Hacking the Kindle to get it to do more than it was intended is certainly not a new thing, but lately it seems to be much more possible. The Director of the Kindle at Amazon is even publicly open to people hacking and reverse engineering the Kindle to extend its functionality. Here is a round up of the current hacks available for the Kindle 2:
- Unicode Fonts Hack – Change the font to another one of your liking, or to another language or script altogether! Blog Kindle came up with this hack and has kindly provided a solution. It is completely reversable.
- Kindle 2 Screensaver Hack – The Kindle and Kindle 2 come with some very nice imagery used as a screensaver that is displayed when the Kindle goes to sleep. The screensaver isn’t to protect the screen because there is no harm to the pixels to have content displayed at all times. The main purpose is to show off some art when you’re not using the Kindle (which of course doesn’t use any extra battery since it’s eInk). However, this hack lets you customize which images show up. Blog Kindle has also written about this hack.
- Savoury – Automatically convert PDFs and ePub documents to Kindle/Mobi format. It will not convert DRMed files! Jesse Vincent created this hack (along with hacks for lots of other devices as he exposes himself to them thanks to wicked curiosity). He can be found on Twitter as @obra.
Network Tethering to your Kindle 2– This easter egg was disabled by Amazon in Kindle firmware 2.0.3.
