Published by Si at 28 April, 2008
in Games.
Mario Kart Wii arrived so don’t expect any blog posts for several weeks. Well, maybe there will be the odd one about how AWESOME it is. That is, assuming that it is in fact awesome. I am thinking that it probably is awesome because Nintendo are awesome and their previous Mario Kart games are awesome. Will the wheel be awesome? Have I said awesome enough yet? Oh right, I almost forgot. Not only do I predict it will be awesome, but it will be awesomesauce. Made fresh with buckets of awesomeples from the awesomest awesomeple tree in awesometown.
Awesome.
Update: My Mario Kart Friend Code: 1848-2086-6755
Fate has clicked me through to a site with some awesome pictures of Tesla coil fun. This guy and his cronies must have a death wish. Apparently they’re in Bunbury! There is obviously nothing better to do in that town than try and electrocute yourself and your neighbours. And as for Tesla coils: DO WANT. Hmm… I wonder if there are any instructions on how to build one…
Published by Si at 21 April, 2008
in Screen.
Ronald D. Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica series is reportedly working on a 2-hour telemovie titled “Virtuality” that has the potential to spawn a new series.
Virtuality is set about the starship Phaeton, which is on a 10-year journey to explore a distant solar system. To keep the 12 crewmembers busy during their length trip, NASA installs “advanced reality modules” in the ship that lets them assume different identities and experience computer-generated adventures.
But of course, it’s not long before a mysterious “bug” is found in the system.
I’ll be watching.
Via Tvfix
I was all geared up to write a flaming post about the shit audio quality of music playback on the iPhone, and how it must have been an afterthought in the design process, etc. Due to the wonderful design of that bloody recessed headphone jack, my favourite headphones just wouldn’t fit. Nice one, Apple. So I tried the included headphones for about 5 minutes and just about every EQ setting would cause the audio to distort, even at low volumes. Even with “sound check” activated, which is supposed to make your songs play back with similar RMS volume. It’s a bit of a lame feature - when you start playing a loud track you get a few milliseconds of OMGLOUD before it kicks in. But I digress.
In desperation I bought an adaptor off eBay supposedly designed to act as a proxy for the obese plugs so they fit into the iPhone but it’s a piece of shit. It uses that “3 bands” 3.5mm plug - same as on the iPhone headphones. It’s hard to describe but the adaptor caused the sound to be biased to the right speaker, sounding like it wasn’t plugged in all the way, even when it was. I swear there was some shorting going on. By this stage I was feeling quite ripped off, and pissed off. But then a gleaming beam of hope…
It’s not the iPhone! It’s those frickin tits-on-a-bull headphones! Excuse me while I go and place them in the round filing cabinet. Today I hacked up the adaptor to use a standard 3.5mm stereo plug. I plugged in my $75 Sony “suction bass” headphones and almost died at the difference in audio quality. Now I can use *every* EQ preset with almost no distortion (some of the EQ’s are a bit excessive, regardless of your headphones). For now I’ve settled on “Bass Booster”.
Published by Si at 15 April, 2008
in Apps.
I’m yet to find a decent free “DVD Shrink for Mac”. I’ve used ffmpegX to compress DVDs down to single layer size, but it can really only compress a whole disc and lacks the “reauthor” feature of DVD Shrink. But then I thought, why not run DVD Shrink through Wine? So I installed Darwine on my MBP, which is a great little package and worked straight out of the box. My first impressions were that it was bloody fast. So I thought I’d encode a whole DVD as an impromptu benchmark against my PC. This isn’t meant to be some “Wine on a Mac is better than a real Windows” spiel. That would just be silly. It’s more a comparison for interest’s sake so I can prove it to myself, and add another one to the growing list of contributors to my PCs obsolescence.
The original DVD was 6.93 GB and pre-ripped to a 5400rpm USB 2.0 drive. The same drive was used on both Windows & Mac. The encoded DVD was saved to the local hard drive, and not back to the USB hard drive. DVD Shrink version 3.2.0.15 was used.
MBP Specs: Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2, 5400 rpm.
Time to encode on MPB (Wine): 24m 56s
PC Specs: Dual Core P4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB DDR2, 7200 rpm.
Time to encode on PC (WinXP): 34m 38s
Wine is still a bit glitchy pretty usable, once you get past the annoying xterm and log windows it insists on spawning. It maps the Desktop and filesystem root in My Computer for easy access; you just have to remember to do the “Explorery” stuff like creating folders in Finder, as Explorer functionality is limited in some areas.
Next I’m gonna leave uTorrent running for a couple of days and see how stable it is.
UPDATE: To stop xterm launching when X11 is started, run this command in terminal: defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true which updates your ~/Library/Preferences/org.x.X11.plist file.
Published by Si at 15 April, 2008
in Games and Net.
Then Desktop Tower Defense is the game for you. Get your quick fix of tower defense goodness with this awesome flash game. My personal best is 5203. I was only able to get this by designing the maze on grid paper before hand. After that game, I realised you can click on “send next level” and get bonus points instead of just waiting for the next wave of creeps. The game is highly addictive so to say that it’s a “quick fix” may be somewhat misleading.
Published by Si at 12 April, 2008
in Games.
I took some old Xbox games to EB Games and asked what they would give me for a trade-in. These were the games:
Forza Motorsport
Fable: The Lost Chapters
Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee
Half-Life 2
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
EB Games offer for all games = $31
Needless to say, this is a pretty pathetic offer. I thought I would try eBay.
Fable: The Lost Chapters ($26.03)
Forza Motorsport ($4.71)
Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee ($8.93)
Total for selling on eBay (minus fees) = $39.67
If anyone wants the 2 games that didn’t sell, email me.
Published by Si at 6 April, 2008
in Tech.
Last night I thought it would be a good idea to change the root password on my iPhone…
… Stop laughing. No seriously, stop. I can hear you from here…
Oh, how wrong I was. If you change the root password from the default “alpine” the iPhone gets stuck in an endless “Finder restart loop” and keeps reloading the “Edit Home Screen” over and over again. This renders the phone pretty much unusable. The good news is that the underlying BSD subsystem appears unaffected. I could still SSH into the phone through WiFi, copy files over SCP, etc. But even after changing back the root password it was still “rooted” - haha that was an awesome pun there. I crack me up.
All of this happened at 11:30pm and I was not about to stay up all night fixing the darned thing. I actually managed to get some sleep despite being very anxious that I had just manufactured one very shiny brick. But it was not to be. This morning I put the iPhone into “DFU” recovery mode manually by holding down the home and hold buttons together. Then restored 1.1.4 firmware through iTunes. Then ran ZiPhone and it came miraculously back to life!
But this is the best part, I plugged it back into iTunes and the contacts & music were just restored automagically. I had to redo settings like WiFi & email accounts, but that took all of 10 minutes.
That little rant aside, here’s the other stuff I did that *didn’t* break the iPhone:
Custom Ringtone
The ringtones are stored in /Library/Ringtones/ in MPEG-4 Audio format with .M4R extension. It’s a good idea to set correct permissions after uploading, with `chown root:admin` and `chmod 0664` or through a GUI SCP client, like Fugu or WinSCP.
Custom SMS Alert
The SMS sounds are stored in /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/ and named “sms-receivedX.caf” with X from 1-6. The audio format for .CAF extension is AIFF. These are just a renamed .AIFF file. Easiest way is to replace one of the existing files. Not sure about adding new ones, or changing the names that show up in the GUI. It’s probably in a .plist files somewhere, but I’m not game.
Other Information
Connect via SSH or SCP with username “root” and password “alpine”. DO NOT change the root password. Repeat, DO NOT.
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