Strikes me as a very good reason not to buy Amazon electronic devices. They have now proven they will orphan the product on a whim and leave their clients with a piece of junk.

Source: Amazon is dropping registration support for its earliest Kindle models – The Verge

Here’s a neat idea a visitor to this site, Larry Goss, submitted. Thanks Larry!

I have a nifty (at least I think it’s nifty) idea for making it easy to find desired content on the Kindle using a “taglist” file and the Kindle’s Search function.  I’d like to contribute this idea to this web site.  Here’s a sample, a few entries from my own taglist.txt file:

” Is Amercia Losing At Globalization?”
qeconomics qglobaleconomy
” Is Amercia Losing At Globalization?”
Newsweek Sep 8, 2008
————————————-
” Big Russ & Me ”
qbio qRussert qnonfiction
” Big Russ & Me ”
Tim Russert
————————————–
” King Lear ”
qPlay qShakespeare qtragedy qfiction
” King Lear ‘
William Shakespeare
————————————–
” The Island of Dr. Moreau ”
qscifi qadventure qfiction
” The Island of Dr. Moreau ”
H. G. Wells

You guys are probably smart enough to figure out how to use this as well as how to create this.  But in case you didn’t get enough sleep last night, the tags are the words that begin with the letter q.  One searches on the applicable tags and gets a Results screen with a list of only those documents that the user has associated with those tags.  One can then do another search on the document title and Kindle will bring that up for them.

Larry Goss

Here’s a hack to add your own pictures to the Kindle to be used as the screensaver images that get rotated thru.

Adding Pictures to the Kindle Screensaver

1. Connect to your Kindle via USB.
2. Create a folder named ‘pictures’
3. Within that new folder, create another folder name ‘My Pictures’
4. Copy any number of pictures you want into the new ‘My Pictures’ folder. 600×800 is the size of the screen display.
5. On the Kindle, go to the Home Screen
6. Press ALT+Z to cause the Kindle to refresh the book list
7. There should now be a ‘book’ named ‘My Pictures’ displayed. Note that it may not be on the first screen page depending on how you have your display configured/sorted.
8. Open the ‘book’ to start the picture viewer.
9. Cycle thru all of the pictures pressing F (to make them full screen), then ALT+shift+0 (the number zero) to select each one for the screensaver.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These instructions apply only to Kindles earlier than version 3. The Kindle 3 is locked down and does not permit changing the screensaver unless you jailbreak the device – see the comments thread to this post for more details.     April 5, 2011.