Once jailbroken, I installed the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) software that lets me launch custom applications, and installed the KOReader document viewer and eBook reader app. This app is far more capable than the standard Kindle app, especially when it comes to handling PDF files.
I wanted to see if I could get the Kindle to display a Home Assistant dashboard and discovered the hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver add-on. It's a simple but effective tool that takes regular screenshots of your Home Assistant dashboard, converts the screenshots to a grayscale format for the Kindle, and serves the images over Wi-Fi for the Kindle to fetch.
https://www.howtogeek.com/your-kindle-isnt-just-for-booksheres-5-extra-features-you-can-try-today/
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-switched-to-home-assistants-new-dashboard-and-its-now-my-favorite-hub/
MickelBlue Ars Centurion
11y
282
agt499 said:
:And to the OP's situation, I'm pretty sure the WIIM stuff support the actual ChromeCast Audio protocol too, so they could conceivable replace failing units one at a time is needed without shifting to a whole new system.
WiiM products support Chromecast audio (called Google Cast in WiiM): https://faq.wiimhome.com/en/support...-enable-or-disable-google-cast-on-wiim-device
MickelBlue Ars Centurion
11y
282
Baenwort said:
I'm glad my ChromeCast Audios still work. I'm dreading the day I have to figure out a replacement for them to keep all my old amps around the house playing the same thing in sync.
There's quite a collection of music streamers that support multiple platforms and multiroom audio that could replace a Chromecast Audio, while also offering more functionality:
https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimmini/overview
https://www.arylic.com/products/s10-wireless-preamplifier
https://www.evehome.com/en-us/eve-play
And for anyone only needing an Apple Airplay receiver, similar to the old Apple Airport Express devices: https://www.belkin.com/p/audio-adapter-with-airplay-2/AUZ002ttBK.html I personally have one and it works wonderfully.
Whereas Thomas plants the beacon on where SCOTUS should be on an issue and where it needs to go, Alito is willing to stake out a milder position to help get it there over time. The former provides the big-picture outline, while the latter colors it in. //
What cases like Dobbs and Hamm underscore is the often-unappreciated secret sauce behind many of the Supreme Court’s crucial decisions in recent years. That is, Thomas’ and Alito’s differing but equally necessary approaches to the law working together to produce jurisprudence that accords with what the Constitution calls for.
Whether in victory or defeat, these two justices are laying the foundation of solid originalist interpretation for future courts to look towards in related matters before the bench. Their combined presence at SCOTUS is a blessing, one which Americans would be wise to appreciate while they have it.
America's telecoms regulator has unveiled new measures to speed the transition to modern high-speed networks, but critics argue the move could leave behind those in rural areas or with special needs.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it has adopted rules that let telcos retire their aging copper line infrastructure, and claims this will free up "tens of billions" annually for the rollout of high-speed, all-IP-based networks.
According to the FCC, the build-out of modern networks is hindered by "the need for carriers to divert precious resources to the maintenance of deteriorating legacy networks that deliver outdated services to an ever-decreasing number of subscribers."
Microsoft knows that these are all issues because PowerToys has fixes for all of them, except they're not fixes that make it into Windows 11.
Speaking to Ars in the wake of the controversy, Rosenbaum says he “learned a lesson” and is “going to be much more suspicious” and “reticent to trust” AI outputs going forward.
But he also can’t tear himself away from the tools. Rather amazingly, Rosenbaum is not interested in going back to the AI-free research process he used to write previous books.
“The idea of taking X years off [from AI] while it sorts itself out, and going back to, like, Microsoft Word … it’s just not in my nature,” he told Ars. “[AI] is magical. Because it connects, it knits together ideas and gives you pathways to think about things that you’re not going to come up with on your own.”
It’s also magical in another way: Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s One Ring, AI convinces many of those who use it that they can control its power properly. But can they?
In the O.J. Simpson case, one of its early lawsuit efforts, DirecTV had an investigator on-site who physically turned on Simpson’s TVs and saw the unscrambled DirecTV programming. But this kind of evidence was hugely expensive to collect and required law enforcement help. Most later DirecTV cases were based merely on device purchase lists; DirecTV had no idea what people like Treworgy were actually doing inside the walls of their homes.
In the Treworgy case, both the district court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that simple ownership did not create “a private right of action against a person in possession of access devices in violation of section 2512(1) (b).” In other words, DirecTV couldn’t sue people just for buying a card or a bootloader; they had to show actual illegal activity. //
After the judge ruled against Simpson, the only remaining issue was how much he would owe in damages.
DirecTV had requested $20,000 under each of two separate laws, for a total of $40,000. The judge noted that Simpson had not “used the devices commercially or for resale,” so she declined to award the full request. Instead, DirecTV got $15,000 in damages under the first statute and $10,000 under the second, for a total of $25,000.
The higher cost, though, came from legal fees. DirecTV submitted a motion for Simpson to pay its lawyers after his loss, and the judge agreed to a $33,678 legal bill.
The court granted final judgment on November 29, 2005, ruling that “the Juice” owed DirecTV a grand total of $58,678. It was pricey, yes—but in a way, Simpson got off cheap. When the recording industry launched its own mass lawsuit campaign, college students and single moms were eventually hit with $675,000 or even $1.92 million verdicts.
Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant. //
Streams are the primary mechanism making QUIC a better fit for request/response operations. When HTTP runs over TCP, the only way to allow one request to proceed independently of another is to open multiple parallel TCP connections.
With each connection running its own congestion control loop, the experience of congestion on one connection is not apparent to the other connections; each connection tries to figure out the appropriate amount of bandwidth to consume on its own, while competing with the others. And if HTTP runs over a single TCP connection, a single dropped packet blocks the entire progress of any requests in flight until that lost packet is retransmitted.
So QUIC allows for many streams within a single connection, and each stream can make progress independently from the others. A single packet loss only impacts the stream (or streams) whose data was in that packet. At the same time, QUIC can use that one packet loss to respond appropriately to congestion. //
Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie are the authors behind Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related Systems Approach series of books. All their content is open source and available for free on GitHub. https://github.com/SystemsApproach
US Mobile offers service through those two networks as well as Verizon’s, rebranding the options as Dark Star (AT&T), Light Speed (T-Mobile), and Warp (Verizon). //
A 2026 survey of Consumer Reports members placed US Mobile at the top of the publication’s customer-satisfaction ratings for phone carriers for the second year in a row. US Mobile received top marks for value, customer support, and overall quality of data service.
the passenger version of the Boeing 747-8, also known as the 747-8I for 'Intercontinental,' has a fuel capacity of 63,034 gallons (238,610 liters). According to Boeing, these aircraft have a range (based on a load of 410 passengers) of 8,900 miles (14,320 km). Dividing the latter by the former, we get a figure of just 0.142 miles per gallon.
The figure for the Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) version of the 747-8 is slightly more favorable. Indeed, based on an assumed capacity of just 100 VIP passengers, this private jet has a range of 10,213 miles (16,437 km), resulting in a figure of 0.162 miles per gallon. As for the 747-8F, which carries cargo, its range of 4,908 miles (7,899 km) and fuel capacity of 59,734 gallons (226,095 liters) give it a figure of 0.082 miles per gallon. But are these low figures as bad as they seem at face value? //
the 747-100, Boeing's data shows that this version of the iconic quadjet could typically fly for up to 5,320 miles (8,560 km). When this range is offset against the 747-100's maximum fuel capacity of 48,445 gallons (183,380 liters), we get a figure of 0.11 miles per gallon. As such, the 747-8's score on this front has improved by more than 29% from the oldest to the newest model. //
when we multiply the 747-8's figure of 0.142 miles per gallon by its capacity, for this purpose, of 410 guests, we get a much healthier figure of 58.22 passenger miles per gallon. Of course, a full five-seater car would only need to achieve around 11.65 miles per gallon to get a higher passenger miles per gallon figure, but, in reality, cars often only transport their driver. As such, in this regard, a fully loaded 747 can be more efficient than certain cars in the event of solo occupancy. //
Boeing 747 Production
Sub-Family
Number Produced
747-100
205
747SP
45
747-200
393
747-300
81
747-400
694
747-8
155
Turning a Kindle into a portable monitor isn't something you can do with the standard firmware. Amazon locks its software down so you can't just throw some code onto your Kindle and get it to display whatever you want.
The good news is that plenty of people far smarter than I am have figured out how to jailbreak many Kindle devices. I'd already done this to my Kindle and installed the KUAL app launcher that lets me install and run custom apps such as KOReader. Using the USBNetwork software, I was able to connect my Kindle to my computer over USB and SSH into it as if it were a network device.
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-jailbreak-a-kindle-ereader/
With my Kindle jailbroken, I was able to set up a method of getting the Kindle to display a mirror of my Mac desktop. This works by running a shell script on my Mac that takes a screenshot of my desktop every half a second. This is passed through ImageMagick, an open-source image processing tool that converts the image to grayscale and resizes it to the correct resolution for the Kindle's screen.
This image is then made available as a JPEG over my home network using Python's lightweight web server. Another shell script running on the Kindle fetches the JPEG over Wi-Fi using Wget, a common tool for downloading files. The JPEG is then displayed on the Kindle screen, and the process repeats, producing a near-live mirror of my Mac desktop running at around one frame per second.
The result was better than I was expecting.
WASHINGTON — Thousands of Americans on Sunday converged on the National Mall to mark the country’s 250th birthday with a prayer festival featuring religious music and speeches by leaders from across faiths.
In February, President Trump declared May 17 a national day of prayer and a time “to rededicate America as one nation under God” in a move that energized evangelicals.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “Fox News Sunday” about Sunday’s massive religious gathering in DC. //
The May 17 date for the national prayer days traces its origins to America’s early days.
Shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the colonial Congress declared May 17, 1776, a national day of fasting and prayer
The automaker marked its first annual loss in more than 70 years.
After US government policies wrecked the country’s electric vehicle market, automakers have been scrambling to adapt. The loss of federal clean vehicle tax incentives and funding for charging infrastructure, combined with capricious tariffs, has resulted in a 28 percent drop in EV sales for the first three months of the year.
That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when optimism abounded and a strong commitment to an EV-heavy portfolio translated into a higher share price. As those commitments are abandoned, there’s a financial price to pay, including more than $9 billion of write-downs for Honda, which made its first operating loss in the company’s history.
Vaccines may be training a part of our immune system long thought to be untrainable.
May 15 marks one year since Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a “bell-to-bell” ban on personal phones in public schools, impacting almost a million children in K-12 public and charter schools across the state.
Teachers who spoke to The Post all say the ban has had an overwhelmingly postive impact on their schools.
“I think that the cell phone ban has been remarkable,” Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College of Manhattan on the Lower East Side, told The Post. “I’ve been astounded by how much of a shift it has been.” //
But it’s not just in the classroom. When he walks by the cafeteria during lunch, it’s now full of energy.
“They’re talking with each other instead of just looking down at their phones,” he marveled. “Now they have to communicate, they have to socialize. They have to talk, find out how their day is going, what’s going on, what class do you have next, did you do last night’s homework?”
In a recent paper in Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at the Kanazawa University, Japan, used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ultra-faint galaxy called LAP1-B as it existed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. It’s the most chemically primitive galaxy we’ve ever seen.
The magnifying glass
The LAP1-B is 13 billion light-years away from Earth. To observe an object that faint and distant, even the huge, gold-coated beryllium mirrors of JWST were not enough on their own. We spotted it due to a massive cluster of galaxies called the MACS J046, which warps the spacetime between us and the LAP1-B.
“The galaxy was strongly magnified through the gravitational lensing effect,” Nakajima said. Specifically, the spacetime warped by the MACS J046 clusters magnifies light traveling from LAP1-B toward Earth by roughly 100-fold. //
This analysis revealed a profound shortage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The gas-phase oxygen-to-hydrogen ratio stood at just 0.4 percent of what we find in our Sun.
Another detail in the spectrum indicated the type of radiation that made the gas glow. The team detected emission lines from triply ionized carbon—a state where a carbon atom has lost half of its six electrons. Stripping multiple electrons away from carbon atoms requires extreme-ultraviolet photons, with energies exceeding 47.9 electronvolts. Standard stars, even the massive ones we see in our galactic vicinity, are not hot enough to produce radiation this intense.
The stars that could get this hot, Nakajima’s team suggests, were the very first that ignited in the Universe. These were made exclusively of hydrogen and helium forged in the Big Bang and lacked heavy elements to help them cool as they formed. “Such stars should be formed from primordial gas,” Nakajima said. //
The stars we see today, including our Sun, are Population I stars. The older generation, found in the halo of our galaxy, are Population II stars, which have far lower levels of elements heavier than helium. Population III stars were the first to appear in the cosmos, and they’re theorized to be violent monsters with masses hundreds of times higher than the Sun squeezed into surprisingly small volumes. They burned extremely hot and died young in supernova explosions. Nakajima’s team has likely found traces of these explosions in LAP1-B.
Cable firm Cox’s Supreme Court win may help all tech providers, not just ISPs.
Second, Jackson’s relationship with children too often ventured into the inappropriate and indefensible, but at the same time, the overwhelming evidence is that he was not guilty of sexually abusing children and was in fact the victim of multiple extortion schemes.
But even today, when the world has rendered its own judgement, that Michael Jackson remains beloved, the media cannot bring themselves to talk about him without suggesting he was likely a pedophile. They refuse to do it. They refuse to tell the truth and they refuse to acknowledge that their preferred version of his story has been rejected by the public. //
I could understand some of the obsession if there were any proof that Jackson did something criminal. He’s been accused and after the one and only time it went to trial, he was acquitted because the jury was introduced to the alleged victim’s wretch of a mother who had a proven history of theft and fraud— schemes that she used her kids to execute.
There was the 2019 Leaving Neverland documentary in which another two accusers, now grown men, laid out graphic details of their own alleged abuse. Both of them are demonstrable liars in ways both big and small, and both made their charges only after Jackson was dead and in pursuit of money (they’re both actively suing his estate).
The details of all of these cases are genuinely riveting, just not in the way the media would prefer.
Instead, their fitness seems to stem from their father’s exercise habits before they were even conceived. It’s a finding suggesting that running might benefit not just the exerciser, but also his unborn children.
“I was very surprised when I first saw the data,” says Yin, a biochemist at Nanjing University.
Yin’s team analyzed the molecules inside the exercising rodents’ sperm and found tiny bits of RNA—dubbed microRNAs—that were present in higher amounts than in the sperm of their idle littermates. When the scientists injected those molecules into unrelated embryos, they got animals just as fit as those that were born to exercising fathers.
That 2025 study adds to mounting evidence that sperm are more than wriggling vessels carrying DNA to an egg. Over the past two decades, studies in mice have detected microRNAs and other types of RNA fragments that surge and wane inside sperm cells in response to not just exercise or sloth but also fatty or sugary diets, daily stress, childhood trauma, heavy drinking and exposure to pesticides and other hazards. In step with these changes, researchers have documented developmental and metabolic changes and differing rates of depression in the males’ offspring.
And while it’s difficult to study the effect in people, researchers also have documented fluctuations in RNA fragments in the sperm of men who do or don’t exercise, smoke or eat excess sugar, as well as men with obesity or traumatic childhoods. Studies also report that children of parents who are overweight or who dealt with mental health stress are more likely to have those conditions, too. //
But though puzzles remain, recent studies show that not only are paternal RNA fragments transferred to a fertilized egg, but also that they are capable of inducing changes in the offspring at the doses found in sperm. //
Today, those studying the phenomenon are sure the effects exist but aren’t certain how they are transmitted. The end result, they believe, is adjustments to the activity of genes—a phenomenon known as epigenetics.
Such adjustments occur during normal development as tissues and organs adopt their different identities, which require certain genes to be active or to be turned off. //
Today, the idea that small RNAs carry environmental signals has the most direct evidence behind it. Although small RNAs are short-lived, they aren’t actively removed like other epigenetic marks. Somehow, the tiny bits of nucleic acid fluctuate in response to the environment, then find their way into sperm cells.b//
Whatever the mechanism, there’s enough evidence to rebalance parental responsibility, Teperino says. “Now it’s almost all on women,” he says. “When a couple is planning a family, the doctor gives the woman a list of rules to follow. This is not valid anymore—we need to at least give recommendations to both.”