bafflegab.org

A little while ago I got around to modding my xbox. I went with the ’softmod’ option, which is to say I only modified the software which runs in place of the standard dashboard, rather than installing a chip. The easy way to do this is by modifying a saved game on a memory gizmo, and loading that into certain games which are exploitable this way. I didn’t have the neccessaries to reprogram a save, so instead I went for the ‘hotswap’ option, which involves some small risk of hardware damage by swapping an ATA cable while the xbox & a nearby PC are both running.

This trick is required as the xbox locks the drive it uses when it is not actually being used, thus preventing you from just removing it while the xbox is off,and plugging into your pc to update. Once you have done this once though, you can get the modified software to dump the value of the chip in the xbox which is used to lock the drive, and once you have that, you can lock and unlock it to your heart’s content. (Or upgrade the drive, and lock a larger HD so that it will work in the xbox)

I must say the software to do all this installing of software and (un)locking was lovely to use. It’s a bootable linux distro called XBOXHD with xfat filesystem drivers and a bunch of pre-scripted actions of the type you’re likely to need. All just worked like a charm. Once I’d done all this buggering about, I ended up with the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) installed. I must say, it’s just bloody lovely. It is the very device my loungeroom needed. It frontends for Mplayer, so it plays every type of media under the sun, it lets you play files over the network, reads RSS feeds and scrolls them along the bottom of the screen, lets you run emulators, displays TV guide info & weather forecasts grabbed online etc.

So, I bunged an enormous drive in there, and I’ve shunted all my media onto the thing. Been enjoying being able do play all my stuff without disc hunting, and have been taking a nostalgic trip through emulated Amiga games from my youth.

In short, nothing makes for interesting, useful software like generations of hackers & pirates working on something. Maybe the adverserial model helps as a motivational aid? If nothing else, the fact that you have to buy a fucking dongle to play DVDs on a device which is quite capable of already playing DVDs, and has a perfectly good controller already hanging out of the front of it is reason enough to hack the thing, I reckon.

_{Images stolen from instructables.com, the xbmc homepage, and an xguides article on hotswapping.}

These are just awesome.

Video of Paul Merton visiting Mr Woo, an eccentric Chinese fellow who makes electro-mechanical robots out of junk.

Hurrah! We can cheer him, and run up and shake his hand… or we could realise that we can’t get anywhere near close enough to him for that, and kick back on the couch to watch the buildup to the coming protest. Gotta be better than trying to get to work through a heavily cordoned city.

20 thousand people expected this weekend, my local news service tells me. The violence of protesters is already being hyped, so no-doubt there’ll be some juicy arrests and hippie-bashing. Apparently, splinter anarchist groups, particularly ‘Mutiny’ are distributing materials on the best way to do said rioting. I note that the Australian anarchy movement site describes the group as “a bunch of dodgy anarchist squatters who think they’re musicians”, which I can’t say strikes the fear of watching the system fall into my timid heart. Their own website doesn’t exactly make them look much more menacing, I must say. They just seem to be feral musos. Maybe they just had a cool sounding name.

Of course, if you can’t find violent protesters to justify state-mandated violence, you can always hire some…

If you’re headed to this protest, good luck; since the atmosphere is being pre-emptively built up to justify kicking heads, expect heads to be kicked. Try to make sure that they’re not yours, eh?

This pic is indicative of a rather odd aspect of ol’ George’s visit which my gf pointed out to me, which is the silly expression on Mr Sheen’s face. Watch some of the footage, if they’re still running it, and you’ll see what I mean. We never usually get to see him making these particular faces; and I have trouble determining what, if any, human emotion or reaction they are supposed to convey…

Maybe they’re just his ‘toadying up to the boss man’ faces, which we don’t usually see because, well, he’s the boss man. Or at least, his office in the boss office, if you know what I mean. Johnnie doesn’t exactly have a powerfully charismatic presence. In fact, if he turned up at my house not only would I ignore any legislation he passed from his seat on the couch, but I wouldn’t even let him watch the cricket. Not even to check the score.

Well, I was going to write this post on the astonishingly high proportion of abuse that our fearless leader’s recent foray into Youtube attracted.   Last time I went and checked it out, something  like 75% of the response posts were out-and-out abuse of the PM, his party, and policies.   I had hoped to include some of the pithier, more vitriolic of them here, but unfortunately, they seem to have been removed from the site.

Not being terribly interested in yet more evasive bullshit, I actually originally visited Howard’s Youtube posting in order to see what kind of reaction it had got from the masses, rather than to watch it.  I was not disappointed, but I am afraid you will have to be, dear reader.  Ah, apparently a policy of wholesale comment deletion every 24 hours was implemented somewhere along the way.

Naturally, all of this hasn’t prevented the creative denizens of Youtube from finding a way to take the piss out of ol Mr Sheen.  There are several videos which in some way lampoon, or disagree with, Mr Howard’s original posting, all of which have been keyword spammed so that someone searching for the original is very likely to run across them instead.

Makes me wish I’d saved a few of the comments when I first ran across them.  Well, shit happens.

…about time we voted him off the island, don’t you reckon?