almost a technocrat

Getting bored looking at the factory shipped Kindle screensaver whenever you put it on standby? Or you might want to customize the screensaver with personal message and give the Kindle to someone as a gift with a personal touch.

Jail breaking your Amazon Kindle device will enable you to customize fonts and your screensaver. Additional to fonts and screensaver customization, you can also try out some of the hacks for Amazon Kindles . This post will guide you through the steps of jail breaking your Amazon Kindle device. Don't panic! Just follow the steps below.

Go to Home > Menu > Settings .  The firmware version is located at the bottom of the settings page. Refer to the screenshot on the right.

The Amazon Kindle Keyboard has a hidden feature where you can put the device into diagnostics mode (the tests factory operators run before delivering the Kindle device to you).

Full Justification Left Justification There is a hidden menu entry called "Justification" in the font size menu [ A A ] of Amazon Kindle Keyboard. The Justification option toggles between left and full text justification. You can use this option to set from default " full " to " left " so you can read eBooks with a ragged right margin. 

Fig 1 : Default margin setting This post will show you how you can customize the left and right margin. In your Amazon Kindle Keyboard, to adjust the left and right margins of your text, you can use the "Words per line" option from the font sizes menu (press A A key to the right of the spacebar on the keyboard). The option provides you with three types of margin sizes with friendly names. They are default, fewer and fewest. You might feel that at the smallest margin setting (default), there is still a lot of space left from the text to the side bezel. You can customize the margins even smaller till the text close to the side bezel.

DuoKan Lite is an alternative OS for Amazon Kindle Keyboard developed by DuoKan team. Currently (this posting date) it's only available for Amazon Kindle Keyboard. The DuoKan team provides this for free and for non-commercial usage. DuoKan Lite will not replace or interfere the official Kindle OS. Instead, it works as a secondary OS through dual booting. DuoKan Lite supports ePub format and handles PDF better than Amazon Kindle OS. It supports text re-flow of PDF file so that you don't have to zoom and unzoom your PDF files. This post will guide you on how to install, uninstall and upgrade DuoKan Lite on your Amazon Kindle Keyboard. Because DuoKan Lite is developed by Chinese developers from China, the default language is Chinese. For English speaking audience of this blog post, you will be guide on how to change the Chinese language to English. For more information about DuoKan Lite, you can refer to: What is DuoKan Lite? DuoKan Lite Frequently Asked Question

For those who just got their brand new Kindle Touch, you can now jailbreak it. Thanks to Yifan Lu , all you need is just an MP3 file.

By using your Amazon Kindle Keyboard experimental web browser,  http://maps.google.com/m/directions   looks great on the e-ink display of Kindle. Type in your "From" and "To" and Google will return you with the directions in text. With the light weight of your Kindle, it just feel like you are carrying a piece of the printed directions on paper.

Amazon Kindle Keyboard does not comes with the feature that automatically turn the pages while you are reading an eBook. You can easily workaround this by

This is how you can schedule your Ubuntu PC shutdown using the "shutdown" command. Very handy if you need to leave your PC alone and shutdown at a specified time.

This is how you can manually turn or switch off your display or monitor using command line in Ubuntu. You can set a keyboard shortcut to run this so that you can manually turn off your display.

A KML file is a "flat" file or text based file composed of Tags similar to XML or HTML. A KMZ file is basically a ZIP archive that contains a KML file. This was done so that your any software such as Google Earth would automatically recognize it as a file and open it. If they had left it as a .ZIP file, then it wouldn't automatically open the file.