Kindle Tips

The smart bloggers over at Blog Kindle have made up a download&edit process to add your own screensavers to your shiny new Kindle 2:

Before you continue with the instructions below, please understand that you are doing it at your own risk and this can potentially void your warranty. On the bright side, the update seems small, straightforward and reversable and several people (myself included – see pictures below) have successfully applied it to their devices.

To enable custom screensavers:

1. Download kindle_screensaver_hack-0.3.zip. This seems to the latest version now and I’ll try to keep this post updated with more versions as they become available.
2. Unpack it.
3. Connect your Kindle to your PC via USB. Go to the Kindle drive (usually K:\)
4. If you don’t see system folder, you need to configure Windows to show hidden files and folders. Otherwise go the next step.
5. Go to the \system folder and create sceen_saver subfolder in it.
6. Copy all of the images you want your screensaver to randomly cycle tough. Both PNG and JPEG formats are OK. While Kindle will resize images it’s best to resize them to 600×800 beforehand. Definitely don’t try putting 10 megapixel photos from your camera there as screensaver would then take long time to load and image will not display right. Good freeware tool to edit images is Paint.NET
7. Copy Update_kindle2_user_screen_savers.bin that you’ve unpacked in step 2 to the root directory of your Kindle 2.
8. Unplug the USB cable.
9. Press “Menu”, select “Settings”, press “Menu”, select “Update Your Kindle”.
10. It normally should take under a minute to update and reboot your Kindle. And you’re done!

If you did everything right you should see the following in at the bottom of your settings screen.

via blog kindle