Hacks Beta Testers: Kindle Visual Guide [KindlePID]

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

I'm not a Mac person but I want to make sure I understand. You want to move Palm books (pdb?) onto a Mac and use mobi2mobi on them but you aren't trying to move them to your Kindle? You just want to change the metadata?

I want to be able to use the perl scripts to change the metadata of of .prc and .mobi files that I have on my Mac. The Mac comes with Perl already installed, but the Palm libraries need to be installed for the scripts to work.

Mike

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

I want to be able to use the perl scripts to change the metadata of of .prc and .mobi files that I have on my Mac. The Mac comes with Perl already installed, but the Palm libraries need to be installed for the scripts to work.

Mike

Ahhh, gottcha! I'm going keep out of this one and let the Mac Man and anyone else who knows what they're doing take care of it.

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Do they steps on the mobiperl site not work? I do plan to do this, but was basically going to steal those directions. I have yet to run mobiperl stuff on my Mac... only done that on Windows so far.

BOb

The steps on the mobiperl site probably work if you are a programming geek, but I haven’t programmed in 20 years and it’s like reading a foreign language. Plus there’s too many alternates, I just want one set of step by step instruction to follow that match what I will see on the Mac. The instructions on the mobiperl site don’t seem to correspond with any Mac directories that I see. As soon as they started talking about CPAN, I was totally lost.

The instructions talk about having Perl in /opt/local/bin, but there is no such directory on either of my Macs (one PPC, one Intel). I have toggled the ”Show hidden files and directories” switch. Perl commands do run, so Perl is on there somewhere.

“which perl” gives me: /usr/bin/perl

[daffy4u]

Okay, the KindleFIX for Vista and XP page has been changed.

I removed the requirement from Step 2, to have copies of kindlefix.py and prc.py in the same folder as the book being converted. I was having an issue on my end that required the files to be there before I could make the conversion (I had to re-install python 2.6 to fix it).

Mobi2Mobi will be next.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Okay, the KindleFIX for Vista and XP page has been changed.

Nice work. How did you get the screen shots on the Kindle screen?

BOb

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Nice work. How did you get the screen shots on the Kindle screen?

BOb

Alt+Shift+G on the Kindle keyboard. It will save the screen shot as a .gif file on the SD Card.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Alt+Shift+G on the Kindle keyboard. It will save the screen shot as a .gif file on the SD Card.

Wow...you learn something every day.

BOb

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Wow...you learn something every day.

BOb

It's one of these "Easter Eggs" Igorsk discovered.

Bonus content

The main GUI and most of the back-end code is written in Java. The framework is quite elaborate and can be extended with extra "booklets".
After spending some time investigating it with JAD, I found some undocumented shortcuts, features and easter eggs. Here's a more or less complete list.

Picture viewer

I'm not sure why Amazon didn't make it public (maybe because paging is kinda slow), but there is a basic picture viewer in Kindle.
To activate it:
1) make a folder called "pictures" in the root of Kindle drive or SD card. Kindle also checks for "dcim" made by cameras.
2) put your pictures for a single "book" into a folder inside that. The subfolder name will be used as the "book" name. Supported formats are jpg, png, gif.
3) in Home screen press Alt-Z. A new "book" should appear. Open it to view your pictures.
4) In the local menu you can toggle dithering, resize to fit and full screen mode.

Keyboard shortcuts

Various undocumented/underdocumented keyboard shortcuts. I italicized most interesting ones.

Global keys

Alt-Shift-R reboot Kindle
Alt-Shift-. restart GUI
Alt-Shift-G make screenshot
due to an implementation bug, screenshots can only be stored on SD card, not the main storage. A gif file is saved in the card root.
Shift-Sym start demo
Enabled only if allow_demo=true is passed on the Java commandline. Needs a special demo script present on the SD card.

Home

Alt-Shift-M Minesweeper
Alt-Z rescan picture directories
Alt-T show time

Reader

Alt-B toggle bookmark
Alt-T spell out time
Alt-0 enable/disable slideshow
Alt-1 start slideshow (if enabled)
Alt-2 stop slidehow
Alt-PageForward/PageBackward go to next/prev annotation or one "chunk" (1/20th of a book) forward or backward

Settings

411 show diagnostics data
511 run loopback call test
611 diagnostic data service call
c/e/s
126 Lab126 team members

Font List

J show/hide justification options

Picture viewer

Alt-Shift-0 set current picture as screensaver
F toggle fullscreen mode

Minesweeper

I,J,K,L up,left,down,right
M mark mine
R restart
Space open cell
Scroll move cursor up/down
Alt-Scroll move cursor left/right
H return to Home screen

Text input

Alt-Backspace clear all
Alt-H/Alt-J move cursor
(the following don't work in search field for some reason)
Alt-6 ?
Alt-7 ,
Alt-8 :
Alt-9 "
Alt-0 '

Browser

It seems there is a location capability (GPS?) in the CDMA module. I cannot check it as I'm not in USA but the following shortcuts are programmed inside the browser.
Alt-1 show current location in google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Alt-D dump debug info to the log and toggle highlight default item
Alt-Z toggle zone drawing and show log

Audio Player

Alt-F next
Alt-P play/stop

Search commands

These command work in the search field. You can enter only beginning of the command if that's enough for it to be unique.

Public commands (always available)

@help
@web
@wiki/@wikipedia
@store
@time

[pilotbob]

I'm surprised no one noticed there was no step 5 on the KindlePID Mac page. Fixed.

BOb

[Boston]

The three of you have helped so many here (including myself)...and this effort is a wonderful extension of all you have done!

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by Boston

The three of you have helped so many here (including myself)...and this effort is a wonderful extension of all you have done!

Thanks for the kind words! As I said, I'm learning (see DG, I put the "r" in this time) as I go. And that includes learning how to build wiki pages.

Kindle Mobi2Mobi Vista/XP is up but still a work in progress (as all the pages are).

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

(see DG, I put the "r" in this time)

I have no idea what this means... and feel I should not. But, I am curious anyway.

BOb

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

I have no idea what this means... and feel I should not. But, I am curious anyway.

BOb

See post #5 in this thread.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Thanks for the kind words! As I said, I'm learning (see DG, I put the "r" in this time) as I go. And that includes learning how to build wiki pages.

Kindle Mobi2Mobi Vista/XP is up but still a work in progress (as all the pages are).

I bow, (as much as a cat can) to your *learning* prowess.

[=X=]

Awesome daffy4u, while I don't have the Kindle this tutorial will be helpful for evaluating future upgrades

=X=