As you probably already know, I’ve got quite a thing for mobile devices. My newest favorite is the Tegra 2 powered Viewsonic G-Tablet. Load up a custom ROM and an overclocked kernel and you’ve got a dual core 1.5ghz android tablet that’ll run with the best of them. Like most of the higher end tablets though, it’s pricey and easy to recognize. This makes it a pretty choice target for thieves. Rather than lower the usability of the device and leave it at home, I set out to disguise the tablet in some fashion. After browsing through the tablet cases available, I figured I could do just as well by building a hide-a-book. And that’s what I did! Read on for the full tutorial.
Like many of my readers, I’m excited about the prospect of playing New Super Mario Brothers in 1080p with 16xAF and 8x AA and 3x the internal graphical resolution. Of course I’m not talking about the recently announced Wii 2, but the Dolphin emulator, which is currently running New Super Mario at a crisp 60fps with the above settings on my laptop. The wiimote and accessories connect fine via internal bluetooth, but what about the sensor bar? Turns out if you’ve bought yours recently you may not need anything other than a pair of scissors to convert yours to USB.
For those of you who have picked up a tablet, but have yet to pick up a nice case, here is a quick hack for you. I’ve taken a paper feed tray, a PCI slot cover, and a standard dell usb keyboard and screwed them all together. I covered all the screw heads and rough edges with hot glue, and I sit here now typing a comfortable 80+wpm on my tablet. As I’m running a kernel that supports USB host mode on my GTablet, I simply plugged it in via USB and found a way to attach the tablet to the back of a keyboard (screws and hot glue). Fun, and it works great!
As someone who hacks up every console he’s ever gotten, my PS3 has been rocking a Linux enabled CFW for some time now (remember that tutorial I did way back on turning your Linux PS3 into a cross-compilation powerhouse?). As such, I’ve gotten the banhammer from Sony PSN networks, and if I want to play some multiplayer games with my PS3, I’m out of luck except for LAN play. This is fine, as there’s always tunneling applications such as Xlink Kai, or so I thought. It’s been quite a while since I last looked into XLink Kai. This article was originally going to be titled “Xlink Kai Arm Port”, however the XLink Kai developers have decided to close source their project. That’s their prerogative and if they feel it contributes to the quality of their project it’s within their purveyance to do so. That said, it just doesn’t jive with me. One can argue the effectiveness of closed source solutions but at the end of the day Xlink Kai would have had a fully working ARM port working on all the billions of Arm devices today if they had left their source open, because I would have ported it this weekend.
Anyway, things being what they are I decided to get their main competitor (XBSLink) running on the ARM platform. Some of the ps3 hackerblogs have been talking about XBSLink lately, and I thought it’d be an optimal application for a little ARM box (a pogoplog perhaps). This will allow you to run the XBSLink daemon on your ARM based Linux box (hopefully pulling 4 watts or less like mine is) and save you the hassle of running a full 400 watt multi core many gigahertz PC for a frikkin port forwarding application. Read on for the setup tutorial. I had gone into this article prepared to walk you through a full compilation and porting tutorial, but it turns out it’s not necessary. Read on for the full guide!
In case any of you have been meaning to pick up a Pixel Qi display and install it into the best possible netbook out there, allow me to save you the trouble. Now that I’ve got a top-secret e-Ink project in the works, I’m letting go of my Samsung N210 netbook that’s got a Pixel Qi screen installed (the one featured in my third book Hacks..). It’s fully loaded, stacked, and just like you’d get straight from the factory…except that there’s a frikkin Pixel Qi screen installed! It’s the only one I’ve ever seen for sale on eBay, ever. Spread the word if you know any cutting edge gadget loving folks that don’t fancy cracking open a screen bezel.
Hacks is a collection of my most popular tutorials, scripts, tweaks, Zipit Z2 work, and source code. Within these forty some chapters reside some of my most interesting work, and certainly some of the most viewed tutorials and hacks on the Internet today. Featured on Hackaday, Engadget, Make online, and hundreds of other blogs and forums, these hacks are meant to enlighten and entertain while providing the reader with concrete examples and launching platforms for future work. Whether you are wanting to reorganize your desktop, reboot your modem, port software to a new platform, administer a Linux box, or just entertain yourself on a lazy sunday, you’ll find something of interest in the chapters ahead. At just over 200 pages on most eReader devices at 1.99$ it’s a terrific bargain and an excellent reference guide. I’ll be updating the permalink page (top left in my WordPress theme) when the Amazon and B&N links go live sometime this evening or tomorrow morning.
Here’s a fun thing I came up with for those Steam users out there. Ever wanted to use an SSH client in the middle of a Steam game? I’ve got an arm based server running constantly at my house (4 watts average power usage) doing menial chores like downloading and file serving and queuing up print jobs, playing music, etc. I prefer to SSH into a screen or byobu session, start a long task, then disconnect and check back later. If you’re relaxing at home playing a game in Steam however, you may not want to alt-tab out of your game session. Besides, if you’re running in Wine there’s a fairly good chance this will crash your game in some fashion. Short of booting up another computer or opening ports on your router to allow web-based ssh services to work, what is one to do? Read on for my solution to the problem. Continue reading »
As most regular readers will probably know, I’ve got a thing for low powered devices. In my daily work life, I build clusters with them and write/run scientific computing and visualization software on them. At home though, I’ve got a thing for game consoles, emulation, and USB. I’ve especially got a thing for getting people playing games or running consoles on unusual systems that they would have never thought to use. I think the Zipit and IM-ME communities are fairly well aware of this already. What amazed me though, is how few people I found seriously discussing the idea of using a pogoplug device as a game or emulation console. Allow me to get the conversation started with a bang.
For those with web ADHD:
tl;dr – Using a Dockstar and a DisplayLink adapter in tandem for gaming works incredibly well not just as an emulation console, but as a general purpose desktop as well, watch the video below for a multitude of console and PC gaming goodness. I show it running
Scummvm (Monkey Island 3)
NES (Contra)
Doxbox (Warcraft)
Mednafen–
Lynx (Lemmings)
GBA (Aria of Sorrow)
GBC (Lufia)
GB (Links Awakening)
TurboGrafx (Bonk 3)
NeoGeo Pocket (Last Blade)
Wonderswan (Guilty Gear Petite 2)
stella 2600 (Adventure)
VisualBoyAdvance (Mario World)
SuperTux
Abuse – Actually this was cut for time in the youtube clip but it plays perfectly.
Wesnoth
yabuase Sega Saturn (Sonic Extreme)
Quake 3 (OpenArena)
Most with the exception of Saturn and OpenArena run at full playable speed with sound and full or near fullscreen graphics. I have no reason to believe SNES or even Mame and Playstation are out of the picture, with some cleverness. There is so much more below.
For everyone else, read on for photos, configuration files, tips, tricks, explanations, and a thorough walkthrough of the process.
After a particularly long (but rewarding) day of prototyping and contract hunting over at Discursive Labs, Mark and I weren’t quite ready to stop creating when the work day ended. Already having his trusty iron handy, and me with my parts (and MY AXE), we decided to unwind and relax by hacking something. Typical Wednesdays right? Anyway, after reading about how the PS3 homebrew scene is blowing up, we decided to see if we could build a PS3 jailbreak device with parts we had around our workbench. After finding an old ‘atari in a joystick’ TV game we had previously stuffed into a PS1 trackball, we had the spark of an idea. Read on for photos, video, a ridiculously scatterbrained photostream, and all around good times.
As most of you readers probably know, I have been terribly remiss in my postings of late. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been hacking. Oh no. Bootstrapping a startup requires hacking all over the place. During the past week alone I’ve
Gotten to know my franchise tax agent on a first name basis
Authored contracts, which in my opinion should be written in python
Authored a research paper on novel methods for efficient bulk virtual machine storage and retrieval (stay tuned for that one!)
Reminded myself daily why I use git, while writing features integrating svn, cvs, etc
Created what, I am fairly sure, is the world’s largest openWRT/BCM5354 firmware image/executable set
Created at least 10 new project virtual machines
Which actually brings me out of my /startup header and back into :/publish . One of the terrific things about founding a startup (ducks!) is the flexibility you get while setting up your workflow. Long a proponent of integrating virtual machines into business processes, I have been enjoying the real freedom a robust virtualized system can provide. I’ll get into the detailed workflow later in the post. For those ‘first page only’ readers I’ll get to the golden ticket, I recently picked up a REX 6000 credit card PDA for 6$ at the local thrift.
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