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Shared I Like What Bob Likes.
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Shared high tide.
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Shared New Years at Mars.
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Shared Oh my glob. It’s almost 2015..
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Shared 4 photos.
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Shared 3 photos.
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I finally took some time to personalize the screensavers on my Kindle 3, thinking it would be a quick hour or less. And indeed, the process of jailbreaking a Kindle and hacking it to load your own screensavers is drop dead simple. That part really didn’t take any time at all.
The hard part is more deciding what pictures you want to see as a screensaver every day, a task that ended up taking me all afternoon. I first got caught up thumbing through the free downloads on the Kindle Wallpapers Tumblr, which is fascinating on its own.
Then I decided to add a few of my own pictures, so I found a half dozen of my favorites, converted them to black and white, and shrunk them down to 600 x 800.
When I posted on Facebook about what I was doing, someone lamented that she’d recently left her Kindle on a plane, which made me flash back to something I read several years ago. I can’t find a reference to it right now (little help?), but I remember reading about a guy who took pictures of himself and text on signs about how to return the camera if someone found it. He then kept those picture at the beginning of his camera’s memory card in case someone ever found the camera and looked through the photos.
I’ve always thought that was brilliant, so I figured I’d try it with my Kindle. I took a picture, added some text, and then loaded it as a screensaver.
Granted, it’s unlikely that this particular image will be displaying if I lose my Kindle, but my hope is that whoever finds it will be interested enough in the screensaver that is showing to scroll through them. I know it’s a long shot, but it was also something fun to do.
Which then got me thinking about libraries. Are there any libraries customizing the screensavers on their Kindles? As a librarian, I came across some free, library-related screensavers, so I put a few of them on my own device. If you, too, want some library-themed screensavers, here are the ones I’ve found so far:
Do you know of other images we could use to build a list for libraries and librarians?
Share: 3 Comments on Library-related Kindle Screensavers, last added: 5/17/2011
I’ve been trying to get back to blogging for the past couple of years, but so far out of all of the things I do in the 24 hours of a day, it’s the activity that’s fallen by the wayside the most. I still hope to blog more this year, but the reason I implemented the lifestreaming back in 2009 was to provide an aggregated glimpse into my overall online activity in the meantime.
Unfortunately, the wp-lifestream plugin I was using died for no apparent reason last October. I spent a couple of months trying to get it working again but to no avail. I haven’t been able to find a good replacement that lets me import my activity into my site (as opposed to just displaying something that only lives elsewhere) and publishes it as a daily blog post.
The best I’ve been able to do is hack the heck out of the complexlife plugin to display my lifestream on my home page. It’s not as comprehensive as the sites available in wp-lifestream, but it’ll do for now. Right now, it’s displaying my public Flickr pictures, my tweets, tweets I’ve favorited, my public Diigo bookmarks, things I’ve liked on FriendFeed, shared items from Google Reader, and posts I’ve made on ALA Connect.
If you want to track even more of what I’m sharing online, you’re better off looking at my FriendFeed stream until I figure out how to add more sites here in complexlife. If you want to subscribe to my online activity to get daily updates pushed to you, I’d suggest using my FriendFeed RSS feed.
So now if you visit the TSL home page, you should see a link to the latest blog post at the top, followed by 30 days of lifestream activity. If/when I get back to blogging, I’ll probably play around with the home page again to better display the blog posts, but for now subscribing to the main RSS feed will again show just the posts; in other words, not much.
You can also go directly to the blog page to view just the posts. Overall, my goal is to post shorter, tumblr-like posts going forward to try to get back in the swing of things, but we’ll see how I do.
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When we got home yesterday, we were surprised to find a weird “activate your device” message when we tried to go online. I turned on the TV, and there were no cable channels. Something was afoot.
So I called the number on the “activate” screen and had an automated message tell me that my account was delinquent, I owed hundreds of dollars, and my service had been discounted. Imagine my shock to learn this when I’d had NO PREVIOUS NOTICE. Even worse, I couldn’t get through to a customer service representative without paying my bill first (sleazy — what if it had been your mistake?).
Long story short, when my card number was stolen back in October, the bank canceled it and issued a new one. I forgot that the old one was registered for your automatic payment program, so your were unable to process payment in November and December. Fair enough, but maybe you could have mentioned that to me at some point before taking the extreme step of disconnecting my service.
Clearly you had my email address. While I received weekly “Xfinity What to Watch” spamails that I was too lazy to unsubscribe from, I never once received a “hey, there’s a problem with your payment” notice. And when I called to try to talk to a human being about the problem, the automated voice verified the last four digits of my phone number, so obviously you know how to reach me by phone. In fact, after a second call when I could finally reach a real person, I received an automated telephone survey, so calling me is proven to work. Not once, though, did I receive a “hey, we’re going to disconnect your service” call during the last two months.
And while we’re at it, we’re on the verge of 2011 and you’re my cable and internet provider. Don’t you have the technology to pop up a message on a screen saying, “hope you’re enjoying this, we’d like you to keep enjoying this, but can we talk about the problem with your card number? please call.” On the TV or on my computer screen — your choice. Or go old school because you know what else still works? Postal mail, a channel you and I will be returning to using.
Honestly — in 2010, you couldn’t find *some* way to contact me to let me know there was a problem? On top of that, I now have to go anti-green and re-activate paper bills if I want to be sure I see problem notices, because the only billing-related emails I received from you during the last two months looked exactly like the one below. Which looks exactly like every other “your statement is ready for viewing” message I get each month.
That message is the only billing-related one I received from you for the entire month of December. If you saw that message every month from your electric company, would you think there was a problem? Would you expect a little something more from them that they’re turning off your service? I expected more from you.
Yes, I could have logged in during those two months and seen a notice on the screen, but I also think you could have added a notice to that email or sent a separate notice to make sure I knew there was a problem. Good customer service this ain’t.
And now you want to charge reconnection fees because you disconnected my service without any heads up that there was a problem. Seriously?
Now that I’ve calmed down, I’m submitting the following requests so that others don’t have to spend a frustrating evening the way I did.
A word of warning about jail-breaking the Kindle to do this. It will void the warranty with Amazon and will hinder the ability to install any software updates or fixes that Amazon releases. From anecdotes I heard about the latest Kindle update, it installed on jail-broken Kindles, but then made it impossible to undo the jail-breaking or to add additional screensavers to the Kindle. So jail-break your Kindle with caution!
Wow — thanks, Frank. I hadn’t seen that information in my research, so that’s good to know. I knew it would probably void the warranty, but I wasn’t sure if Amazon would support library Kindles to begin with. But this is a good warning — I can’t in good conscience recommend this to libraries, so individuals should only consider this at their own risk.
Jenny
I thought I should also mention that the article that explains how to jailbreak your Kindle also includes a detailed description of how to uninstall the hack. So when the next update comes out, I’ll probably uninstall the hack, do the update, and then re-install it when the new version is ready.