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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to jailbreak your Kindle, or render images.

You can just point its web browser at any webpage you design, and disable the Kindle's "screensaver" (its ads or sleep screen) with debug commands [1, 2].

You'll be stuck with a browser bar along some edge of the Kindle (you can rotate the device orientation to put it at the bottom or right edge), but it's a small price to pay for being able to write your weather/transit/news screen in easy HTML/CSS/JS and whatever backend language you want, and run it on a cheap DigitalOcean $4 instance or whatever.

[1] https://blog.notfaqs.com/2018/06/kindle-e-reader-disable-scr...

[2] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198334

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It would be even cooler if Amazon also encouraged and built a "Kiosk mode" browser view of the kindle for this sort of display hacking.

(author here) I've also been thinking about this - I've since built out a Rust library (https://github.com/lily-mara/kindling) for scaffolding the server piece of this and I've been considering creating a Kindle client app that integrates with it. This is possible but would require using the Kindle Java SDK, which does not fill me with excitement.

That would be fantastic, although even just the way you've done this here is great. I've got a few old Kindles that would be good to convert to displays, and if I could just install a server and a client, it would take a lot of the work out of it.

No matter what, jailbreaking would be the most difficult step in the process, but the library I linked above takes a lot of the work out of it. It's entirely undocumented atm (I am surely the only one using it), but it comes with an install script you can run on the Kindle to do the setup once you have the jailbreak done.

They really ought to, it's a fantastic reuse mechanism.

Like I totally understand why they wouldn't for new Kindles, since I assume part of their ebook sales help subsidize the hardware, but if they enabled it once a device hit 5 years old or something, I don't see what they'd have to lose.

> I don't see what they'd have to lose.

If there is a cost or liability, then most businesses will avoid doing it.

There usually has to be a clear financial benefit: businesses should make profits - they are not social services or hobbies.

Fortunately businesses contain people and people often do altruistic things for non-financial reasons.

I did this with an inkBOOK, which just runs Android. Loaded on a Chrome APK and pointed it at a webpage I made. `document.documentElement.requestFullscreen()` enters true fullscreen, no status bars. And my local transit service's API is accessible directly from web pages, no backend needed.

I looked into this with my 4th generation Kindle; it seems like it won't be able to use any HTTPS website due to invalid certificate. However, setting it up to talk to a server on my local network would be the way to go. Thanks for the idea!

I am almost certain disable screensaver was removed for later Kindles.

I didn't seem to be last I checked -- the older Kindles require the sequence:

  ;debugOn
  ~disableScreensaver
  ;debugOff

while newer ones only require:

~ds

I know that for some ad-supported Kindles it doesn't work unless you pay to remove the ads (for obvious reasons), but if you pay then it will.

But last I checked was a couple of years ago. I'd be very curious if anyone can report it not working. (Also note the command doesn't survive reboot, you have to re-disable after rebooting.)

Unfortunately, ~ds was disabled by a firmware update a few years ago.

Ugh, that sucks. Any idea how to determine which ones are affected? I.e. what firmware version, or which models it started affecting?

Older models still support ~disableScreensaver -- at some point Amazon just stopped issuing firmware updates for them, I have to assume.

How ironic that not having firmware updates is good... I found the following April 2022 Reddit thread [0] that I remember visiting back in the day.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/u8u7up/disable_auto...

> How ironic that not having firmware updates is good

That's often the case, things going from good to worse. Cf. the removal of Manifest 2 on Chrome for instance.

I don’t follow the space closely, but if you find a Kindle Keyboard (third generation of the product) or earlier, they stopped getting updates ages ago and in fact can no longer use the store (though USB sideloading still works fine). They are all jailbreakable.

As a kiosk-like display, though, they do have that keyboard taking up space.

I only use my Kindle to read outside (at the beach or pool); in the house, my iPad is faster and has a bigger screen. But in the sun, it’s useless. eInk is far superior for that. For the week or two a year that I need one, my 15-ish-year-old Kindle is fine. I travel with a laptop and tons of cables anyway; sideloading just means a few minutes of work after dinner to make sure there’s enough on there to read tomorrow and isn’t much slower than using the internal interface to get books was.

I do miss the free 3G. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/548/

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