The Arrival of NX (Part 1 of 7)

Anyone who has used a VNC connection to remotely use an X Windows machine knows that a high speed link is necessary for a remotely usable experience. NX (aka NoMachine) technology compresses this communication and suppresses unnecessary communication between clients and servers. The benefit to the user is a near-local speed experience with any decent link and a very usable one over even dial-up speed links. This series of articles seems to be a nice history of the events that led up to the current state of NoMachine technology. Debian systems can enjoy FreeNX, a completely free version of the technology.

6 Urban Legends of Wireless Security Debunked

Okay, now I don't feel comfortable at all with wireless networking. The only piece of hardware I own doesn't support WPA, only WEP so I am at a loss. I'm guilty of two of the 6 useless security measures (turn off SSID broadcast and using MAC filtering). Guess for someone who wants in, these aren't even a speed bump. Especially with things like this floating around the next.

This Is Broken...

Here's a fun site that lets people vent about stupid stuff they deal with everyday. From ambiguous instructions to odd signs and pictures. I liked the "masculine men's shaving cream" that eventually started to lose its label only to show it was relabeled Women's shaving cream. Odd stuff of all sorts.

The War on Terror As Seen From A CLI

Here's a humorous look at the war on terror as seen from the *nix command line: Here's a sample, click the link above for the whole post:

The War on Terror

As viewed from the Bourne shell.

$ cd /middle_east
$ ls
Afghanistan Iraq Libya Saudi_Arabia UAE
Algeria Israel Morrocco Sudan Yemen
Bahrain Jordan Oman Syria
Egypt Kuwait Palestine Tunisia
Iran Lebanon Qatar Turkey

$ cd Afghanistan
$ ls
bin Taliban
$ rm Taliban
rm: Taliban is a directory
$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
. .. .insurgents
$ chown -R USA .*
chown: .insurgents: Not owner
$ cd ..
$ su
Password: *******
# mv Taliban /tmp
# exit
$ ls
bin
$ cd bin
$ ls
laden
$ cd ..
$ rm -r bin/laden
bin/laden: No such file or directory
$ find / -name laden
$
$ su
Password: *******
# mv bin /tmp
# exit

Here Comes The Bait...

BetaNews is reporting "Sony said Thursday that a software update for the PlayStation Portable next week would add the capability to surf the Web and watch video clips. The Web browser will be HTML 4.01-compatible and will be able to display most Websites."

What this means to you and me is they are adding extra functionality to lure people into using a firmware that doesn't allow you to run homebrew or copied games. While I haven't been too impressed with the available selection of native PSP games, I have thoroughly enjoyed the homebrew and emulators available via the 1.50 exploits. It will take a lot for me to willingly update my PSP. I use it daily but between listening to audiobooks while I walk and playing with homebrew/emulators, I don't play much in the way of native PSP games. I am anxiously awaiting Burnout Legends though and have my fingers tightly crossed that it doesn't disappoint. I guess we'll have to wait and see...

DIY POE

Here's a great resource for Do It Yourself Power Over Ethernet. Pricing out DLink's POE connectors ($50 each!) made me wonder what would be involved in making your own. Well it looks like cosmetics are the main thing that suffers, but with careful planning, careful connecting, and careful metering you can do it all yourself on the cheap.

Linux Distro Chooser (beta)

Let this little test suggest an appropriate Linux Distro after answering a few key questions. I have to admit that it nailed my preference (it recommended Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu) as I run a Debian file server and an Ubuntu desktop.

Record from a Comcast DVR to your Windows XP Machine

The steps are detailed here if you wish to grab digital content from the Comcast Motorola 62xx DVR via Firewire. Not sure if I want to go through that hassle but I did learn that MythTV is able to leverage this for its uses, so I guess it's not all bad.

One Stop Searching for Cable Pinouts

Need to know what pins are used for in that random cable from your stack-o-parts? Well, this site can probably help!

Spamusement.com

Spamusement is a funny site with hand drawn comics inspired by real SPAM subject lines. Funny stuff!

Do It Yourself Home Video Monitoring

Here's an interesting article on setting up a video surveillance system for your home. The $80 security cameras they use received rave/poor ratings, depending on who you talk to. Sounds like the built in web server (in each camera) was less than desired, but they also provide a "raw image" way to connect which seems to be what this article focuses on. The one thing I really like is that these are IP cameras, and don't need a computer connected to them. If they can be rigged with POE (power over ethernet) then you could really stretch these things out quite a way from your switch for some decent coverage. They need pretty good light though, from what I gather.

This Keyboard Can Change On The Fly!

From the "I bet it ain't cheap" Department, this keyboard has tiny little displays built into each key that can change depending on your needs or programs you're running. Very interesting...

How to Desolder Components

Here's a nice tutorial on desoldering components. I really need to brush up on my soldering skills and I can't count the number of times a little soldering has led to cool results. I'd like the confidence to take on trickier projects using more expensive parts, but my lack of training in soldering techniques has scared me away more than once... I'm too scared to do a $20 mod on a $100 item for fear of owning a $120 pile of scrap...

Remove "Corrupted Data" Icons on PSP

There are utilities to do this and people have roughly explained how to do this by hand. I hope this short description will be clear enough for ease of use. To remove the ugly "Corrupt Data" icons from showing on your memory stick, you need to name your folders accordingly:

For the Non-% folder, the length must be exactly 32 characters with no more than 5 real characters to the name. The trailing part will be underscores followed by a 1.

For example, xsnes__________________________1
The other folder must be exactly 9 character in length and end in ~1% such as xsnes_~1%

RatDVD

RatDVD offers a way to compress an entire DVD (including menus, chapters, extra audio, etc) into a very small package. Once installed, a variety of programs can play back the RatDVD compressed files. And if you want to play it on a regular DVD player, it always contains all data required to reconstruct a "regular" DVD playable in any player. While I haven't tried it yet myself, it sounds very impressive.

Mod that $100 DVD Player!

Here's an interesting article telling you how to buy a $100-$120 DVD player, add less than $100 in parts, and end up with a DVD player that would retail for substantially more than you've invested in it. It's an interesting idea. Buying a value-priced components and replacing some of the "cheap parts" with "quality parts" resulting in an overall improvement to the unit. I know from my computing experience that what they're saying about the power supply quality is very true. The best equipment, when hooked up to a crappy power supply, will not perform up to par.

PSP News

Wow, I've really been letting the Blog slide lately... there's just been so many cool developments in the PSP Homebrew arena that you're either left reporting on them or playing with them. It's obvious from the lack of updates which I've been up to. Here's a very non-comprehensive summary of recent days:

• PSP Chess has been updated (current version 0.18), see here.
• Snes9x by "Y" has been updated (current version 0.02y22), see here.
• PBP Easy Installer v1.2F released, see here.
• PBP Maker v0.21 released, see here.
• An FTP server for PSP was released, see here.
• A nice compilation of emulators/apps is here.
• And of course, on the piracy scene, news of an ISO loader here.

A Tribute To Raiden I & II

Check out this Flash based game paying tribute to Raiden I and II. This is a great vertical scroller that takes the "build up insane weapons" style of gameplay and runs with it. A fun time waster.