Ten Years of HunterDavis.com From Archive.org’s Perspective
I was relaxing after a hard day at work today, and thought it may be fun to throw up a little reminder of where hunterdavis.com came from and how far it's come. In glorious GIF format 
*Update! It gets better. My ancient pre-hunterdavis.com website from 2001 is still available on the wayback machine! I've posted all my rants from 2001 below the break.
Apologies for the Site Hiccups!
Apolgoies for the site hiccups everyone, I've almost got it all straightened out. I've switched from godaddy hosting and domain registration to BlueHost. See my previous post for more on that, and stay tuned for even more site updates!
Dockstar Stereo + Wii Frontend
Chris Irwin alerted me in a previous article about MPD, the music playing daemon. While I was planning on installing this as both a client and a server on the dockstar stereo, It turns out there's a MPD frontend for the Wii. I hadn't been giving my Wii very much love lately, being so active in the PS3 scene. On a whim I picked up a little tv to use as a monitor for the Dockstar stereo, and I hooked the Wii up to it to see how things were going in the Wii homebrew community. I was BLOWN away. Not only has the wii media center grown tremendously, (it streams from samba shares), all the emulators have been updated (ps1 games from samba shares!), and there's a tremendously dynamic game modification community (check out smashmods for some of the coolest in-ram game modification you will EVER see). The wii VNC client works quite well as a head unit for the dockstar stereo, but it's got a native MPD frontend that I thought would be fun to get running. Read on for the setup of MPD on the Dockstar Stereo (or any embedded arm linux).
Can Pixel Qi Technology Change your Life?
Quite the dramatic lead-in, I know. It's been one week since I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Pixel Qi trans-reflective screen from Makershed and just over one whole work day since I installed it. And what a difference a day makes. Here I sit, typing a blog post and fixing bugs, not 20 feet from the ocean. At 11am. In Los Angeles. The sun is shining brightly overhead, and I'm actually getting work done on my laptop. It's fantastic. For those of you who haven't heard of the Pixel Qi screen, it's from the folks at Pixel Qi, a spinoff from the OLPC project. You can order the screen right now for 250$ on sale from Makershed and I have to say it is quite worth it, at least if you'd like to get some work done in the sun. If you're smart about it, you can actually get yourself set up with a Pixel Qi enabled netbook relatively cheaply, as I did.
90′s Tech to The Rescue (network monitor)
Like many of you, I am throttled by the uplink speed of my network. Unfortunately, my upstream router (which also supplies my HDTV channels) is supplied by my ISP, and I do not have root access. The cable company also doesn't release metrics for line usage, data transfer for television shows, etc. Fortunately, it uses standard ip networking over Ethernet. I ended up using a 90's era netgear router and an old Palm V to display link statistics, throughput, etc. The connection was made using paper-clips.... more info after the break!
The littlest famicom
Ok not really. But it's pretty sad anyway. Tired of playing games on virtual console, I set out to construct my own nes (and make use of the carts strewn about my closet).
Leapfrog Crammer – 10$ ogg vorbis/mp3 etc with disassembly
Reccomended to me on the comments of a previous thread, I picked up the leapfrog crammer for 10$ at big lots. I've seen these all over the discount stores (along with didj's, which I have one of Claude's cartridges for and will be porting software sometime soon). For 10$ ogg vorbis support and a touch screen (kind of ..) is a heck of a deal. More info after the jump.
75$, 20 watt blue ray player (with video and kill-a-watt goodness)
Yeah, more technically it's a 20-watt x264 player. But it's an 800mhz CELERON (all caps!) pumping 1080p into a broadcom decoder. More info after the jump
Wallclock 2.0
After a power out blanked my wallclock's memory, I was not eager to go searching through ten year old websites looking for a new terminal emulator. Luckily I found a ten year old NES emulator that loads fine! Behold wallclock 2.0, NES edition! Also be sure to peep the ancient medical tablet that is pulling duty as my new serial terminal. Fun!
Snesaver – Zsnes screen saver for linux
Ok, so here's a fun bit of perl code I wrote last night. It's called snesaver, and you can download it here. Here's how it works,
1. You'll need to be running some flavor of *nix (self=ubuntu), with perl installed
2. You'll need to have xscreensaver set up as your screensaver (though it should be simplicity itself to do this for most any other screensaver)
3. You'll need to have zsnes installed
4. You'll have to supply your own roms (legality), and record your own rom state movies in zsnes (simple simple!)
And that's about all you'll need. Just open up your ~/.xscreensaver file and put an entry for snesaver.pl (should be in your path) under the "programs" section. Then edit the script to point to /your/rom/directory/structure/ and you're all set.
Here's a youtube video of it in action.
/H