New Portfolio

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 @ 8:10pm

A few days ago I revamped and relaunched my portfolio. The new site is now built upon Wordpress and should help expand the type of content I put on the site. The new launch also includes a blog which will be completely separate from this blog. For friends & family, don’t worry; this blog is sticking around. I’ll be able to post about mumbo-jumbo like “jquery, javascript, css, php” over on my portfolio’s blog while keeping this one on things I find purely interesting (and non portfolio related).

If you have any remote interest in web design, or the things I post over on my portfolio, please feel free to add my portfolio’s feed to your favorite RSS reader.

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Google Chrome OS

Sunday, December 6th, 2009 @ 12:06am

I’m sure most of you have used Google at some point or another. I personally use it every day, and my job would become quite difficult without Google. As you may or may not know, Google Chrome was released a little over a year ago; Google’s stab at an internet browser. It’s advertised to be fast and small.

More recently, Google has announced Google Chrome OS. Based on Linux, Chrome OS is designed for the internet, and the below video explains that concept in more detail. It’s hard to argue that the internet hasn’t taken a major spotlight on our PCs, but it’s even harder to predict whether or not a desktop os can truly survive when built around the internet. Take a look below at things to come from Google.

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Download Firefox 3.5!

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 @ 10:41am

A little over one year after Firefox 3’s release, today marks the release of the newest version of Mozilla’s browser. Firefox 3.5 promises to be faster, safer, and more customizable. 3.5 also includes new features such as private browsing (no history saved) and forget this site (remove all traces of a site from your computer). Download Firefox 3.5 today! See this YouTube video for a quick tour of Firefox 3.5 highlighting the newest features.

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Wii Homebrew + USB Hard Drive

Friday, May 29th, 2009 @ 12:30am

I’ve been running Homebrew on my Wii for quite some time and recently stumbled upon the ability to play backed up games from a USB hard drive. There’s several advantages to this, one is I don’t have to worry about changing DVDs anytime I want to play a game in addition to not having to carry them around, and having the games loaded from a USB hard drive should increase my load time.

I needed to keep a log of all the steps I had to take in order to get this functionality working, so I figured I might as well be helpful and provide a list of the steps needed to do so.

The only thing I ask is that you don’t follow these methods to pirate games. It’s wrong and it cheats developers out of money they deserve. Homebrew is there to help enhance the functionality of the system, not for free games. So please use it wisely and don’t abuse the system. It’s all on the honor system here folks.

Prerequisites:

  • External USB Hard Drive
  • Homebrew Channel already installed (See Twilight Hack if you have system 3.4 or less, or Bannerbomb if you have 4.0 for Homebrew installation instructions)

Step 1 – Install cIOS38 (if you don’t already have cIOS38 installed, otherwise skip to Step 2)

  • Download cIOS38_rev14 (you can find it here)
  • Extract and rename “cIOS38_rev14-Installer” to “boot.dol”.
  • Create a folder named “cIOS38_rev14″ under the /apps directory on your SD card and copy the extracted “boot.dol” file to that folder.
  • If this doesn’t work and the installation fails, you need to download the Trucha Bug Restorer for your system. Try that and attempt to install cIOS38 again. Please note that this step may brick your Wii! I highly recommend you go ahead and install BootMii in boot2 and back up your NAND before attempting this portion. Doing so will allow you to recover should anything go wrong, otherwise you are continuing at your own risk!

Step 2 – Install a USB Loader

There’s actually several options available here as far as USB loaders are concerned. Just take a look at the wide range of loaders and pick one that has the features you like.

  • Download your favored USB Loader.
  • Follow any included instructions, otherwise you may only need to copy the extracted folder into your /apps directory on your SD card.

Step 3 – Format Your Hard Drive

You will probably need to partition the drive as the following download will only work with raw, unformatted partitions and not NTFS, FAT32, etc. I highly recommend GParted. It’s also a good idea to partition if you want to use any extra space on this hard drive for other things than your Wii, or if you want to move backed up iso files to your computer.

  • If you want to partition your hard drive, you may want to try and download a partition manager like GParted. Otherwise you can use the whole hard drive.
  • If you decided to use GParted, simply partition the hard drive and leave the partition you want to use as “unformatted” and continue on to Step 4. If you want to use the Windows method, read below:
  • Since the hard drive is already likely formatted, you’ll want to format it as “unformatted”.
  • Once you load up the hard drive in USB Loader, it should format it correctly.

Step 4 – Install & Run Games

The following steps may differ depending on which USB loader you installed (I’m using CFG USB Loader).

  • Launch the homebrew channel and your recently installed USB Loader.
  • Select “USB Mass Storage Device”.
  • Insert any game disc, and press “+” to install it. This may take some time depending on the size of the game.
  • Repeat last step for each and every game you want to install.
  • You’re now ready to play your backed up games! Just select your game, and press “A” to begin.

Some of the USB Loaders will automatically download game covers, and others don’t. If you downloaded one that doesn’t you can find them here. It’s only 40mb to download 450+ covers, so you might want to do it anyway just in case.

If you have any issues with the above steps, please be sure that you remove any and all GameCube memory cards. It seems some Homebrew stuff has issues with the memory cards in place when you’re trying to install.

I tried to be as detailed as possible and cover as many angles as I could, but I’m bound to have missed a thing or two. If you are attempting to follow this guide and are running into some issues, or I seem to be missing a vital step, leave a comment and I’ll try to address it as best as I can.

As a bonus, here’s what it all looks like using the loader I tried. Please note that the above steps will not create a USB Loader channel in your main menu, but will need to be accessed through the Homebrew Channel. If you’re interested in doing so, you can follow this guide here which outlines the steps to create a USB Loader Forwarder Channel and creating channels from games installed onto your USB hard drive.

This is only a small piece of the pie of what Homebrew offers. There’s tons of applications and utilities available, not to mention the ability to play DVDs. You can find more details and information on everything over at WiiBrew.org.

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Google Chrome

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 @ 1:24pm

Google is starting an ad campaign (as seen above) to help push more downloads of Google Chrome. It’s a fast, streamlined browser and provides a nice alternative to Safari and Firefox. As a web developer, I don’t really care what browser you use as long as you use one that is helping to push standards compliance. If you want to try something new and difference, download Google Chrome today.

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Boxee

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 @ 2:11pm

While searching for ways to integrate Hulu with MythTV, I stumbled upon Boxee. Right now, it’s only available for Linux and OSX flavors, but a Windows version is supposed to be released this summer in June.

Boxee is an idea of where I see media centers heading, allowing information to be easily accessed all in one place. I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with it, but I like what I see. It can poll my local hard drive or network to look for content, or even stream my content online by pulling information in from sites like Flickr. Even more interesting is the social aspect of Boxee. By adding friends to my account, they can recommend new media to me, or I can view their streams to see what they’re watching.

Take a look at this video introduction explaining how Boxee works:

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Queen on Old Hardware

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 @ 9:14am

I’m a sucker for Queen. But at the same time, it’s pretty amazing the different sounds that can be extracted from old hardware. Some guy had the creative idea to arrange program old hardware to play Bohemian Rhapsody. Enjoy!

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Windows 7

Monday, April 20th, 2009 @ 11:20am

Windows 7I’ve been sporting the 7000 x64 build of Windows 7 for several months now, and wanted to post some of my impressions on Microsoft’s latest push on their newest OS. Vista has been a marketing disaster for Microsoft. Even with service packs improving Vista’s stability and functionality, the stigma associated with Vista is still bad enough to have people stick with XP. I myself have been using XP for the past 8 years, with brief forays into Ubuntu for my primary OS. But Windows 7 is all about change, and Microsoft has something to prove. Will they succeed?

Windows 7: New Taskbar

One of the most interesting changes from Vista and prior versions of Windows is the task bar. Instead of having the normal, “each window takes up space” portion, applications are reduced to large icons in a similar manner to Apple’s OSX dock in 7’s default setup. The task bar is surprisingly very interactive, showing indicators of the number of windows, or status information for items such as downloads or file transfers. It’s also easy to switch between windows, or close excess windows with the preview Window feature. Of course, if all of this seems daunting, the old task bar functionality can be restored.

Windows 7: Start Menu

The start menu is not surprisingly very similar to Vista’s, but with some additional functionality. “Jump Lists” are a new feature which allow you to quickly access commonly viewed sites or files from frequently accessed programs. This feature can be accessed through the new start menu, or by right clicking on the icon in the task bar.

Of course the previously mentioned items are all about eye candy. What about actual performance? With my desktop’s configuration, Windows 7 is very responsive and I’ve experienced little to no slowdown. Compared to when I beta tested Longhorn/Vista, Windows 7 is a very big improvement in being a much smaller consumer of memory resources. Additionally I’ve been able to run Steam games very smoothly with no major issues. Like Windows Vista, Windows 7 includes a scoring system from 1.0 to 7.9 that rates your systems performance. Given my machine’s specs, here is my score:

  • Processor: 6.1
  • Memory (RAM): 5.9
  • Graphics: 7.9
  • Gaming Graphics: 5.9
  • Primary Hard Drive: 5.9

Overall score: 5.9

I could probably improve my performance with faster RAM, or setting up a RAID array, but overall the general performance of everything is very speedy and quick.

Overall, I’m very happy with Windows 7 and feel that it is a much needed improvement over Vista. There is a lot standing on Windows 7 at the moment, and Microsoft really needs to make a big push to show that people really need to upgrade from Windows XP. Given that I’m running a beta version and it has thus far proved to be very stable and reliable, good things should come once the final version is ready for release.

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Download Firefox 3

Monday, June 16th, 2008 @ 5:59pm

Tomorrow is the release date of the official version of Firefox 3, and to boot it off they are having a download campaign. If you have an older version of Firefox, download it. If you don’t have Firefox *shudder*, download it.

I have been using the beta/release candidates for over a month, and the features and speed has been greatly improved over previous iterations of Firefox, so you really are doing yourself a disservice if you do not download Firefox 3 tomorrow.

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Black Screen of Death

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 @ 9:36am

See slashdot.org for article.

As per the article, Computer World is reporting that Microsoft has just turned on “Reduced Functionality Mode” for Windows Vista users. What this means is that for users not running authorized versions of Windows, Vista functionality is crippled reducing the screen to a black screen with no start menu and no desktop after 1 hour of browsing.

The problem with this in itself is that Windows itself has had issues authorizing itself. A few weeks ago, the Windows Genuine Advantage had an outage. Not to mention there are a ton of cases where Windows has had “false positives” identifying legal licenses of Windows as “pirated”.

I seriously question Microsoft’s intentions here. I understand they want to battle piracy, which is noble on its own terms, but when you alienate your own legal customers, your business should be at risk. It’s no wonder that XP still retains a large portion of the market share and that alternatives such as Linux and OS X are becoming more popular. If Microsoft does not shape up and learn that you should not treat all of your customers like criminals, some changes could be in store for them in the future.

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