What Hacks Do You Have Installed?

[Tanga]

Hi,

I think I'm getting close to having my Kindle set up the way I want. But I'm always looking for new inspiration. I thought it was set up right and then I discovered Lauchpad - and the Mediaplayer, and Dictaphone, and...

My Setup

0.6N Jailbreak
SS and Font hack - I haven't really utilised the font hack yet, but I've installed some fantasy screensavers which I then stamped. The first stand alone program I'm running is KIF. An awesome interactive fiction machine.

For a while I was happy with just the above. Then I saw the MPlayer hack and Launchpad. I've installed all the ini scripts on the launchpad page (the 'rotate screen' add-on is the most useful. Although the dictaphone add-on is a close second. I also might have *ahem* fibbed about my location to get Notepad (not a hack but useful).

I can't talk up the readability mod enough for those who read stories online. It opens all chapters up on the one, well formatted, page.

On my computer I have Calibre for organising my (non-amazon) ebooks and putting them on the Kindle. I use Mangle for converting comics for the Kindle (for Linux users you are much better off using the windows mangle under wine).

I am using a Kindle 3 wifi. I have it tethered to my android phone because internet seems to be faster (it's certainly not slower), and android can do ad-hoc networks like the one at Uni.

So, what hacks do you guys use / recommend?

EDIT: Tonight I added the FreeDownload hack too. I can now download books (including epubs, txt docs, etc), music files (including ogg) and KIF game files to their respective directories and use them straight away. Sweeeeeeeet!

[kindite]

thanks for your cool list of hacks! I'll have to check them out

[kindite]

How big are the dictaphone files? any information you can provide on size/time? Definitely cool!!

[mobad]

Originally Posted by Tanga

Hi,

I think I'm getting close to having my Kindle set up the way I want. But I'm always looking for new inspiration. I thought it was set up right and then I discovered Lauchpad - and the Mediaplayer, and Dictaphone, and...

My Setup

0.6N Jailbreak
SS and Font hack - I haven't really utilised the font hack yet, but I've installed some fantasy screensavers which I then stamped. The first stand alone program I'm running is KIF. An awesome interactive fiction machine.

For a while I was happy with just the above. Then I saw the MPlayer hack and Launchpad. I've installed all the ini scripts on the launchpad page (the 'rotate screen' add-on is the most useful. Although the dictaphone add-on is a close second. I also might have *ahem* fibbed about my location to get Notepad (not a hack but useful).

I can't talk up the readability mod enough for those who read stories online. It opens all chapters up on the one, well formatted, page.

On my computer I have Calibre for organising my (non-amazon) ebooks and putting them on the Kindle. I use Mangle for converting comics for the Kindle (for Linux users you are much better off using the windows mangle under wine).

I am using a Kindle 3 wifi. I have it tethered to my android phone because internet seems to be faster (it's certainly not slower), and android can do ad-hoc networks like the one at Uni.

So, what hacks do you guys use / recommend?

Rather than using Mangle try out Canti.

http://bitcake.com/?page=project_canti

It has tons of great features, including the shrinking of whitespace in manga rows and columns (which makes most manga pages almost full screen on the Kindle 3), creation of .cbz files (which are really nice on the Kindle 3),
colour quantization (which means it only uses colours that your device can display, which saves space and makes things look better), auto splitting of non continuous landscape pages, and much more.

It is also multi platform and supports a variety of devices.

One caveat is the the GUI sucks at the moment and doesn't support the newer features, but the developer says he is working on it.
The CLI version works well though.

[Tanga]

Glad it's helpful. I was going to do some kind of journal post on 'easy kindle hacking' but my post pretty much does that =/.

Just had a look - a 1m19sec file (my longest) is 624kb (files are saved as .wav files. So you would need to convert your uni lectures to ogg or mp3 on your computer if you wanted to keep a bunch of them in your kindle, for example.

By my (rough as guts) calculations 1hr = about 30 mb.

EDIT: Thanks Mobad - I want to try Canti, but it fails under wine in Ubuntu. Sorry, I missed your post before. I might try again at some point though because I would love to be able to save larger American style comics with 800 width and read them sideways.

[mobad]

Canti has full Win/OSX/Linux compatibility.
You should be able to run the GUI just by double clicking it or the CLI version with "java -jar Canti.jar"

Oh also, as we are talking about Kindle hacks, I like usbnetwork as you can make it enable SSH over WiFi so I can scp files over to the Kindle wirelessly and screw around with the Kindle. Although only install usbnetwork if you really know what you are doing as you can brick the Kindle easily.

[Tanga]

Hmm - it's not working real well in Ubuntu either though - ie not doing what it should - so I'll keep using Mangle for the forseeable future.

Yeah, usbnetwork looks interesting, but since I stuff up in Terminal all the time I think it's safer if I leave it alone. Besides, with the download hack it makes something like that isn't as necessary as I can download files directly.

I'm about to head out to check out 'dropbox' and to see what it offers for the refined kindle user =).

Anyone else with suggestions / discussion on what they're using? (you don't need to include links, I just thought I would to help other newbies out a bit).

[intunachintu]

How did you manged to run Wi-fi from an ad-hoc network to Kindle ?

[Tanga]

I didn't. I used my Android phone to join to the ad-hoc network. I then joined to my phone (set up as a wifi-hotspot) with the Kindle. =)

[intunachintu]

@Tanga I mean Kindle doesn't even connects to a wi-fi made by Android phone. Isn't the network made by Android a ad-hoc ?

[Mario1up]

I have the screensaver hack, FreeDownload hack, physkeyb hack for symbol shortcuts, Mplayer and launchpad, and I have my margins at 20px and justification changes enabled.

I'm worried that some of the "active" hacks, like the physkeyb hack which constantly scans the keyboard, will have an effect on battery life. After I got this hack, my fully-charged battery lost a notch overnight, where it didn't before. Has this happened to anybody else?

[Mario1up]

Ack, sorry, my Kindle double-posted. As a side note, I was going to install a terminal, but it required usbNetworking to be installed. That's probably the only thing I will never install, due to the high Kindle brickage ratio.

[Tanga]

No Intuna, not at all. I'm running 2.2 on a HTC Legend, and Kindle sees my phone as just another wireless network (I have it set up with both a password, and so that anything trying to use the network needs to be accepted by the phone first, just to be safe).

Mario - I agree about the usbnetwork hack. I would love to get a terminal up and running, but the reward:risk ratio is too low. Thanks for mentioning the physkeyb hack. That sounds interesting. I have been thinking that a shortcut for commas and an @ symbol, etc would be a good thing. Cheers!