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Comment by foobarqux | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that Kindles aren't hack-friendly, there are lots of old Kindles lying around that would be great as an always-on display.

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Some Kindles can easily be jailbroken [1]. I have two jailbroken Kindle 4 devices and they're still great. Both for reading (though you have to sideload books) and as e-ink dashboards [2]. A Kindle 4 can run for ~ 28 days on a single charge, refreshing the screen every hour.

[1] https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle4NTHacking#Jailbreak

[2] https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash

It is doable though. A bunch of years ago I followed some instructions and set up a dual-boot on one using a Chinese ebook platform firmware. This way if you wanted to read epubs or PDFs you would boot to the other OS. Worked pretty well! Had access to all of the hardware including wifi.

So it would be the same basic principle here as what you envision.. boot into that other system, but have it instead launch some other app.

Though I haven't actually tried this, it probably wouldn't be too hard to use the built-in Kindle web browser to display a constantly updating web page and/or full-screen image from a remote web server.

Amazon recently disabled the ability to keep the screen always on so it doesn't really work. It's kind of finicky as well: I would have the network selector pop-up and stay there if there was a temporary disconnection in the WiFi (say if someone used the microwave).

> Amazon recently disabled the ability to keep the screen always on so it doesn't really work.

Too bad. There are probably other use cases for "keep the screen on continuously".

> It's kind of finicky as well: I would have the network selector pop-up and stay there if there was a temporary disconnection in the WiFi (say if someone used the microwave).

Now this I've never seen. The WiFi is pretty solid here, though... there are 5 WAPs in different parts of the house (primarily so I can get signal out to the edge of the yard -- the house is only medium-sized)..

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