Hey everybody! Recently I had the opportunity of poking around a friend’s Kindle Touch to see if I could disable the ads on the “Special Offers” version. And I’m glad to say it was a success, and it’s not that hard if you know your way around a Unix shell.

First, copy your screensaver (in PNG format with a size of 600x800px) to your Kindle as “screensaver.png”. Now what we need to do is to jailbreak your KT. Yifan Lu was gracious enough to provide us with a jailbreak a couple of days ago. I won’t dive too far into it, but he provides a MP3 whose description in the metadata is a simple shell script. Yes, when the Kindle plays an MP3, it executes any shell script in the metadata. Not only does it execute the script, it does it at root. Huge security risk? Most likely.

1. So to jailbreak, first visit Yifan’s KT jailbreak page and download the jailbreak AND the “Simple usbnet update”. Once you have both downloaded extract the “jailbreak.mp3″ file from the jailbreak zip to your Kindle’s “music” folder via USB. Also extract the installer .bin file to the root folder of the Kindle and rename it “update.bin”.

2. Disconnect your KT and then go to Menu->Experimental->MP3 Player and then hit the big “Press to Jailbreak!” button. You device will start the jailbreaking process.

3. Once the jailbreaking process is done, go to Menu->Settings->Menu->Update Your Kindle. Your device will apply the homebrew update that will install SSH.

4. The update also installed a package called “usbnet”. I was not sure how to use it, so I did not mention it in this post. If you know how to use it, let me know in the comments. EDIT:elbunuelo explains how to use usbnet

5. Now you’ll want to find the IP address of your Kindle. I did this by looking at the DHCP client table in my router and matching the Kindle’s MAC address (found in Menu->Settings->Menu->Device Info) to its IP.

6. Before we start the SSH server you will need to set a root password. This can be done by returning to the main menu, then tap on the search bar, type “;un password PASSWORD” where PASSWORD is what you want your password to be. NOTE: Please make this a secure password. I know the Kindle runs everything as root through metadata, but it’s still a good idea to give it a secure password.

7. Now we can start the SSH server. Hit the search bar again, but this time type “;un”. The SSH server is now started and we can get to disabling those pesky ads.

8. Open up your favorite SSH client and connect to your Kindle’s IP address with the username “root” and whatever password you set up before.

9. Type “mntroot rw” so we can get some write access. Then type the following lines:

rm -f -R /mnt/us/system/.assets/*
chmod -W /mnt/us/system/assets/
mkdir /mnt/base-us/ad_backup
cp -f /usr/share/blanket/ad_screensaver/* /mnt/base-us/backup/
rm -f /usr/share/blanket/ad_screensaver/screen*.png
cp -f /mnt/base-us/screensaver.png /usr/share/blanket/ad_screensaver/screensaver-unregistered.png
cp -f /mnt/base-us/screensaver.png /usr/share/blanket/ad_screensaver/screensvr.png
rm -f /usr/share/blanket/ad_screensaver/banner*.gif

And that’s it! Your ad-supported Kindle is now free of corporate interference! Now go and support Amazon a little for making such an awesome device by buying some books.
No, but really, this is purely for demonstration of how Amazon failed to prevent something so simple.

EDIT 12/21/2011
So I fixed the MP3 installer. Well, I completely rewrote it. It turns out that I was really being an idiot and packaged it up completely wrong, for which I apologize. Here is a link to the new version, which also has a built-in uninstaller. Also, this time to replace the screensaver, you only have to drop in one file (I dropped in a sample for you to use). If you have problems, hit me up in the comments.

I know I made a post a while ago saying I was going to update the theme on my site. Well, I’ve decided that my current one, while it may be old hat, still looks great and has everything I want it to have. Once I get my MacBook up and running again (a long and painful story of deceased hard drives and SATA controllers), I might add a couple of new features. I would really like to fix my contact page, and maybe update my bio, as I have some exciting news.

The biggest changes are the ones you probably won’t see. I’m most likely going to rebuild my theme from the ground up to solve some styling quirks and hacks that I’ve used on my site. Honestly, this thing is so hacked together, I’m surprised how good the compatibility is across browsers. I also have a lot of time on my hands in the foreseeable future, so I’ll most likely have some fun and exciting projects to announce!

Jewels for Android, available free on the Android Market, is a game you’ve likely seen before. For those not familiar with the game Bejeweled by Popcap games,  the objective is to line up three or more jewels, for which you get points. Jewels is a rip off of Bejeweled, but is it really that bad? Let’s take a look.



Jewels offers four kinds of game modes; arcade, timed, quick, and infinite. Arcade mode is basically “Keep going until you run out of jewels to match up.” Timed mode and quick mode are similar, but one aspect sets them apart. In timed mode, there is a timer that decreases, and if you match up jewels, it refills the timer up by a little bit. In quick mode you’re also given a timer, but the goal is to match up as many gems as you can before the timer runs out. Infinite mode is just that, you can play the game until the end of time. If you run out of moves, the screen simple resets itself while all your points are kept how they were. The graphics are pretty good. You’re given a screen filled with colorful gems and backgrounds, and as you progress onto new levels, the background changes. When a group of three or higher are destroyed, the next jewels slide in with a smooth animation. The sound, while it may be simple, is great. It really fits in well with the game.

However, whenever I play Jewels, I can’t shake that feeling that it’s just a rip off of Bejeweled. The graphics and sound are almost identical, but it doesn’t have that Bejeweled feel. Gameplay wise, compared to Bejeweled, Jewels is missing some special jewel powers. For example, normally if you match up five jewels, you’re given a glowing jewel that can be matched up with any jewel, and then it will remove all jewels of that type. Jewels doesn’t have this feature and it can lead to boring and repetitive gameplay.

That all being said, Jewels is one of the best Bejeweled knockoffs around. However, I still question why Popcap hasn’t released Bejeweled 2 on the Android market when it’s had a lot of success on the iOS app store. Overall, Jewels is an okay game. There’s nothing that really sets it apart from other Bejeweled clones, but it’s free. If you’re looking for a simple time waster, this might be the game for you.

Originality: 0/10

Graphics: 8/10

Sound: 9/10

Gameplay: 7/10