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moonlit

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Everything posted by moonlit

  1. Pick up an used netbook, low powered, very small boards that can handle Windows without a problem. I've been thinking about something similar with my eee for some time, I've fitted a USB touchscreen overlay (7", <$30, DealExtreme) and it seems like it'd be perfect for something like a carPC, the downside is that the LCD cable would be hard to extend all the way from the back of the car to the front, so you'd either have to mount the motherboard near the dash (glove box?) or use a seperate screen. But hey, original LCD in the boot with a touchscreen overlay for BBQs with a second touchscreen on the dash or something? Sounds pretty good to me.
  2. Unfortunately what you propose isn't possible, a TV channel sucks up about 6MHz while your sound card can only handle about 100kHz (give or take a few Hz) so there's no way to cram enough data into the line-in on a sound card to see the video signal. You can do what digip suggests though, receiving and decoding certain types of amateur radio data encoding (such as slow scan TV or PSK31), you can also use a soundcard as an extremely basic oscilloscope which allows you to see the signal from an infrared TV remote, for example, using an IR receiver hooked up to the line-in.
  3. FYI, just because a PSU has been unplugged for a while doesn't mean it's discharged, they can still give you a good reminder not to touch the wrong thing.
  4. There's a difference between "vulnerable to a third party bootdisc" and "leaving the keys under the mat". This is the latter. Why even bother?
  5. Because Linux is InherentlySecure!
  6. As far as I can tell, not being a Linux expert, it won't do anything stupid and it *might* work. Give it a go, it won't do any harm, just make a note of what your GRUB menu entry said before you changed it. Reminds me of the giant gaping hole in Ubuntu, I believe they've closed it now, but it used to be the case that if you'd never changed your root password (you're discouraged from messing with root at all), the recovery console didn't need a password. In short what this meant is you could boot a system, drop to recovery, passwd and reboot. Pretty stupid stuff.
  7. For Windows Mobile there are several wardriving apps that I'm aware of, the first is somewhat aged now, MiniStumbler (from the writers of NetStumbler) and WiFiFoFum which is free for home use. Both support GPS and I believe that they're compatible with most Windows Mobile phones with wifi. There's also Octoox, and finally an application called Retina which claims to scan for access points, give audible proximity alerts in the style of a Geiger counter and additionally crack WEP, though it no longer appears to be available from its vendor, it's available elsewhere with a little googling. Other potentially useful network tools include AirScanner, Microsoft's own Network Analyzer, PocketPuTTY, a personal favourite of mine which does much as you'd expect if you've ever used PuTTY on a PC and last but not least, Cambridge vxUtil. Cambridge also offer a sniffer, an FTP client and various other apps you might find useful.
  8. BattZ: He're referring to "(even basic)" in Psychosis' message above. Joe Fisher: What Psychosis meant by that was that you need a game engine, even if it's a very basic one, in order to build a game.
  9. The game engine is what powers the entire game, it keeps track of health, inventory, game progress and other essential stats. If the game has any non-player characters then it handles artificial intelligence, basically a set of rules which define how the environment and other characters interact with the player. It also draws stuff on the screen, handles models, sprites, movement and physics, it plays music and sound effects and deals with keyboard, mouse or gamepad input. Without an engine you have a pile of sounds and pictures, it's basically the code, the glue that holds everything together, the brain of the game.
  10. One problem with this approach is that you may accidentally run a command which bricks or changes the behaviour of the drive itself. It's also possible that the drive will stop accepting commands under certain circumstances.
  11. Due to security reasons, U3 autorun no longer works as it did previously. Microsoft has disallowed the use of most forms of autorun because it was a security risk (an obvious and long-running one at that). You must manually run the U3 application yourself.
  12. Easiest way is create a quick batch script and dump a shortcut to it in your Startup folder. startvm.bat: start "c:\program files\sun\xvm virtualbox\vboxmanage.exe" startvm "XP 1" start "c:\program files\sun\xvm virtualbox\vboxmanage.exe" startvm "XP 2" Copy to text file, save as startvm.bat and place a shortcut in your Startup folder (in the Start Menu). If you prefer them to run headless, use this instead: startvm.bat: start "c:\program files\sun\xvm virtualbox\vboxheadless.exe" -startvm "XP 1" start "c:\program files\sun\xvm virtualbox\vboxheadless.exe" -startvm "XP 2"
  13. 5GHz can, in theory, carry more data, it has twice the bandwidth per channel and twice as many channels when compared to 2.4GHz wifi. The 5GHz band is also much less polluted resulting in less inteference, whereas 2.4GHz wifi has to compete with many, many other types of signal such as bluetooth and wireless video transcievers. Edit: Both 802.11a and 802.11n use, or can use, the 5GHz band, both of which are in use in the USA. Here is a table stating which channels are available for the use of 5GHz wifi across the world, including the USA.
  14. Do stuff, learn stuff, experiment, explore, play around, theory is all fair and well but experience is better.
  15. AWUS051NH supports 5GHz and AWUS036NH does not. The former also comes with a suction mount and laptop clip.
  16. moonlit

    The $5 Ipod

    Why so desperate to involve Linux? There's absolutely no need to include an OS that complicated in a project like this. It just increases the hardware requirements and makes the software unnecessarily complicated. This would be more than enough for a cheap mp3 player but there's no way in hell it'd run Linux... and it's still well above $5. Here's an example of an entire player which, again, would easily play music and audiobooks, but Linux would laugh mercilessly at its utter lack of power. Granted, both of those links fail to take into account economies of scale, buy my point stands. KISS. I've owned budget players which have even had LCD screens which have run for hours, days even, from a *single AAA battery*, so why they need 3 AAs I'm not sure, seems like it'd just make it harder to power it if you lack electricity and batteries. As for what you could do with $50, I'm sure you could probably build your own basic mp3 player with an LCD and an SD card slot. Throw in an LED flashlight at the end of the case, might come in handy when and where there's no electricity. Maybe throw in an alarm clock too. Come to think of it, as long as you have a powerful and flexible enough hardware platform to begin with, there really aren't many limits to what you could add in software. Edit: that article's over 2 years old, the "sub-$10" device now exists: http://www.literacybridge.org/talking-book/device/ Powered by 2 D-cell batteries (up to 15 hours playback) and with the footprint of a CD case, it's not small. I do wonder about their choice to use microSD cards instead of regular ones, it's certainly not the case that they were lacking internal space, and full size SD cards are usually a lot cheaper.
  17. I dunno if I'd like to hazard a guess at what kinds of phones people around here actually have, but I'd say Windows Mobile 6, however old it seems now, is still a very good operating system for people who wish to really use their phone. No need to root it or anything, it's just open to whatever you wanna do with it. There are all sorts of apps and tools which, even today in the world of Android and iPhone, are very very good. It feels like a mini computer, which is both its strength and its downfall. In my mind, the UI is the only thing that prevents it from being a competing OS (but with that said, a lot of people do still use it, despite arguments to the contrary). I also have a TyTn II, it's slightly underpowered despite being only 3 years old, but it has all the features I expect from a smartphone; wifi, bluetooth, gps, a touchscreen (which isn't huge, but it's reasonable large), and the ability to easily develop for it. Speaking of development, if you have any experience with Visual Studio, developing for WM6 is as easy as pie. I don't think Windows Phone 7, at least when it first arrives, will be that power-user-friendly, it seems very much more iPhoneish, but if anything can be done about that then I'm sure xda-devs will certainly be right on the case and Microsoft have said that certain things will change over time. The iPhone started off as an overhyped featurephone and it's come a long way since, Windows Phone 7 has the potential to do the same. As for the flashing idea, I sort of expect people who choose to manually flash their phones to be able to research it themselves given the potential for ending up with a brick, but I guess a walkthrough isn't necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of warnings might be wise. It might be worthwhile to note that on some Windows Mobile phones you can run Android (natively, no emulation) from a microSD card without flashing, and for some phones you can even get flashable ROMs if you want something more perminant. Using he same method (haret.exe) there's no reason you couldn't run any variation of Linux as long as it's compiled and configured appropriately for the target phone, such as an ARM version of Ubuntu which is floating about on XDA currently. Don't quote me, I'm not certain, but I imagine that it could be possible to run other OSs in a similar fashion, because Android when launched with haret basically shoves WiMo out of RAM and runs the Linux boot stuff. Just shoving any old ARM OS on there wouldn't work because it's not going to have any drivers or any idea how to talk to the hardware, but something like RISCOS 5 (which is open source) could work, given enough effort. There was also a leaked version of Blackberry Application Suite for Windows Mobile which essentially gives you the Blackberry OS on top of Windows Mobile, but unfortunately it seems impossible to make it work because it's not a full product and as such not at all supported by anyone, especially RIM.
  18. Current shows: Obsoleet Amateur Logic Fatman and Circuit Girl Past shows: IPTV Archive There's probably more, I don't currently recall. Anyway, that lot should keep you busy for a while, enjoy.
  19. The one where you have to spin him around by his tail and throw him into bombs... ...ohh, browser? Yeah, sorry. no idea.
  20. Man, the scrolling bullshit up the side of the video tipped it for me but the whole thing's just so obnoxiously self-important. I don't much like Linux on the desktop (though I don't begrudge the use of it, your choice), I hate shit like this even more. These fanboys will spin a tale worthy of a freakin' Oscar if they thought you might possibly, maybe switch and abandon the evil Mikro$haft, it has absolutely zero basis on reality and all it'll end up doing is either pissing people off or just confusing people for a while. That's not to say that all Linux users are this way, much like not all Windows users are oblivious, malware-infested luddite-sheep with their heads up Billy Gates' very own arse and not all Mac owners are card-carrying, turtleneck-wearing, blinkered Jobsians who'll put up with anything just as long as it has a fruit sticker. Rant though I often do, I have zero expectation that anyone might switch based on my own opinions, I have no vested interest in any particular OS. This is not the way to make people adopt desktop Linux! Funny really, it's so open yet so based on lies and propaganda... go figure.
  21. I don't want to spoiler anything (I haven't even finished the challenge myself yet, it gets trickier), but it's not stego. Take a closer look at what you already have.
  22. I should note that tihs isn't actually run by the BBC nor is it affiliated with them, it was promoted on the breakfast news show Monday morning. Anyway, that said, I also have that hex string, after confusing myself a bunch of times.
  23. Depends what the string is really... Edit: I'm lazy, I ignored something really obvious this morning. Fail. >_> Edit 2: I got it... well, sort of, looks like I'll have to manually punch in all those bits, but I know what's happening. Edit 3: Orrrrr, I could go back to being lazy and write an app to do it for me. Yay!
  24. Ahh, more sneakiness? Hadn't thought about that, good thinking... thought it was too easy :P
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