While perusing the web this morning I ran across something that made me very happy; the playstation 3 has finally been hacked!  Hacked by Geohot, the same guy that first hacked the iphone no less.  This guys a legend!

Currently this doesn’t mean anything other than a glimmer of hope for us frustrated owners of the PS3, but Geohots released an exploit, tutorial, and encouraged hardcore console hacking enthusiasts to document research on the psDevWiki.  This means that hackers can start building software to enhance the playstations capabilities.

Sony built a console with tons of potential as media centre, and marketed it as such.  Sadly however, they failed to deliver anything more than something rather mediocre.  I’d love to make my PS3 my media centre, but it just isn’t good enough.

In case Sony (who are no doubt depressed right about now) come across my blog heres a few features I desperately want in my playstation.

1) Last fm scrobbling.  I’ve been scrobbling music to last.fm since 26th March 2004.  Building up statistics of music I listen to.  I’m not going to play music primarily through my ps3 until it can scrobble my plays.

2) Media Server Capabilities.  If you want me to put all my media on my ps3, then I’d damn well better be able to share it with my other devices.  Why cant I sync it to an mp3 player?  Stream it to my laptop or other computers?

3) I bought a PSP because provided my ps3 is on standby, I can travel, and providing I have access to the internet, use my psp to turn on my ps3 and browse the media on it.  I’d presumed my psp would be able to DOWNLOAD the media from my ps3, not simply stream it…  Seriously, I mean, if its streaming the media anyway, then all the psp needs to do is SAVE the media for playback when my psp is no longer connected to the internet.  How is this not an obvious idea?  I have since sold my psp.

Now that the ps3 has been hacked, and hope renewed for hackers hardcore or not, maybe we can let ourselves dream about ps3 features we would love to see.

What would you like to see enabled on the playstation 3?  Leave your comments below.

Thanks once again to Geohot for improving my iphone, and making this leap of progress for my ps3.

Filed under: Games, Recreation, geek, music, security by kiamo
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And the world gets more awesome.

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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Recently I started working on a theme for the haphazardMEDIA website.  I enjoyed mashing it together in photoshop, however the lack of thought I put into design left me feeling stuck.  Something just isn’t right.

After reading a brief amount about web design on Mark Boulton’s Blog, I did a quick little experiment in photoshop to help me break free from the haphazardMEDIA theme.

What are your thoughts on these designs? Particularly the first one?  It would be really helpful to hear other peoples points of view.

Filed under: freelance thinking, geek by kiamo
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Earlier on in the year I tried out the Windows 7 beta, and was fairly impressed with how fast, stable and complete it was.  However, it wasn’t perfect so I continued using vista.  (or macOSX while I was experimenting with my hackingtosh)

The other day I got a hold of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) and I’ve been testing it out.  It runs faster than vista, it’s stable, and all my important apps are working fine; zbrush, photoshop, dreamweaver, 3dsmax9(32bit) 3dsmax2009 (32/64bit), and all the other more general apps too.

Windows Vista was bloated and slow, windows had grown into this big, complex, monstrous, resource hungry thing with compatibility issues due to versioning (although I still preferred it to xp).  Windows 7 is leaner, faster, generally better optimised, will not suffer the same compatability issues vista went through, and has some nice UI features.

Keyboard Shortcuts!

Windows 7 also includes some more keyboard shortcuts.  So if your the kind of person that likes shortcuts (I am) then you might like some of these.

• Dock your windows left and right with WindowsKey+left/right arrows.
• Win+up/down to minimize / restore / maximize.
• Win+Shift+up/down arrows to maximize and restore vertical size.
• Win+Shift+left/right arrows to jump windows to other monitors.
• Win+P to change through display modes.
• Win+1, Win+2, etc.. For launching new instance of any of the first five icons on your taskbar.
• Win+Space to peek at your desktop.
• Win+T will put focus on the taskbar so you can use the arrow keys to select which window or group, then hit enter.
• Win+E will open up a new explorer window.

How to get it?

On April 30th Microsoft finished and made available Windows 7 RC to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and it will also be available to the public on May 5th for anyone to download from the Windows 7 site.  Microsoft have stated that people runing the freely available Release Candidate, will be able to continue using it freely until June 2010.

System Requirements?

Windows 7 will run on the broadest spectrum of hardware compared to any Windows version at launch.

• 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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I cant quite believe I haven’t mentioned Ubiquity in a blog post yet.  It’s a really exciting innovation in the way we could(should) be using the web.

Its all about connecting the web with language.  Check out this short presentation by Aza Raskin.

This is really cool, and completely turns the philosophy on how we get to Internet services on its head.  I installed the Ubiquity prototype a couple of months ago and now I use it all the time.

You see a phenomenal amount of bad design on the Internet.  A good user interface shouldn’t interrupt you or ruin your train of thought, distract you with flashy effects or with clumsy design.  It should sit idly by, unnoticed, ready to show itself when your need it.  Ultimately a good user interface, is pretty much invisible.  In addition, a good UI should allow you to call apon services and functions in the most natural way, and with the least steps required to get there.

Ubiquity fulfills all this criteria.  It brings services to you, so you don’t have to go out of your way to get them, and it does this using natural language.  It is also completely hidden unless you invoke it with a very natural key combination (CTRL + Space).

Using Ubiquity I can spend more time focused on what I’m doing rather than on how I’m doing it.

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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Seriously… their products are free, theres no advertising, they employ and pay around 150 people full time, and they spend massive amounts in bandwidth costs. (firefox 3.0 was downloaded over 1million times during the first 24hours after its release)

How on earth do they afford it all?!

This is a question that often occurred to me, so I set about looking for answers…

Turns out Mozilla have a partnership with Google.  For shipping firefox with the default search choice as google, google shell out an undisclosed sum per search from that bar in the top right.

“We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars,” Wrote Mitchell Baker (head of the Mozilla foundation)  in a blog post from 2006.

Trawling the web looking for info didn’t reveal anything particularly recent, infact, any figures at all, where to be found in various blog posts and articles from 2006.  Including  this post from Christopher Blizzard, another notable member of Mozilla.

“There have been a couple of articles written about the amount of money that the Mozilla Foundation has raised through various means. This entry says “72 million” and has been repeated over on digg.com. I won’t comment on the dollar amount except to say that it’s not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude.”

Google and Mozilla have recently renewed their deal which now lasts until September 2011.  Given the growing popularity of Mozilla products (namely firefox) it seems like a fairly safe assumption that the 72 million (ish) from 2006 will have risen considerably.

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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I wanted to peek around the Iphone SDK, but you cant unless your on an apple mac.  So I decided to see if I could get osx leopard running on my dell xps m1530.

Lo and behold after many hours of googling, and reading I am now sitting on my bed typing this in osx Leopard 10.5.5.  It was no easy task getting it to the usable state its in today, and it still has issues.

What currently is NOT working:

-Internet(cable)
-shutdown/Restart/Sleep (this is caused by the nvidia drivers and means I have to manually push the off button once the computer has finished its shutdown sequence, not a big issue)
-sound in via internal mic

What currently is working:

-Graphics Card
-internal wifi(via Dell Wireless DW 1390 mini pci-e)
-Sound out(headphones and internal speakers)
-Speed Stepping(This is a cpu function that optimizes power use on the cpu)
-updates from apple
-fingerprint scanner
-integrated webcam
-Keyboard and Touchpad

Edit: Dual screens is working now too [happyness]

The lack of a working mic is the most annoying thing, backed up closely by the failing ethernet port.  Perhaps with time I’ll get these problems sorted out too.  Though it doesn’t look likely for the ethernet as someone has to actually make a driver for it.

I’ve never really used macs before, not since around… 1999 ish.  And they where pretty old computers even for that year.  Boasting 32megs of ram this was pre pretty apple days and I quickly concluded that I hated these computers.

Since then I’ve never really had a reason to revisit the mac.  Until now, and I have to say, I’m liking what im finding a lot.  My next computer might actually be a real mac! *SHOCK*

osX Leopard is fast, stable, secure, smooth, and a lot more customizable than I’d thought.  I’d had the oppinion that macs take control of your computer for you, a notion that caused me much unease.  However I’m happy to find that this is not the case, and in fact, windows is worse in this respect.

Hang on, just for the record, while I’ve always mainly used windows, I’ve never liked it.  I might have expressed a little bit of enthusiasm or excitement apon a new windows release, but this is due to my conclusion that windows was the best of the worst, and the optimistic hope that maybe MS where going to make it fast, and stable, and secure, and pleasant to use. Windows seems to move forward in some of these areas some times, and moves back in others.  All in all it seems to just be staying just as bad as its always been but progressively making the UI more revolting to look at.

I’ve often dabbled in linux, and liked what I’ve found, its got great things going for it, but its lack of software, and ease of use really lets it down.  I dont mind getting out of my depth in technology and code and general geek stuff, but sometimes I like to come up for air, and while after a few months in linux you start learning how to swim, the only way seems to get you deeper…

osX is built on unix, which is what linux is built on, and it was a damn good idea, because the unix platform is clearly the best for stability, security, and speed.  Its just better, flat out.  So mac have taken that, greatly enhanced its software support, and ease of use and delivered pretty much exactly what I wanted.  In the last place I would look for it.

It’s still early days though, I’m sure I’ll find annoyances.  But so far osX is totally winning!

Filed under: geek by kiamo
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