The Node

Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Canonical has met with some fresh controversy recently with the release of Ubuntu 12.10, mostly for the inclusion of the Amazon shopping lens in Unity. While I find it weird and creepy to have to put up with this kind of behaviour in Linux, it is very easy to disable and remove. So stop screaming on about it on Twitter :-D

Run this: -


sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping


If you want to remove the Music Store search too, just run this: -


sudo apt-get remove unity-scope-musicstores


Easy right? All gone. Are you happy now?! ;-) Anyway, you should all still be running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS because it’s the version Steam will be on. You know, with their creepy monitoring instead. But at least there will be zombies.

While the screensavers on Amazon’s Kindle are quite tastefully done, I would like to keep a page open, especially if it’s a textbook. Since Amazon don’t allow you to set the time limit anywhere that I can see in Settings to set how long the Kindle must wait to kick in, I was forced to take rather more drastic measures as I was sick of flicking the power switch each time I wanted to refer back to my book. Here is how you can disable the Kindle screensavers completely. It’s not as ideal as having a settable timer for the screenwavers, but it appears to do the job.

First, press Home so that you are on the home screen of your Kindle and not on any page in a book. Next press Enter and type: -


;debugOn (press enter)
~disableScreensaver (press enter)
;debugOff (press enter)


It’s a bit hack-y and I have no idea if this works on any other version of the Kindle apart from Kindle 3, but it does work :-) Why Amazon felt the need to include screensavers at all on an e-ink display that takes up no power simply to display yet take up power to bring up the screensaver image itself, I have no idea. Nor why they couldn’t throw in an option in settings to change the wait time or disable it in a user-friendly manner.

Perhaps these little niggles will be fixed in the next version of the Kindle, which I’m betting (based on the Amazon Android App Store) will be Android-based (yet still Linux!) and will probably include a touchscreen. I wonder how that will affect the e-ink display?

The 3.1 Kindle firmware update is now available. Key features of this update include: -

1. Public Notes: You now have the ability to share your book notes and highlights available for others to see.
2. Real Page Numbers: Finally. I don’t know what that location number rubbish means usually, but this is a much-needed touch.
3. Before You Go Feature: When you reach the end of the book, you can immediately rate the book, share a message about the book with your social network, get personalized recommendations for what to read next, and see more books by the same author.

So, a minor update and still no word on improving the PDF support (although I’m thankful to have it at all). See the above link for update instructions and links to the update itself.

Update 05-03-2011: Yes, the Kindle does run Linux as it’s operating system :-) Linux-2.6.10 to be exact. I only found out after catching up on my Linux Outlaws podcasts. Sorry!