K5 Touch & PaperWhite ScreenSavers Hack

[GoSharks]

Originally Posted by phoneticerror

Sorry to have to ask, but I've installed everything the way I have been told to. All my screensavers are in the correct place, and have the correct dimensions/file type. I've rebooted my device twice, but I'm still getting the exact same built in screensaver that I always have had. None of mine are making an appearance on the Paperwhite screen. Anybody know why this is?

If the hack was installed correctly, you should at least be seeing NiLuJe's deletable screensaver...if not, then you did something wrong and need to give a step by step description of what you are doing. Also, are you removing the usb cable from your computer and rebooting via menu>settings>restart?

[phoneticerror]

Yeah, I saw that on the directory of my kindle, and my screensavers are on there in the same folder, and I've restarted without the USB using the method mentioned several times, but I'm still getting the same big standard screensaver I've always had.

[GoSharks]

@phoneticerror
First...is your PW a Special Offers? If yes, the screensaver hack won't work. If no, then you need to give specific details about what you did and in what order. (starting with firmware, etc....)

[doodie]

n/m figured it out

[SampleAndy]

Hey guys,
I've wasted my time, now I figure it's only fair to waste some of yours.

I followed all the instructions, and be damned if it didn't show the cover of the book I was currently reading (if I waited a couple seconds between book changes). Great! But then it hit me... When I get the magnetic closure/smart cover working for my Paperwhite, I'll almost never see a screen saver again, unless I put a clear window in the cover. The screensaver selection routine makes the shutdown/wakeup process marginally slower, and the python install wastes 40M of my hard earned space. Sooo... I see that there's an uninstall update for linkss, but there's none for python. Is there an easy or semi-easy way to get this thing back to the way it was before I "fixed" it?

(kinda reminds me of back when we were taking symbolic logic, and we figured out that the contrapositive of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was, "If you fixed it, it's broke." ... yeah, I know... you had to be there)

Thanks for reading,
Andy

[knc1]

just remove that directory (the python directory)

[GoSharks]

Originally Posted by SampleAndy

Hey guys,
I've wasted my time, now I figure it's only fair to waste some of yours.

I followed all the instructions, and be damned if it didn't show the cover of the book I was currently reading (if I waited a couple seconds between book changes). Great! But then it hit me... When I get the magnetic closure/smart cover working for my Paperwhite, I'll almost never see a screen saver again, unless I put a clear window in the cover. The screensaver selection routine makes the shutdown/wakeup process marginally slower, and the python install wastes 40M of my hard earned space. Sooo... I see that there's an uninstall update for linkss, but there's none for python. Is there an easy or semi-easy way to get this thing back to the way it was before I "fixed" it?

(kinda reminds me of back when we were taking symbolic logic, and we figured out that the contrapositive of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was, "If you fixed it, it's broke." ... yeah, I know... you had to be there)

Thanks for reading,
Andy

Yep...with the active cover you will not see the screensaver but for a second or two when you open the cover. I happen to like seeing it even for a short time but that may not be worth the memory usage to you. One other thing that you might consider - I also like it when I take my PW out of the house or travel with it. I turn on the security feature that requires a pin to be entered to wake it up and use the 'pinfo' addition to the screensaver (I only put my name and cell #). That way, if I lose it, there is a way for the finder to contact me and yet not be able to use it....just a FYI.

[NiLuJe]

@pgfiore: No, if you want a signle fixed screensaver, then put a single file in there .

@NullNix: It bothered me too, until I started working on the K3 port, and realized the framework itself was already doing a crazy amount of superfluous IO .

FWIW, the hack is only doing extra IO on cache miss or true book switch, it won't do anything on a true cache hit [it's not replacing the exact same file with itself if you open the same book twice]).

That said, I can probably come up with something slightly less uglier. Can't use sym/hardlinks straight away because the userstore is a vfat part, so, no dice, but we *can* indeed use something else (the settings part), without even having to resort to an extra tmpfs mount.

[peepo]

if it's not off-topic,

how to set opacity of png using say GIMP?

the home page seems to bleed through my screensaver,
which is not satisfactory...

not found an easy way to force opacity to stop this.

[NiLuJe]

@peepo: Layer > Transparency > Remove Alpha Channel

[peepo]

tx, but unfortunately I started with that...

the homepage still shows through.

[NiLuJe]

@peepo: You might just be seeing an effect of the usual 'ghosting' of the eInk screen tech.

[peepo]

arghh! that seems likely enough, but why not book pages then, or the official screensavers?

tx so far...

[NiLuJe]

@peepo: Easy enough to check. Snap a screenshot (via screenshot? snapshot? or call scrot yourself) of the Kindle over SSH while it's asleep: if it's fully opaque, it's ghosting, if it's not, then you still have an alpha channel in your pic .

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@NullNix: It bothered me too, until I started working on the K3 port, and realized the framework itself was already doing a crazy amount of superfluous IO .

Oh wonderful, now I'm going to be feeling guilty whenever I turn the page or suspend the thing however, note that most of the superfluous output that the framework does seems to be logfile I/O, which is mostly to the same few files -- so it probably switches eraseblocks relatively rarely (and *that* is the expensive operation). Writing out whole new files is likely to be more expensive. Or so it seems to me.

(I suspect I am indeed worrying about almost nothing, modern flash write life and expected Kindle lifespan being what they are. But still.)

FWIW, the hack is only doing extra IO on cache miss or true book switch, it won't do anything on a true cache hit [it's not replacing the exact same file with itself if you open the same book twice]).

What can I say, I switch books a lot!

That said, I can probably come up with something slightly less uglier. Can't use sym/hardlinks straight away because the userstore is a vfat part, so, no dice, but we *can* indeed use something else (the settings part), without even having to resort to an extra tmpfs mount.

The other advantage of using a tmpfs mount is that it eliminates a single Flash write to update the symlink (or whatever). For something as transient as the cover of the current book, which isn't going to outlast a reboot anyway, updating permanent storage just seems *wrong*. I'd probably use a tmpfs for this sort of thing on any Linux box, not just a power-limited one. It's not like mount points are an especially limited resource: Al Viro did the work years and years ago to make sure that you could set up hundreds of thousands of them at once with no problem (the only danger is running out of nonswappable memory, and you'd need many tens of thousands to get close to that). And the Kindle is more powerful than the machine he was developing on then.