A Strange Animated screensaver like thing appeared on kindle

[knc1]

1) Do not ssh in over Wifi, ssh in over USB - there is no time out.
You will see a sleep screen after a period of inactivity, but the Kindle never goes to sleep while on external power because there is a 'lock' set in the kernel to prevent it.

2) Do not use ;ds (or the script that it calls) - that does not mean: "Disable Screensaver", although you will find that claim made both here and in the firmware comments.

3) Those are OpenGL 'screensavers' running on X11, they came as part of the Debian distribution you installed.
For undisturbed tinkering, disable them.

4) No they did not ship with the Amazon firmware, you installed them.

5) Install the exact same release of Debian (for the appropriate cpu) on your desktop - that will give you a way to discover/resolve questions and behaviors like this example that may show up.

[nasser]

Tch.. and I was thinking we had a paranormal phenomenon on the kindle, which knc1 (= Mulder?) would investigate!

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by knc1

Since the movement that prevents the non-metastable device from producing a latent (burned in) image is computed - -
You have just tossed away the battery run time of the Kindle, since to support the movement, the cpu (and other hardware) has to run.

Yabbut not quite. The major power drain in this case won't be the CPU -- it'll be the e-ink screen update. The e-ink update is by far the most power-hungry thing the Kindle ever has to do: it even exceeds the power requirements of flash writes and full-speed CPU usage. We're not talking a few transistors flipping here: we're talking electric fields powerful enough to drag things around that are big enough to see!

You can actually detect this in a quiet enough room on some devices (it's louder on ones with less battery in the way of, uh, whatever is causing the noise, probably something vibrating under the field variation as the current level changes, so it's probably easiest to discern on an Oasis, though I did this on my PW1 to avoid jailbreaking my Oasis): hack up something to flip the screen just from black to white, with almost no CPU activity needed, and it'll make a quite discernible noise while that's going on. (It makes the noise when you flip pages normally, too, but that does involve noticeable CPU usage, so you can't rule either possibility out with an unhacked Kindle.)

I am not geekmaster so I cannot tell what the actual current draws are when this is going on, but the datasheets are fairly clear. e-ink displays are power-hungry beasts when they change state.

[knc1]

Still, the Kindle is not sleeping and only sleeping gives the long time between recharges.
Your did read the "(and other hardware)" in the snippet you quoted, didn't you?

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by knc1

Still, the Kindle is not sleeping and only sleeping gives the long time between recharges.
Your did read the "(and other hardware)" in the snippet you quoted, didn't you?

Er. I missed that. I guess my eye skipped over the brackets. :/