As I was having my morning coffee, and having a look through the headlines in my RSS news feed aggregator (subscribe to The Daily Hack's site feed), I came across an interesting hack that was featured on Hack A Day. Apparently, Jesse Vincent had posted a hack on his blog (The views expressed here reflect those of my employer) on how to tether the new Kindle 2 to a computer. But, unlike the hacks I posted on how to turn your iPhone into a wireless router and the Blackberry/MacBook tethering hack which allows your computer to run off of your phone's WiFi connection, this hack is flipped to allow your Kindle 2 to run off your computer's internet connection.

Why would you want to do this? Well, according to Caleb Kraft (Hack A Day), "this should allow not only a faster connection, but possibly a chance to see what exactly they are transferring back and forth." Another benefit of this hack, is that it allows people in areas without Sprint coverage (like here in northern Canada), to still access and download content for the Kindle 2. So, how exactly is this done? The following is Jesse's step-by-step tutorial of the Kindle 2 tethering hack:

For today's experiment, you will need:

• One Amazon Kindle 2
• One computer (the instructions assume you're using a mac)
• One Amazon Kindle MicroUSB cable

Make sure your Kindle is not connected to your computer.

Reboot your Kindle:

First, Click "Menu", then pick "Settings"
Now, Click "Menu", then pick "Restart"

Enable debug mode:

From the Kindle's home screen, type something to get the search box to pop up.
Hit the DEL key to clear the content of the search box.
Hit Sym and select the Semicolon (;) using the 5-pad.
Type debugOn
(You should now see ;debugOn)
Click the enter key.

Congratulations. You've turned on Debug mode. From here on in, you can probably do all sorts of things to render your Kindle 2 useless.

To verify that debug mode is on, run the private debug tools "help" command.

From the Kindle's home screen, type something to get the search box to pop up.
Hit the DEL key to clear the content of the search box.
Hit Sym and select the ` using the 5-pad. (It's the next-to-last thing on the middle row)
Type help
(You should now see `help)
Hit the enter key

You should now see a list of commands. We're interested in two of them: `usbNetwork and `usbQa.
Click to close the menu.

From the Kindle's home screen, type something to get the search box to pop up.
Hit the DEL key to clear the content of the search box.
Hit Sym and select the ` using the 5-pad. (It's the next-to-last thing on the middle row)
Type usbNetwork
(You should now see `usbNetwork)
Hit the enter key

If you were to stop here, the Kindle would be in USB network mode but wouldn't be set up to try to talk to the Internet over that interface

Type something to get the search box to pop up.
Hit the DEL key to clear the content of the search box.
Hit Sym and select the ` using the 5-pad. (It's the next-to-last thing on the middle row)
Type usbQa
(You should now see `usbQa)
Hit the enter key

Now it's time to plug your Kindle 2 into your Computer. If I have to talk you through plugging in a USB cable, you should probably stop reading here.

Once you plug in your Kindle 2, you should see something like this:

Click Network Preferences. (Adjust accordingly for Linux or Windows)

Next, you should see something like this:

Configure your computer with a static (manual) IP Address:
Type 192.168.15.200 into the IP Address field.
Click "Apply" in the lower right-hand corner.

Congratulations. You've set up a network connection between your computer and your Kindle 2.

You can test the local network connection by popping up a terminal and using ping
Type ping 192.168.15.244

If things are working right, you should see something like this:

Assuming that's working right for you, the last step is to set up Internet Sharing so that the Kindle can use your computer's network connection to talk to the outside world. On a Mac, that's pretty straight forward. Open up System Preferences and click on Sharing. You'll want to set up a config something like this:

And that's about it. If you open up the Kindle Store, you'll be able to browse and buy books. (You'll also note that the Kindle's wireless indicator shows empty boxes. The EVDO is turned off automatically as you bring up USB networking).

When you want to use the Kindle 2 in disk mode again, you'll need to get it out of USB Network mode. There's likely a way to get the device back onto wireless without restarting, but restarting is easy enough that I haven't gone exploring.

First, Click "Menu", then pick "Settings"
Now, Click "Menu", then pick "Restart"

Good luck!

Pretty neat, huh? Jesse is continuing to update his Kindle 2 tethering hack as well as work on other Kindle 2 homebrew projects. To keep abreast of any new developments, you might want to check out Jesse's blog: The views expressed here reflect those of my employer. Enjoy!!

Via Hack A Day and The views expressed here reflect those of my employer Blog

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