Faresh

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13221450

This is a of a post made during a time where outgoing federation for lemmy.ml was broken. I hope lemmy.ml readers will forgive me for shoving my filthy little words under the shining gaze of their precious and observant eyes for a second time.

I have a Kindle Paperwhite (7th generation). (Stallman weeps) It appears people generally customize their kindle beyond Amazon's original design by jailbreaking it. But I was wondering if I could replace the entire system on the kindle by a new one, for even more hacking fun.

It appears Kindle Paperwhites run on ARM processors, so there should be plenty of compatible software. However, it appears flashing the ROM of kindle only appears in the context of something called the Kindle Fire. Why is that? Is there any reason ROM flashing for the paperwhite kindles isn't common? The only reasons I could think of is that disassembling and reassembling the kindle paperwhite is kinda annoying (especially with the glue holding the case together) and that maybe not everyone has a board to externally flash ROMs. I've also thought that maybe the ROM is write-protected or that the software is signed and that the Kindle will refuse to boot off of anything that hasn't received Jeff's blessing. Is there any existing guide on flashing a custom ROM? Have any ROMs been created already?

Maybe my foolish self has not searched good enough and hasn't found the discussions on ROM flashing of other kindle models, but in any case I think it's good to have this discussion on here on Lemmy too even if it potentially already exists somewhere else on the internet, so that other fools like me may come across your wisdom and be enlightened.

If this is complete and utter nonsense what I'm babbling about, can I at least somehow download the firmware and software running on the kindle from the device, so that I may poke and probe it with my disgusting, dirty little fingers, defiling Amazon's intellectual property?

I hope that you have a good day and that the following days be good too. If I am stupid for even mentioning the idea of a good day, I wish that some day our suffering may end and that a good day be something we all can look forward to.

People who struggled with procrastination and have now stopped, what made you stop procrastinating? What do you think were the factors leading or contributing to your past procrastination and how did you stop or improve the situation?

Please don't answer with the "I'll tell you later" joke.

Most introductions to unit testing give very simple examples of functions that simply receive some arguments and produce a result. However a lot of software has to read input from external sources, such as from the internet, from the file system, or from the user during its execution. How does one write tests for such software?

For simple software that only reads a few files from the file system, I imagine can be tested by writing some files for the test to give to the tested program, but what if it becomes more complex? Or what if you are trying to test a web scrapper for a website, would the tests run a web server and simulate the targetted website? Or for the GUI, how would one test that the user can see what they are supposed to see, when they click a certain way at a certain time?

Maybe the parts that read the data shouldn't be tested and only the functions that code relies on should be tested? I don't know.