Look What I Found
I often think about modding my XBOX, mainly because I want a place to put all my MAME stuff on. However, I am not sure about popping open the cover of the thing. (Interesting because this feeling hasn’t stopped me before.)
Anyway, here is a link to a step by step guide to Softmodding your XBOX, and even installing Mac OSX on it. Maybe I can get over that feeling this coming weekend…
Related to my earlier post about Fanfilms This is one I really liked. Basically this is a pickup of where Star Trek:TOS left off.
This is a band of people working together to create a new set of Star Trek:TOS style episodes that actually pick up where season 3 of the TOS left off. They say that this is what season 4 would have been like.
There is Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The sets and costumes really look like they picked up authentic stuff off of ebay or something. What amazes me most is that they can’t make a dime off of this, yet they work thier rears off to make a film.
The first episode was good, called ‘Come What May’. The second, “In Harms Way” was just released earlier this month and I am downloading it now.
Check it out over Here
I wish that there was a way for these people to profit something from this, but you know how that goes…
Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam – Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument
This is an image of Mount St. Helens, taken from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. The Observatory and VolcanoCam are located at an elevation of approximately 4,500 feet, about five miles from the volcano. You are looking approximately south-southeast across the North Fork Toutle River Valley.
I remember when this thing went off the first time. Seems to me that at the time the people living there weren’t prepared. Like they didn’t know it was coming until the last minute. Like the Hurricanes latley it is amazing the lead time we get on these things now.
I am a sucker for eye candy, and when I saw that Fedora Core 3 Test 2 had Xorgs 6.8 included I thought that this would be a good chance to see the new Shadow and Transparency extensions that came with xorg. Well, it has been quite an event.
First off, I installed FC3t2 and ran update to get all the new updated RPMS that were new since the release , and that included the xorg 6.8 final. Then I found some postings that told you how to get it running.
Add this to your xorg.conf file:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Then when you restart X you should be able to open a terminal and type:
xcompmgr -c &
…to start the Shadows. I found that Metacity apparently doesn’t like this at all, and as far as I can see Metacity segfaults on me. I see it come and go a few times (My window borders come and go) and then it dies. I read somewhere that someone got Metacity 2.8.3 working without a problem, but 2.8.4 comes with FC3t2. Turns out that Metacity has some kind of a compositing manager included in it, and that was causing the conflict. I basically got the source rpm, and modified the configure.in to not enable the compositor and made a new RPM. No go there either.
Finally I said screw it. (I guess I am starting to learn to stop while I am ahead.) I installed xfwm4 and started that up instead of Metacity, and then got my shadows up and running.
It looks great, except it is a little slower moving windows.
My workstation here has a Intel i810 video card. It’s good but not great. I bet it would perform better on my Nvidia card at home.
It is interesting all that can be done with consumer electronics today, especially making movies. I think that it is really cool what a few hundred dollars and a little imagination can get you. (I am not talking about partying on the weekends either)
There are a ton of fan films out there, especially StarWars related. Some of my favorites are made with action figures. And these are great examples too of some of the live action stuff people are doing, not necessarily StarWars related, and very professional looking.
Be sure to check out Grayson, Worlds Finest, and Batman: Dead End.
I’d pay good money to see Grayson.
Firefox is here (almost). It is 1.0 Preview Release, but it is full featured and almost ready to go! This is a great browser.
I have been using Firefox for sometime now, and have converted several people to it and have heard nothing but good feedback from others.
So, are you fed up with IE? Ditch it and enjoy browsing the web again.
Increase iPod battery by 70% – Engadget – www.engadget.com
It was nice of Apple to up the battery life on the new iPod to 12 hours from the sorta dismal 8 hours of juice the earlier ones got, but if you’re not quite ready to drop $300 or $400 to upgrade, NewerTech has a new replacement battery for first and second generation iPods that adds an extra 70% of battery capacity. The iPod originally came with a 1230mAh rated battery, while this Ultra High Capacity version tops out at almost double that, 2100mAh. Easily worth the $40 if it%u2019s really that good.
Could save you a few bucks.
Fat Fingers – Find typos and misspellings on eBay
Thousands of items on eBay are listed with misspelled descriptions.
These items often expire with no bids on them as no-one can find them.
Type in a keyword below and click the Generate button
Then click the link and uncover those hidden gems…
To me it is always interesting to see what other people see in the world, and no better way to do it than with a camera and the Internet.
Over at Photoblogs.org there a links to a ton of photoblogs where shutterbugs post pictures everyday of people and places. The quality of these pictures are amazing, and captivating. It is easy to visit the links they have and get lost for hours.
Now how cool is that? Being able to set up a wifi access point by just booting off a CD. It looks like you can save your custom interface and all your settings to a floppy (you still got one right?) and have them read when the cd boots.
LinuxWorld | Linux-based Wi-Fi hot spot on CD
Update: Here is a link to PublicIP the project site for the CD.
