How to fix frozen, bricked, or bootlooped Kindle devices.

03-May-2017

My device kept bootlooping and would not allow me to read anything so I spent the last several days digging through forums, reddits, comment threads, and dozens of articles on repairing my frozen bootlooped Kindle Paperwhite.

After trying dozens of different “tips” I found a method by digging around the system directly that will force a system restore without any menu options or directly interacting with the Kindle.

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If you connect it to a computer you will be able view your files, I highly suggest you save all files in your kindle documents directory as this will delete everything on your Kindle.

1. Connect the Kindle to your computer (They suggest Windows or Mac OSX, but I completed this on Ubuntu 17.04 - just requires a file manager)
2. Navigate to the root directory of the Kindle by accessing your systems file manager and selecting the Kindle device.
3. Create a file titled DO_FACTORY_RESTORE without any file extensions attached to it.
4. Now hold the power button for forty seconds. This will force a reboot.
5. Wait.
6. Wait..
7. Wait…
8. After it flashes a handful of times, the device will then take you to the “Language Selection” Wizard and you can set up your kindle just like it was brand new!

If you have any other issues you can contact me on Twitter or by contacting Amazon Support (I suggest using the “Chat Support” feature).

Hope this helps!

Installing Evernote in Linux Using Wine (May 2017)

01-May-2017

I use Evernote a lot. It keeps all my thoughts, log journals, experiments, tests, code pieces (bash aliases, etc), personal simulation philisophy, thought pieces, articles, and more.

I also love to use Linux (Currently switching between Fedora & Ubuntu Budgie, although using the Gnome desktop enviroment).

Sadly, evernote does not have a native linux application (doesn’t everyone just use nodejs and electron.js for desktop applications now?). In the past this has eventually led me to go back to Windows. But I have figured out a way, thanks to WineHQ, to get the latest Evernote version 6.4.2 to work on linux. It has some grapical issues, but mainly just text aliasing.

Here’s how to do it: with wine and winetricks (for GUI haters:

Install winetricks with your package manager if it’s not already installed. Run the following commands in a terminal:

1. export WINEARCH=win64
2. winetricks -q ie8
3. wine “evernote_installer_path”
4. Follow the installer’s instructions
5. The evernote executable is now located at “wineprefix_path/drive_c/Program Files/Evernote/Evernote/Evernote.exe”

Here is how to make Evernote work with q4wine, a gui for wine.

Make sure you have winetricks and q4wine installed (look for them in your package manager). Make sure that your terminal is properly configured in q4wine:

1. Opens the options menu: File > Options
2. Select “General” and opens the “Utils” tab
3. Enter the path of your terminal, for instance “/usr/bin/gnome-terminal” if you use gnome.
4. Enter “-e” as an argument (without the quotes, as always), so that q4wine can execute command just after opening a terminal.
5. Download evernote for windows, from the evernote website.

Installation steps:

1. In the terminal window, type “winetricks -q ie8” (without the quotes) and press Enter. Wait for the ie8 installation to finish.
2. Run the Evernote installer.

You now have Evernote working (nearly perfectly).

WebClipper also works which was a massive surprise. Applicator and all.

Look up and Resist

19-Feb-2017

We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.

Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The internet has brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, people, and little children, victims of a system that makes those torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of those who fear the way of human progress: the hate of those will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as they die liberty will never perish…

People: don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural people, selfish people, with cold minds and cold hearts. You are not cold. You are not cattle. You are human. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate, only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. People: don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty. You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let’s use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all our happiness.

People! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where all people will rise above their hate and brutality.

The soul of the people has been given wings, and at last they are beginning to fly. They are flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us.

Look up.

Look up and Resist.

Completed Books (January 2017)

06-Feb-2017

Every month I’m going to start listing every book that I complete. Last month includes 12 books that I started and finished in no particular order.

Inventing The Future: Postcapitalism and A World Without Work by Nick Srnicek

This book surprised me, it’s well written and well thought out. I have always believed that we are well on the path to postcapitalist system. Capitalism is creating socialism to keep itself alive, it’s a great book that goes deeper into the concept and shows several different sides of the growth and change that the world will have from it.

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg day was last month, and I wanted to have a refresher. Went to a local indie punk remembrance day with fellow like-minded people over at a place called Backspace that was absolutely phenomenal.

Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

Focusing on customer service is the most important part of any business, without it your company will fail. Tony Hsieh shows how focusing on customer service grew Zappos from nothing to over a billion dollars in sales in 8 years because of it.

Rework by Jason Fried

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Quite potentially the greatest and most riveting book I have ever read. Look through the history of humankind all the way from the beginning, not just biologically, but also environmentally, politically, and more. Will read again, and write a full review since it was that amazing.

Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson

Title is pretty self explanatory.

How To Make A Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Space Flight by Julian Guthrie

How To Win Friends & Influence People By Dale Carnegie

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow

Started and finished this book in one day. All 1000+ pages. Read it on and off throughout the day and enjoyed every bit of it. There’s a lot to learn about one of the most powerful tycoons of the 1800’s.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and The Rise of Free Culture On The Internet by Justin Peters

Aaron Swartz is one of my biggest role models and has been for about five years. I already knew nearly everything in this book, but it showed so many different view points and everything that surrounded Aaron and his life, not just his success’. R.I.P. Aaron.

The Code of The Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

Didn’t make it quite all the way through this one, it’s pretty hard of a read and will have to reread this one quite a bit.

Existence is pain

02-Feb-2017

Our entire existence is fueled on the idea to survive, to survive means to get past pain and improve on ourselves.

We require pain to remind us of what the goal is. We have to survive to minimize pain.

We have lived this way all our life as a species. Without pain we would not survive. We would not look for new and better ways to live, we would not be innovative, and we would have died long ago. But we have survived where others have failed - simply because we have innovated as a society to survive.

To move forward as a society we have to go through tremendous pain, we have to find ways to rid ourselves of the pain around us. We have to be tortured through our current capitalistic economic system, we have to go through the pain that is the environment falling apart around us, and we have to go through societal tortures to find the way to end the torture and reach the end goal that we as a species have been after for all of our existence.

What is the point of it all? What is the goal we have been trying to reach? To build a painless existence.

The goal in life is to move forward, innovate, and create a world where we are less pained for existing.

That is the point of life, to end pain and stop living as we currently see it.

Without pain we can not move forward, without depression we can not be motivated to move forward, without a villain standing in front of us, we will never move forward.

Without pain, there is no innovation.

Without pain, we have no reason to fight.

What makes us alive is our will to fight to minimize the pain that surrounds us.

We fight for a selfish reason. We fight for what we believe will make our lives easier. We fight to survive longer and easier. We fight to make our pain go away.

Some people believe we need to discriminate against others, or impede on others rights and way of life to be a better society to make our immediate selves have less pain.

Others believe, like I do, that we need to be focused on inclusion of the people around us. We need to not be judgemental of others, we need to stop discriminating against others to stop the cycle of discrimination. We believe in coming together and working towards our goal and purpose - to make life easier.

We have to be accepting to come together and make life easier together.

If we work to make life easier, to make life be less painful, then we can work together to end pain.

The easy way is to be focused on yourself and hope that you alone can find a way to stop the pain. This has never worked in the history of our society and has always been the end of all civilizations, when others take their own lives more seriously and their happiness more important than the people around them. They hope to be less pained by being exclusionary and independent without others meddling in their affairs.

The harder, more effective, and longer lasting way is by coming together and working together to reach a singular goal.

That’s what separates people, those who believe they can make their pain go away by being independent and selfish, and those that know that being inclusive leads to a life free of pain.

This is why organizations focused for social good created by the people have always been on the right side of history. This is why, when you look at history, the rights of people always prevail. The freedom of people always prevail. The acceptance of each other always prevail.

Existence is pain, and our goal in life is to find a way to work together to end pain.

Without pain we have no reason to fight. We have to have pain to show us the way to come together.

Existence is painful, and a necessary evil for good.

I am tired of analytics

28-Jan-2017

For the last ten years of my life I have subjected myself to a numbers game that everyone is taking part in. This is one of the reasons why I left behind a million followers.

I love to write, but I have noticed a depressing result of publishing on existing platforms.

Analytics.

Every single platform, Medium, Tumblr, Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter all have some form of analytical value that they append to writing.

Likes, comments, reads, views, recommends, shares, and more are the epicenter of the content that is published.

A small subset of people create the content, but the honest truth is that the epicenter of the products and platforms are the analytics that are created from that content.

I want to write to be an individual for my own personal informational purposes. If other people learn and get an emotional response or attachment than that is great, but I don’t want to associate a number to the content.

If I were to write a post, and I see that it doesn’t do as well as some of my other writings then I will naturally correct the rest of my writing to fit into the paradigm of my more popular posts.

I don’t want to A/B test my writing to match the audience. I want to write to match my thoughts.

I could write these all privately and never worry about them, but the issue with a private journal is that you can’t learn or grow from them. You can’t subject yourself to finding people who have similar thoughts.

I write for myself, but to also help myself find like minded people or to help those that are struggling with similar thoughts and want to see into someone else’s mind and be affirmed.

Having thoughts that you believe you are alone in is a punishment onto itself. It’s putting yourself into a cage of self deprivation that is constantly demoralizing and detrimental to your mental health.

I don’t know if anyone will learn from my thoughts, but I am in hopes of it. If there is even a chance of helping someone feel more comfortable with themselves that is a success.

I want my thoughts to be free and uncensored, but I also want others to be able to read them not for my own personal ego, but to help them realize who they are.

I have some unconventional thoughts about myself and the world around us, I know I’m not alone in any of them — but some people do and I want to help.

Posting my thoughts to larger platforms filters and censors my thoughts by forcing myself into an A/B test cage. I don’t want to do that.

Appending analytical value to content is antithetical to the point of content.

Content is meant to be free, and meant to help others and ourselves.

This won’t be the last time I write about this, I think about this a lot.

First Post

28-Jan-2017

I am tired of analytics dictating my emotions and my thoughts, I am going to bring back the idea of the “weblog” at least for my own sanity on my side. I’ll explain later, too tired right now to really explain.

Thanks.

Edit: I have written that post here