If that drawer full of neglected, outdated gadgets in your desk happens to include a Kindle, Jaap Meijers has come up with a clever way to put it back into service. His girlfriend, an avid reader and English literature teacher, wanted a clock for their living room, so Meijers hacked an older model Kindle to display the time using actual literary quotes.
The process, which Meijers has detailed in an Instructables post, involves hacking and “jailbreaking” a Kindle so that it can run custom software.
Finding a literary quote for every single minute of the day — all 1440 of them — sounds nightmarish, but this step turned out to be relatively easy thanks to The Guardian newspaper, which farmed out the task to its readers back in 2011, and then shared the results with the world.
With a little custom coding, Meijers was able to automate the process of turning each quote into an image that the Kindle would update every minute, and he’s been kind enough to share the resulting database on the Instructables page for anyone who wants to download it and attempt this hack themselves.
[Instructables via Hackaday]