to. blog kindle reports that the update only appears to have minor bug fixes but nothing visually has appeared to have changed. They also note that if you have hacked your kindle, you will have to uninstall your hacks before the update will apply.

Excellent List of Kindle 2 Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

kevin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:25:12 +0000

iReaderReview has put up an excellent collection of tips, tricks, and hacks for the Kindle 2. Rather than attempt to build my own list, go check out their posting.

Excellent work guys!

Kindle 2 is hackable!

kevin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:48:16 +0000

Two brilliant guys have hacked the Kindle and Kindle 2.

The Kindle was first hacked a long, long time ago (December 2007) by Igor. He managed to use the Linux sources that Amazon is required to publish in order to figure out how things are setup in the firmware. Then he built a faux JTAG interface and was able to communicate to the device over a serial port. Lastly, he was able to login to the Kindle, revealing more about processes, ports, and other implementation details. This paved the way for the Kindle 2 hacks.

Recently, Jesse Vincent wrote on his blog about his efforts to hack the Kindle 2. He has discovered and written about the following:

An ePub to Unsecured Mobi converter.
Tether the Kindle 2 over USB to use your network’s Internet connection (this might be great for foreign folks, people on business trips, or spotty Whispernet coverage).
Custom firmware updates can be applied to the Kindle 2.

This is certainly exciting stuff! This will likely prompt Amazon to try to quickly respond, but the ability to add additional functionality to the device is certainly possible. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t looking for a convergence device, so we’d prefer to see an ability to extend features in the Kindle UI, but that will prove to be difficult unless Amazon opens up an SDK.

If you had the opportunity to add new features to the Kindle 2, what would they be?